Swashbuckling fronds of peace linked to death of parrots

Who would've known there would be collateral damage from Palm Sunday observances?

For persons without a knowledge of Christianity, let me explain. Palm Sunday, the sunday before Easter, commemorates when Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem for Passover. According to scripture, he was feted by city residents who waved at him with and covered his path in palm fronds as a sign of respect.

Traditionally during Palm Sunday services palm fronds are distributed to the Christian faithful. The palms are kept all year and any palms not distributed eventually are burned to create the ashes that will be placed upon the foreheads of the faithful the following Ash Wednesday.

As a very young child, Palm Sunday meant you'd get something to tickle the back of the ear of the child in front of you during the most solemn parts of the worship service. And after church, you would have palm frond sword fights, or run around laughing and whipping each other with the fronds. At least this occurred until your embarrassed very old-school Catholic grandmother told you that tickling, sword fighting and whipping other children with a palm frond of peace was sacrilegious behavior, regardless of your right to defend yourself, to be contritely admitted in Confession the very next week.

Sometimes shortly after arrival home the cheeks of my butt were red from the paddling of a wooden spoon when I went over the top in my efforts to emulate Errol Flynn with a palm frond sabre. Mom would try to act as my defense counsel but would most often lose the argument to the prosecution of my grandmother. I firmly believe even Perry Mason could lose to her, at least in her house.

When I left for Navy boot camp in 1973, my grandmother gave me a piece of a palm frond, stapled together in the form of a cross. I had stopped going to church altogether when I was 15 but carried that remembrance with me in my wallet until three years ago when it finally disintegrated into dust. I still can't tell you why I carried it that long -- a memory of my palm frond sword fighting days, or my grandmother's stern adherence to Catholic doctrine to the point of paddling me for youthful hijinks, or her deep caring and fear that something could happen to her grandson performing military service -- most probably all of the above.

While painful, that paddling is not the collateral damage of which I write. Apparently the fronds given out at these services today and back then most often are taken from a specific palm tree, the wax palm tree. These palm trees don't grow in Jerusalem or any where near the middle east, but in the Amazon rain forest. And that annual harvest allegedly has created an ecological catastrophy for the Colombian Yellow-Eared Parrot. (Go ahead, click on the link. They're really cute parrots.)

According to the Associated Press article by writer Andrew Selsky:

There are only 540 or so yellow-eared parrots left on the planet. They exist only in Colombia. Their sole habitat is the wax palm, which grows on the misty flanks of the Andes Mountains to heights of 225 feet, making it the world's tallest palm tree.

But for centuries, Colombians have used the fronds of the wax palm for Palm Sunday, which commemorates Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, where residents greeted him by waving palm fronds.

When Colombian peasants cut off the fronds from the young wax palms — Colombia's national tree — to sell to worshippers, the trees die or their growth is stunted. The practice has led to a dramatic thinning of the towering palms.

The article states that palm fronds from the Amazon rain forest are sent all over the world, with the majority going to churches in the United States for their Palm Sunday celebrations. Church leaders across the Christianity belief spectrum are concerned about this and have joined together to prevent further ecological damage. Some have started purchasing fronds from ecologically sustainable palms in Guatemala and Mexico, while in Colombia, there is a pilot project to grow and harvest palm fronds using methods that won't result in destruction of the trees.

[Update 5/5/2005: An appropriate joke forwarded to me by my friend Byron:

It was Palm Sunday and, because of a sore throat, 5-year-old Johnny stayed home from church with a sitter. When the family returned home they were carrying several palm branches. The boy asked what the palm branches were for. "People held them over Jesus' head as He walked by," said the child's mother.

"Wouldn't you know it!" the boy fumed. "The one Sunday I don't go to church, Jesus shows up!"]

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Creative Writing 7001 -- Graduate Level: The Associated Press says some of its 1,700 newspaper customers and 5,000 radio and television customers in the U.S., as well as its 8,500 newspaper, radio and television customers in 121 countries overseas, apparently feeling the hot breath at their backs of growing competition from the 6th estate, have requested it provide news copy to them offering some differentiation from the AP news copy being posted on the web. Thus, reports Editor & Publisher, the AP will offer news to its subscribers giving them a choice of two story leads -- one straight lead, reporting the who, what, where, when, why and how with just the main facts. "The other will be the 'optional,' an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means." A "feature" lead is a soft lead, but I've never known a reporter to produce story leads with "creative means." No, I stand corrected. Janet Cooke, Dan Rather, Gary Webb and Jayson Blair come quickly to mind.

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Updates: I have updated my post "The Cinderella story that wasn't," adding information from the code of ethics subscribed to by the Associated Press.