BURLINGTON, VT — America’s trees have, sources confirmed Wednesday, continued to remain entirely unmoved by the growing national concern over paper cut injuries, which have risen an estimated 14% year over year and now account for what the Consumer Product Safety Commission describes as “a nontrivial share” of minor office-related trauma.
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The trees, when reached for comment, did not comment. They did not, in fact, do anything. They stood, per multiple observers, exactly where they had been standing, doing exactly what they had been doing, which was, per one arborist, “essentially nothing, for centuries.”
“They don’t care,” said a tenured forestry professor at the Green Mountain Institute of Silviculture. “They don’t care about paper cuts. They don’t care about the people getting them. They don’t care about the fact that the paper causing the cuts is, in a very real biological sense, derived from them. I want to be clear that this is not because trees are cruel. It is because trees are indifferent to nearly everything, at all times, and always have been.”
The rise in paper cut injuries, per CPSC data, has been attributed to a range of factors, including a return-to-office movement that has significantly increased the volume of physical printing in American workplaces, a growing preference for heavier cardstock in corporate stationery, and what one internal report described as “a general re-encounter with the physical world after several years of screens.”
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Trees, when this data was shared with them, said nothing.
“You can present them with the injury statistics,” the professor said. “You can show them the graphs. You can walk right up to a mature oak and say, do you know that your cellulose is now injuring approximately eleven thousand Americans per day? The oak will not respond. The oak has never responded. The oak has been alive for two hundred years and has not once, in that time, expressed remorse.”
The trees’ indifference has become a growing source of public frustration.
“I got a paper cut last Tuesday,” said a 41-year-old dental office receptionist in Cranston, Rhode Island, who required a Band-Aid. “It hurt for, like, an hour. And I went outside and I looked at the tree in my front yard, and I said — I said this out loud, on my own lawn — I said, you did this. And the tree just, like, sat there. It didn’t even rustle. It was a windy day. The other trees on the block rustled. Mine didn’t. Mine just, like, refused to acknowledge me.”
The National Arborist Association has issued a statement urging Americans not to expect empathy from trees.
“Trees are not a support system,” the statement read, in part. “Trees do not, and have never, cared about your day. Trees do not know when you were injured, why you were injured, or by what. Trees are extremely successful biological organisms who have, over the course of 380 million years, developed exactly zero capacity for interpersonal remorse. Please stop expecting this to change.”
The statement was, sources confirmed, longer than expected. It ran fourteen pages. It included, on page nine, a subsection titled Yes, Even Willow Trees.
Public reaction to the statement has been mixed.
“I actually feel worse now,” said one respondent, who was not asked. “I thought maybe if I explained it to them — the tree in the park where I read at lunch, the one by my kitchen window — I thought maybe if I articulated it, they would, like, get it. But they won’t. They can’t. That’s a hard thing to sit with.”
Trees, per the forestry professor, are also indifferent to human sadness about their indifference.
“You cannot make them care by being sad,” she said. “That has been tried. That has been tried extensively.”
At press time, an oak in Vermont was, sources confirmed, doing nothing. A pine in Oregon was, sources also confirmed, doing nothing. A stand of birches in New Hampshire was, sources further confirmed, doing what they had been doing for the past 140 years, which was standing there in a row.
None of them, sources concluded, had a message for the American people.
None of them, sources concluded, ever would.