The Queen’s jubilee Green Canopy won’t be getting a tree from me

Climate action should be for the collective good, not a ribbonbedecked offering to a monarch, writes Laura Waddell

Iwill not plant a tree for the Queen’s jubilee. According to the official website, “the Queen’s Green Canopy is a unique tree-planting initiative created to mark Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022 which invites people from across the United Kingdom to plant a tree for the jubilee… With a focus on planting sustainably, the QGC will encourage planting of trees to create a legacy in honour of the Queen’s leadership of the nation, which will benefit future generations”.

Of course, there is no guarantee what proportion of those future generations will still be subjects of the United Kingdom come the trees’ maturity.

Last summer, the Guardian revealed how the Queen, a large private landowner in Scotland, lobbied Scottish ministers for an exemption from green energy bill legislation, using the arcane mechanism of ‘Queen’s Consent’ which allows advance notice of parliamentary bills.

But that aside, the environmental legacy of the past 70 years is already here and it’s downright grim. Instead of bowing and scraping to the crown with trowel in hand, Britain needs to understand climate action first and foremost as a collective human rights issue, not a ribbon-bedecked offering to a monarch whose subjects should consider themselves lucky to breathe the same air as.

Agnes Denes is a land artist best known for her 1982 work Wheatfield, where she planted a field of vibrant wheat in a vacant lot in Manhattan. Striking photographs show the artist waist-high in the haze of wheat, hoe in hand.

The yellow-gold field looks airy, fresh and almost dreamy against grey and brown skyscrapers in the distance, a couple of blocks away from Wall Street and the blocky Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre; landfill from the latter occupied the space before its transformation. Wheatfield was a bucolic reminder of what had come before the modern city, its money men and stocks and shares.

While in Finland in January, I visited Denes’ lesser recalled land art installation Tree Mountain, looking exactly what it sounds like until close up, when circular patterns (a mathematically devised “sunflower/ pineapple” shape) become visible in the neat positioning of the trees. Leafy corridors appear to curve off in every direction.

In rural Finland, hunting is common. Our group trudged into the snowy forest past a plaque pierced by bullet holes. Some 11,000 trees were planted on the manmade mound. Tree owners (a mix of regular people and statesmen, such as George Bush) can pass custodianship onto an heir.

Supported by the United Nations, Tree Mountain was announced on Earth Environment Day at Rio de Janeiro’s 1992 Earth Summit.

When completed in 1996, the Finnish government dedicated and legally protected the land beneath it for four centuries, chosen because, from Denes’ artist statement of the time, “it will take that long for the environment to recreate itself ”.

On her website, Denes writes, “Tree Mountain is the largest monument on Earth that is international in scope, unparalleled in duration, and not dedicated to the human ego, but to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy.”

Nature as a collective good, not for individual ego? The Queen’s Green Canopy could take a leaf out of that book.