I drove past a small boulevard tree the other day, maybe 8 feet tall with a 1.5-inch diameter trunk, which was completely engulfed in a plastic sheet. A big sheet. I’ll bet it was 10’x 25’. Heavy too. Probably 15-20 mil thick. It was the day after a winter storm that had brought 12 hours of wind advisories and 40 mph gusts, so it probably blew away from a construction site or out of the bed of a work truck, trailer, or someone’s backyard. I’m sure it was sailing down the street when it tangled around the tree – and probably flapped there the rest of the day. If the tree had not been staked with steel fence posts, the plastic surely would have snapped the sapling and carried it along on its journey. Instead, there it stood, smothered in trailing, clear poly, which slowly became heavier and more firmly anchored as snow accumulated in the creases and on the horizontal bits.
The following day, it was still there.
And a week later, it had merely settled more firmly around the tree – glued in place by snow that had partially thawed and refrozen.
For at least a week, this poor little tree sat there wrapped in a plastic sheet. It was hard to miss: just a few feet from the curb, on a neighborhood street, all by itself. And the giant sheet was propped up vertically, stretching a good portion of the block.
When I first saw it, I wondered vaguely about why the person who lived there hadn’t come out to pull the sheet away from their tree, but my internal monologue hadn’t even completed the thought before I realized it was not a person who lived there. The little tree was in front of an apartment building.
In the dozens of times I have passed by it, I have never seen an actual person there. People obviously live there. Their cars were in the parking lot. But I had never actually seen any of them outside the building. It was one of those 1970’s/80’s brick, 3-story buildings, part of a complex of 3 identical structures that occupied half a block. Each building must hold about a dozen apartments on each floor – too big and impersonal for people to be neighborly and too small for managers to live on site. It is not near enough to a school or anything like that to attract residents who share identities related to a particular institution. They are probably all working folks who come and go separately.
The grounds surrounding the building are technically shared space. It is afforded by the leasing company for any of the residents to use. But none of them does. Nor do they maintain it. The leasing company, presumably, hires someone to do that (and to clear snow from the parking lot). Each of these individuals is accountable for maintaining their ascribed portion of the space, but none is responsible to care for the place itself.
And the boulevard trees are planted by the city. They are chosen to be resilient and low maintenance – so that no one will need look after them beyond planting, staking, and trimming (once they are big enough to interfere with traffic or power lines). The plastic wrapped tree is in that spot because of a human decision for it to be there, but no-one is specifically responsible for it.
So who cleans up the mess?
To be clear, that is not meant as a passive aggressive question. I do not mean to moralize about how tenants or landlords, or anyone else, should take care of the places they live – or pass through. (I didn’t stop to clean the mess either.) It is a genuine question – at least, it started as one. And it is on my mind because it occurs to me there is no reason for any person to feel responsible for this particular tree. The tree exists in a common space – one that is available to lots of people, but belongs to no particular person(s). In a society in which we conceptualize all non-human things (as well as many human things) as stuff to be possessed, we each really only take responsibility for the stuff that belongs to us. (Note: even then, a lot of our stuff is treated as being disposable – but that is a different issue I don’t want to side-track myself with here.)
I suppose my sense of propriety, when it comes to other people’s space, is a bit extreme. It’s probably the Montanan in me. Or maybe it is that there were spaces in my childhood homes I was forbidden to enter lest I damage my parents’ stuff (being a first-born child, I obeyed those guidelines like my life – or, at least, my butt – depended on it). I don’t know, but whenever I am in a space that is not expressly mine, I feel a bit like I am trespassing. I am loathe to stray onto a neighbor’s lawn – even if we are on friendly terms. Even when it is ostensibly community property, like the common areas of an apartment complex, it feels like an imposition for me to be there (Note: that doesn’t apply to public spaces, like parks – but that seems to me like a different sort of thing compared to privately owned, common space). The sidewalk is the designated way to get from the parking lot to the building – and I stick to the path.
I suspect most other people do not have the same compulsive worry about treading on other people’s space that I do. Even so, most of the people who use the sidewalk in front of my house, stick to the path. Yes, there are a few assholes who let their dogs shit in my yard, or wander wherever they please. And David, the entitled duchebag who lives next door cuts through my driveway and front yard because he can’t be bothered with the extra three steps he would need to take to get to the sidewalk in his own yard. But they are very much the exception. Most people take care of their own stuff and respectfully leave other people’s stuff alone. And that is what I think is going on with that little tree. It doesn’t belong to anyone, so it is being left alone – not out of negligence, but out of a sense of something more like propriety.
People do often take care of spaces and things that belong to other individuals. They carry plastic bags to pick up after their dogs. They leave notes on vehicles if they accidentally damage them in the parking lot. They (pay to) repair things that were accidentally broken in a neighbor’s yard/house. To restore something that has been diminished as a result of your actions, is to be a responsible member of a community. It’s part of being neighborly.
But what of common space – that which belongs to no individual in particular and for which no one is individually responsible – when it gets diminished though actions of someone else or of no one in particular?
In superficial ways, common space looks similar to a communal place – but it seems to me there is a profound difference. Members of a community take shared responsibility for maintaining their communal space. The verb in that sentence is important. Someone may be assigned to maintain a common space, they may even be held accountable for it, but no-one actively takes responsibility for it.
Common space is a simulacrum of community. Just as accountability is a simulacrum of responsibility. Apartment complexes like the one at which the little tree and it’s windblown prophylactic exist are literal examples of substituting the surface features of common space for genuine community. And the unsurprising result is that there is no one to take care of it without a contract or scheduled appointment. Like a lot of people, I have lived in several of these places, so the sterility of them is palpable for me. But it does not just exist in housing or civic structures. I’ve experienced that same artificiality in workplaces, gatherings of acquaintances, classrooms, etc. There are lots of context in which we pretend to community with surface features of common space or common resources – but don’t afford an opportunity for anyone to take responsibility. We rely on leaders or policies to institutionalize systems of accountability – but holding people accountable is not the same thing as individuals taking responsibility.
I think that beleaguered little tree stood out to me as an embodiment of the typical failure of well intentioned attempts to manufacture a sense of community in workplaces, classrooms, and faceless institutions of all sorts. There is something like hegemony at work here, I think. We have come to believe that accountability can substitute for responsibility and common space can substitute for community. But this is distorted thinking. Asserting accountability measures and affording common space are, at best, temporary measures. More often they are (or become) patriarchal stand-ins for authentic relationship (see Peter Block’s argument about this – especially in his book on Stewardship).
Accountability systems absolve individuals of personal responsibility by externalizing it. To take responsibility for something requires that a person first care about it. And that care arises internally. Accountability systems reify that caring somewhere external to any person. I think that is the falseness that eats at me about the carpenter who hung my office door settling for it being plumb-enough. Caring about the functioning of my door is reified in building codes. And since the door’s plumbness is within building code tolerances, the carpenter need not care any further.
The price of acquiescing to the received, patriarchal narrative is a loss of authentic humanity. For everyone.
The whole street was diminished for the presence of that plastic-wrapped tree. Most of the surrounding properties are fairly tidy. It is a typical neighborhood for the most part. The mess created by the plastic wrapped around that tree is just a couple dozen square feet of unkemptness – yet it casts a shitty ethos over acres of neighborhood. Somehow it reflects on the residents of the area rather than the faceless entities that decided what surface features of common space would be provided – and then didn’t take responsibility to maintain them.
And yet, I can’t say any of this is a criticism of the faceless entities, like landlords or government agencies, either. People want “greenspace” and boulevard trees where they live and gathering spaces and resources where they work. And the entities simply provide want people ask for – including a target of blame when something is not right. This is the hegemony I mentioned. It is a collective, societal abdication of responsibility – and, as a consequence, authentic community. It is dissipated care. And the consequence is dilapidated community.