What are the motifs in The War Against the Trees by Stanley Kunitz?

War and peace is a recurring idea. If the poet refers to growth and development as a war against nature, it appears he thinks there are more battalions of soldiers than the one driving the bulldozers. Another regiment works for the oil company and still another drives cars (Kunitz seems to have left out only road and store builders). Growth and development are usually considered peacetime activities, but Kunitz construes them as acts of war. Human activity can be divided into two major categories, wartime and peacetime. People already know that war kills, not just people, but plants and animals as well. But in "The War Against the Trees," readers are asked to consider that peace also kills, that peace is also war, less against masses of humanity, but more against masses of plants and animals. The result, as Kunitz sees it, is a devastated battlefield replete with craters, a moonscape devoid of life—human, animal, and vegetable.