My dear fellow Earthlings – can we stop Amtrak?

            No, I don’t mean repeating Anna Karenina and throwing ourselves in front of the train, although I was tempted to confront their tree-chopping equipment the other day.  Amtrak is cutting every tree that grows on their property, which amounts to miles and miles of trees – along the entire length of train tracks across the country.

The quick, slick Acelas whisk behind my Queens backyard, separated from my property by a line of forty-year old trees, which had been home to thousands of birds, rabbits and even an occasional hedgehog.  They cooled the air in summers, they stopped the wind in winter, they reduced the train noise year around – and yes, they gave the residents privacy, too.  Not anymore.  They’re gone, as of May 5, thanks to Amtrak’s country-wide war on trees, the reason being that they are too much trouble.

“I donno, some real tree-hater came to power,” an old Amtrak employee told me reluctantly, not willing to stir up a heated discussion.  He had to do his job, although he wasn’t happy about it.  “They got tired of trimming tress every year, it’s too expensive,” he added.  “They’re doing it across the whole country.  Every inch of their tracks is going to be clean.”

“Have they heard of global warming?” I asked him, unbelieving, but he only shook his head. 

“I ain’t in charge here,” he told me somberly. “You can complain. You have the right.”

But by the time I wrote my first email to my congressman the trees were gone.

It’s hard to believe that in the era of global warming when the temperatures are rising, floods and droughts take turns assaulting urban and suburban sprawls alike with volcanoes recently joining the riot because of the melting icecaps – it’s hard to believe that a global mega-company like Amtrak is cutting all trees along the entire length of their tracks, all over the country.  Mayor Bloomberg is running a Million Trees project to make New York a green city, the US government is funding environmental projects, the Sierra Club is trying to educate your average Joe Schmoe (or Juan Rodriguez, if it’s Latin America) to stop cutting trees – and meanwhile Amtrak is basically sabotaging the effort.  I can’t find another word for it. 

I used to have a lot of respect for Amtrak as opposed to the oil-dominated Airline companies, permanently stuck in the Chapter 11 mode.  Amtrak, to me, was a better, cleaner, greener, planet-friendlier mode of transportation which Europe and Asia fully adopted, but we still couldn’t.  I saw it as the future, hoping that one day Acelas will become bullet trains and less plains will fly, spitting their deadly exhaust into the blue sky.  I took Amtrak wherever I could skipping the endless airport lines and security measures nearing a full cavity search.  I even took a sleeper to see Disneyworld rather than a plane.  My train had passed by towns, cities and beautiful landscapes with thousands of trees!  Now my respect for Amtrak had collapsed as badly as the fifty-year old trees that grew behind my backyard, separating my property from the Amtrak tracks. 

So my fellow Earthlings, we’re back to the beginning.   Can we stop Amtrak?  Can we throw something in front of their tree-chopping machinery to choke and stop?  Can we write petitions, email our congressmen and call our Mayor?  Earthlings, New Yorkers, Amtrak passengers – help!  Stop Amtrak before they cut down thousands of miles of trees!