On Aug. 6, 1945, a 14-year-old schoolboy named Akihiro Takahashi was knocked unconscious by a deafening roar and flash of blinding light. When he awoke, he found he had been thrown many yards by the detonation of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He had survived because his school was about a mile from the epicenter of the blast.
Dazed and burned, Akihiro headed to the river to cool himself. Along the way, he witnessed a scene of apocalypse: corpses strewn like rocks, a baby crying in the arms of its charred mother, scalded men peppered with shards of glass, their clothes melted, wandering like ghosts through the wasteland, the unbreathable darkened air, the raging conflagrations. In an instant, about 85,000 men, women and children had perished. In the days and months that followed, tens of thousands more slowly succumbed to their injuries and the effects of radiation.
I met Akihiro Takahashi in 1984, when he was the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. By then middle-aged, his body was a testament to that war crime and its aftermath. One ear was flat and mangled, his hands were gnarled and from a finger on each grew a black fingernail.
“You must see the Hibakujumoku, the survivor trees,” he said to me, almost as an order, at the end of a long conversation in his office. “You must see the gingkos.”
It was the first time I had ever heard of this tree. With one of his twisted hands, he gestured toward the city beyond the museum. They were a sign of wonder, the three trees that I visited, in the Hosen-Ji and Miyojoin-Ji temples and at the Shukkeien gardens, spreading and magnificent and resilient.
The gingko, I learned, was an expert in survival, a species found in fossils 270 million years old. These specific trees had been saved because their roots underground had been spared the nuclear annihilation. Within days of the explosion they had sprouted new greenery surrounded though they were by Hiroshima’s horrors of carbonized bodies and black rain and wailing survivors.
The gingkos, Akihiro Takahashi said, expressed better than anything he could say through an interpreter the endurance of hope, the need for peace and reconciliation.
And so, decades later, when the majestic old oak trees in front of our home in the United States were rotting and had to be cut down, it seemed natural to us to replace them with gingko trees. We purchased two specimens, and paid to have them planted along the street we live on, and we convinced the city forestry department to plant a third nearby.
The choice was not simply a challenge to death — though these trees would live far beyond the limits of the oaks, and would be here when we were long gone — but also an aesthetic decision. The gingkos are elegant and supple, their leaves are delicate lobes of green shaped like tiny fans.
I watered these miraculous trees every day and greeted them each morning. On occasion, I even spoke and sang to them.
I thought of Akihiro Takahashi again the other day. Early one morning, my wife and I woke to discover a crew of workers excavating huge holes right next to the roots of our gingko trees in order to make room for thick coils of snaking yellow tubes of fiber-optic cables. As soon as I saw what was happening, I sprang into action. It helped that I could speak Spanish to the workers. I argued vehemently — and persuaded them to dig their trenches farther from the gingkos’ roots. I checked to see that other trees in the street were unharmed and then went home to fire off emails to the city authorities to ensure that inspectors oversaw future encroachments of this sort.
Though our particular trees are safe, I am haunted by deeper, more ominous thoughts about how this great survivor now seems threatened by the depredations of modernity: the gingko vs. the gigabyte. This is, after all, a conflict between nature in its most pristine, slow and sublime form and the demands of a high-speed society that, armed with an astonishing technological prowess, wants to expand everywhere, burrow through any obstacle in its way, communicate instantly with infinite efficiency. The battle is one the Earth is losing as this Sixth Extinction, a manmade extinction, wreaks its havoc on land, water and air, on our plants and creatures.
I am far from being a Luddite. In this isolationist, chauvinistic era, I welcome the human connections that our global communications networks enable. They at least offer a glimmer of what we might achieve, the peace and understanding between different cultures and nations that Mr. Takahashi dreamt of, all those years ago in Hiroshima. Yet, as we heedlessly rush into the future with our arrogant machinery, will we ever stop to ponder the consequences? How many species are threatened today by our insatiable desires, our incessant overdevelopment, our inability to measure joy and happiness by anything other than by the latest gadget?
The Hiroshima gingkos, the tenacious older brothers and sisters of the tender green trees in front of our North Carolina house, were able to resist the most devastating outcome of science and technology, the splitting of the atom, a destructive power that could turn the whole planet into rubble. Those trees’ survival was a message of hope in the midst of the black rain of despair: that we could nurture life and conserve it, that we must be wary of the forces we unleash.
How paradoxical, how sad, how stupid, it would be if, more than seven decades after Hiroshima opened the door to the possible suicide of humanity, we did not understand that warning from the past, that call to the future, what the gentle leaves of the gingko trees are still trying to tell us.