BEST OF THE WEST
MARCH 3, 2105
Myrtle Robbins, perpetrator of the Great Plains “Tree Wars” that led to the vast swaths of tree of heaven monoculture forests now carpeting the region, and a major financial backer of the anti-AI Disengagist movement, has died. She was 88.
Her death was confirmed by staff at the Oklahoma City Community Hospital, where she had been secretly receiving treatment for lung cancer under a pseudonym.
Robbins first came to the field of habitat restoration in her early 20s, working as a volunteer for a trail crew in Oklahoma, cutting and removing invasive species such as European buckthorn and, ironically, tree of heaven, so that the native species might return and flourish. But she quickly became irritated by the long timeline of restoration.
“Steward Robbins was so impatient,” said a former colleague. “‘There’s no time,’ she’d say. ‘The planet is choking to death and we’re trimming bonsai.’ And I hate to say it, but we live in a culture that rewards impatience.”
Not a scientist or ever officially a fully trained Steward, but flush with a trust fund, Robbins had been funding fringe ecology groups since the mid-21st-century, beginning with the group that would eventually become the Disengagists.
At that time, the Disengagists were just a small group of disgruntled artists displaced from their cheap Manhattan lofts when the former diamond merchant building turned condo. But when a private garden on the roof of the building sparked a national frenzy for the mass privatization of public land (called, benevolently, “Roof Island Ecology”), the group turned to the preachy apocalypse novel “Water Water” for inspiration, and their countermovement began to grow.
By the 2070s, the Disengagists had grown to a loose connection of nationwide chapters. Emboldened by the group’s success destroying thirty-six data centers and the flood of support that came after, Robbins began to eye ever more dramatic climate interventions.
“We have to stop talking about saving the planet,” Robbins said in an online interview. “We have to save ourselves. Or they [AI] will be back to deal our species a final blow while we wheeze on our deathbeds.”
Robbins was soon swarmed by pleas for funding from reforestation groups, from those who wanted to dump “treasure chests” of carbon to the bottom of the ocean, from geoengineering advocates, and more.
“Geoengineering is a nonstarter,” Robbins wrote to one such group. “Too much cooperation necessary between countries who hate each other. You think people will ever agree to live the next several decades under a bone-white sky? Get your heads out of your asses.”
Soon she was drawn to the reforestation of fallow farmland and New Desert ecosystems, a potentially expedient means of capturing CO2 and cooling the planet on a relatively short timeline. But Robbins quickly grew impatient with the slow pace of reforestation. “Your pretty, slow forests can come after short-term fast ones,” she wrote in an email to indigenous reforestation advocate and researcher Dr. Beatrix Bos. “This is a matter of urgency, of national and global security.”
As Bos recalled, “Settlers who are angry and in a hurry rarely have the stamina for real change. I didn’t think she’d do something so breathtakingly foolish as a mass planting of tree of heaven for [expletive] sake. I didn’t believe it, and so I didn’t do anything to stop her.”
From her time on the trail crew, Robbins had come to know the invasive tree of heaven, known for its ability to grow almost anywhere and proliferate rapidly through both seeds and clones of its roots, called “suckers.” She threw her considerable inheritance behind the advertising, marketing, and recruitment for a new company—Tree of Heaven Forests, Inc.—but it wasn’t until she made a viral video of a whale swimming in sun-dappled ocean that the company gained traction. In the video, Robbins says, “Do you know what saved the whales? The discovery of petroleum. Without it, sperm whales would have been hunted to extinction.” The whale breaches, and out of its blowhole grows a tree of heaven. “The tree of heaven grows anywhere, it grows fast, and it can be our planet’s petroleum.”
Within a year, entire counties were transformed.
The irony of the whole premise seemed lost on Robbins. “First of all, the whale thing is a myth. Second of all, even if it wasn’t, petroleum is our planet’s petroleum,” said Bos. “In other words, fast fixes were the hallmark of capitalism, and now we are trapped in the web of those bad choices. No one disagrees that we’re short on time, but fast fixes won’t save us. And now our options dwindle even more while we try to clean up this mess. Is that Myrtle’s fault? Tempting to blame someone. I don’t know.”
The Disengagists themselves have latched on to the tree of heaven as a symbol of worship, declaring it a sign that “natural life always triumphs over digital life,” though whether this is true fervor or just another marketing campaign remains unclear.
“I had to fight back,” said Dr. Bos. “Myrtle left us no choice.” Thus began the Tree Wars. But slow planning and the planting of the more temperamental tree species needed for healthy reforestation was no match for the spread of the tree of heaven.
The impact of Robbins’s crusade on carbon dioxide concentration would be negligible, but the impact on the land devastating. The tree of heaven would lead to worsening water shortages, crop die-off, the loss of grazing animals, and the collapse of pollinator populations.
Myrtle Robbins was born in Oklahoma City, the direct descendant of “Sooners”—those settlers who rushed in and stole land from Indian Territory before the official government-sponsored theft of the Land Rush began. The Robbinses would go on to make their fortune in oil. Myrtle’s parents divorced and her mother died in the 2040 pandemic, when Myrtle was 23. In her grief, Myrtle left the family estate behind and joined her first trail crew.
In what appears to be Robbins’s most updated will from early 2102, she bequeathed the entirety of her inheritance to the Berkshires, Mass. chapter of the Disengagists. In the will, she claimed to have had a vision of the sculpture Miracolo “growing a beard of living tree of heaven suckers.” To claim the funds from her estate, the Disengagists would be required to prove their fealty and make a pilgrimage to the sculpture, which is on display at a lighthouse in Maine, and then afterwards to “find the girl,” which seems to be a message with a latent meaning only the group itself understands. The chapter could not be reached for comment.