The Blame Game

Since the dawn of civilization mankind has both relied on nature’s bounty for subsistence and struggled with for survival. Our relationship with the environment has forever been wrought with conflict, yet humans have thus far established a tenuous equilibrium with our world, and a shaky piece with its iron-fisted monarch, Mother Nature.

That is, until now.

The truce was boldly tested last year with the widely publicized death of avid 15-year-old Canadian gamer Brandon Crisp. During Thankgiving weekend of 2008, Brandon’s parents, Steve and Angelika, confiscated their son’s Xbox 360 after it has been discovered that Brandon had been skipping school to play Call of Duty 4. The boy’s response was to run away from home. Three weeks later his body was found, the cause of death due to fatal fall from a tree which he’d climbed. Hundreds of volunteers had turned out to search for the Ontario boy before the story came to its tragic conclusion.

Because of Brandon’s passion for gaming and the circumstances surrounding his death, it was only a matter of time before the media would point a finger at gamer culture in an effort to assign blame. Crisp had reportedly been playing Call of Duty 4 competitively for 6-8 hours daily in an attempt to increase his standing on the Major League Gaming (MLG) ladder. Following the confiscation of his Xbox 360, the teen informs his parents that he plans to run away. Dismissing the statement as an idle threat, his parents jokingly tell him to dress warmly. Three weeks later he is found dead.

Canadian news program The Fifth Estate aired a biased documentary about Brandon Crisp this past weekend entitled Top Gun: When Video Game Obsession Turns to Addiction and Tragedy, in which video games and the professional gaming circuit are directly blamed for the teen’s death. The program covered all of the usual tired clichés that family values media has in their arsenal for their attack on gamer culture, from equating the desire to play games with addictive behaviors like gambling and drug use, to suggesting a casual relationship between playing games and engaging in antisocial behavior. As usual, the parenting ability of Steve and Angelika is considered beyond reproach, and no reference to whether or not they even attempted to make use of the parental controls built into the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live is made at any point in the documentary.

Viewer comments to Top Gun made on The Fifth Estate’s website have been overwhelmingly negative. One poster points out that if Brandon had been a bicycle enthusiast who’d run away after having his bike confiscated as punishment for some indiscretion it would sound absurd to blame the bicycle industry for peddling addictive and destructive products to children. The industry is an easy target for those too old or too ignorant to understand the significant place that gaming has established alongside other creative art forms and story telling methods in our culture. Armed with a keen awareness of contemporary society, perhaps we should turn our attention to the other elements of Brandon’s tragic tale, namely his fatal plunge from what can now be referred to as his mortal enemy: the tree.

While the circumstances surrounding Brandon’s death are unfortunate, video game-related deaths are extremely few and far between, even on an international scale, amounting to a small handful each year. By contrast, tree-related deaths number in the thousands annually. The application of occam’s razor demands that we investigate the more obvious, simpler explanation first. And, indeed, all evidence points to Mother Nature.

Canada’s most important natural resource or its deadliest secret?

As foretold by director M. Night Shyamalan’s visionary film, The Happening, nature has been waging its secret war against the sentient inhabitants of this planet for some time now. Their front line soldiers: trees; their purpose: to obliterate mankind.

A ground-breaking study at Kent State University highlights the urgency with which the arboreal threat must be addressed. Tom Schmidlin, a geography professor and longtime meteorologist, conducted nationwide review of storm-related deaths from 1995 to 2007 with particular emphasis on case studies within Ohio, ultimately concluding that trees represent an immediate and very real threat to our existence:

“This incredible storm sadly illustrated what I’ve found: Trees are the real killer in more storms than most of us realize.”

- Tom Schmidlin, professor of geography, Kent State University

In addition to the shocking number killed by trees under the guise of storms each year, an alarming number of people also lose their lives to falling from trees, people like Brandon Crisp. An estimated 88 humans die every year as a result of injuries sustained from falling out of trees in the United States, a number that pales in comparison to the 135 yearly deaths in Brazil. World-wide, it is estimated that over 700 individuals are murdered by trees in this fashion each year.

A call to action

I urge all of you to write to your local, state, and federal governments and demand stricter regulations on human-tree interactions. The data plainly show that trees are responsible for numerous annual deaths, but disproportionately little legislative action is taken on behalf of protecting our children from these murdering wooden behemoths. Instead, elected officials waste their efforts on bills that enforce stricter penalties for sales of mature video games to minors by retailer, and passing redundant laws requiring warnings and parental control features which are already present on every current game and console on the market.

Cutting down the rain forest is not enough–more drastic actions need to be taken. Warn your family and friends about the dangers that trees pose to our very existence. Educate environmentalists on the errors of their ways. And, most importantly of all, keep an eye on your fucking kids.

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