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Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,--chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time--and long before that--God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools,--only Uncle Sam can do that.The excerpt is from "The American Forests," an 1897 essay by crusading naturalist John Muir. Although he wrote long after westward expansion fell and burned much of the country's woodlands, his advocacy helped spur President Theodore Roosevelt to launch a major conservation program, creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and preserving millions of acres of American wilderness.
An ode to trees bring to mind two things for me: the Ents that Tolkien renders so beautifully in The Lord or the Rings, and the closest I've found to an earthly equivalent, the giant Sequoia and redwood forests of California. It is impossible to walk among those forests without feeling awe at proximity to creatures so magnificent in scale and ancient in age.
"The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range," Mr. Muir wrote. "It
extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten
miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz,
a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained
grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods
of the world."
On a recent road trip up the California Coast, my traveling
companion and I hiked into Big Basin Redwoods State Park, where the
cross-section from the trunk of a fallen redwood hangs at the trail
head. Brass plaques mark the events that correspond to the concentric
circles that show the tree's age. 
Normally
I am an environmental pragmatist. Green causes interest me insofar as
they add to human flourishing: we protect
fisheries so that humanity can continue to eat fish, conserve fresh
water so that our reservoirs don't dry up, and preserve tracts of
nature so that future generations can experience the aesthetic
pleasures of the wild.
A contrary notion--that nature possesses
inherent worth--grates on me when a rare fly is cited as reason enough
not to build an important highway. Even so, I must admit an intuition that certain
creatures demand respect on their own terms. I could never
bring myself to harpoon a blue whale, to slay an ancient sea turtle, or
to fell a giant redwood. Perhaps mine is merely a sentimental prejudice that favors big, old things. I wager that if
you visit the California forests that stand today thanks to
conservationists like Mr. Muir, you'll share my sentiment.
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