Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Every city has something that makes you stop and ask, “Who thought this was a good idea?” For me, living in Phoenix, it’s palm trees.

They’re everywhere.

Drive down any major street, into any shopping center, past office buildings, apartment complexes, golf courses, or neighborhoods, and there they stand like giant botanical flagpoles. Tall. Skinny. Looking vaguely like they wandered in after taking a wrong turn somewhere around Hawaii.

And every time I see one, I ask the same question.

Why?

Palm trees don’t provide meaningful shade. They don’t cool the surrounding air. Most of them don’t produce edible fruit. Birds don’t seem particularly interested in them. They don’t stop dust storms. They don’t help much with our urban heat island. They’re basically decorative telephone poles with bad hair.

Which inevitably reminds me of the scene from Dune: Part Two when Paul Atreides asks the keeper of the royal palms why they maintain trees that consume the water of five men every single day. The keeper doesn’t really have an answer beyond saying they’re sacred.

On Arrakis, at least there was symbolism. Water was life. Those palms represented wealth, power, and the ability to waste the rarest resource in the universe.

Here in Phoenix?

They’re not sacred.

They’re just landscaping.

We’re sitting in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, where today it’s a perfectly reasonable—and by “reasonable” I mean ridiculous—105 degrees. Every summer we’re reminded to conserve water. Don’t overwater your lawn. Take shorter showers. Fix leaking faucets. Yet somehow we’re still planting thousands upon thousands of trees that contribute almost nothing besides the illusion that we’re a tropical paradise.

News flash.

We’re not.

We’re a desert.

A beautiful desert, mind you. We have towering saguaros, palo verdes that actually provide shade, mesquite trees, ironwoods, desert willows, and countless native plants that evolved over thousands of years to survive here. They belong here. They help wildlife. They cool the ground. They make ecological sense.

Palm trees are basically botanical tourists who never got the memo.

It’s almost as if somewhere decades ago a developer said, “People associate palm trees with luxury,” and everyone else nodded without asking whether luxury should perhaps include shade.

Imagine that.

A tree.

Whose revolutionary feature is…

…being useful.

Instead, we have these towering sticks with pom-poms on top. They cast a shadow roughly the size of a pizza box while standing eighty feet tall. If you’re trying to escape the Arizona sun beneath one, congratulations—you’ve found the only square foot of shade in a fifty-yard radius.

Hope you don’t mind sharing it with a pigeon.

Maybe Phoenix simply wants to look tropical. Maybe palm trees make visitors think of vacations instead of heat advisories. Maybe they photograph well against our spectacular sunsets.

But no amount of palm trees is going to convince me I’m living in the Caribbean while my car’s steering wheel is attempting to achieve nuclear fusion.

If it’s 105 degrees before lunch, I’m not in paradise.

I’m living in Earth’s convection oven.

So every time I drive past another row of palms, I hear Paul Atreides asking why they exist. On Arrakis, the answer was tradition and symbolism.

In Phoenix, I still don’t think anyone has a better answer.