PHILIP FRENEAU, THE POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION in the late 1700s, had earlier been a roommate at a New Jersey college (soon to become Princeton University) with none other than James Madison, the principal author of what was to become the U.S. Constitution. Freneau was a tree-hugger as well as an anti-federalist, who became outraged when he learned that the trees of New York City were soon to become an endangered species.

Unbelievably, the city had passed an ordinance that stated that after June 10, 1791, “no tree was to stand within the city limits,” according to Jonah Raskin, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature (Regent Press, 2014). Freneau — born in New York and later living in Mt. Pleasant, New Jersey — went to war in verse against the government of New York City. One line in Freneau’s widely discussed poem stands out: “Trees now to grow is held a crime.”

In addition to his anti-British satires in the colonial period, Freneau had been publishing popular poems about trees he loved, such as “The Dying Elm.” He rallied the people of New York City in support of the city’s trees, just as folk singers 180 years later took direct action against the city’s ban of folk music in the famed Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village and scene of the up-and-coming folk music revival in 1961. (The park is named for the American general and first President of the U.S., whom Freneau despised). Freneau’s poetic campaign forced the City to repeal the anti-tree ordinance.

Across the Atlantic in Europe fifty years after Freneau defeated New York City’s attempt to clear all trees from the city, an editor of the Cologne’s Rheinische Zeitung wrote powerful editorials in defense of trees, against their privatization, and in favor of the rights of peasants to collect dead wood from the forest floor that had been previously unrestricted by law and used in common for millennia.

The editor of Rheinische Zeitung was a brash 24 year-old named Karl Marx. Marx railed against the state’s expropriation of “the commons”. Few remember today that ecological justice was central to Marx’s outlook. From his earliest mature writings and throughout his life, Marx was outraged by the cutting down of forests for private profit; he denounced the enclosure of lands that had been used in common and the state’s criminalization of peasants who took dead wood for heating and cooking.

Marx termed that and other expropriations of Nature “primitive accumulation,” and investigated how such ‘enclosures’ came to receive social acceptance and sanction in law. He pointed out that by 1842, 85 percent of all prosecutions in the Rhineland dealt with a new crime: the “theft” of dead wood lying on the ground. The state enforced that law only on peasants who collected the dead wood, while allowing wealthy businessmen and corporations to strip whole living forests with impunity.

Few today ever heard of poet Philip Freneau, or knew that Karl Marx was an aggressive defender of the forests. Under the Clinton/ Gore administration, considered by some to be ecologically astute, their industry-friendly “environmental” rules enabled more trees to be cut down in the U.S. than by any of their predecessors — combined!

The rolls of newsprint for printing The New York Times equate to 75,000 trees for one weekend of “The Paper of Record’s” publication of its Sunday propaganda and advertisements!

At SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island NY, where I went to college and never learned about Freneau, NY State cleared a large tract of beautiful forest behind H Quad dormitory in order to build …. ready? …. the headquarters of the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation!

Long live Philip Freneau, poet and Tree Hugger, whom George Washington called “a wretched and insolent dog.”

Wretched and insolent dogs of the world, unite!