The tree is a powerful symbol. Trees appear in many creation stories, such as the World Ash or the Garden of Eden. Religions, especially the Druids, have revered trees. Buddha was enlightened sitting under a Bodhi tree. Christmas is celebrated by decorating Christmas trees. There are sacred trees throughout the world. “Family tree” has a symbolic connection to the theme of immortality. Myths and symbols are the carriers of meaning. In them, a situation is presented metaphorically in a language of image, emotion, and symbol. Because human beings share a collective unconscious (C. G. Jung's psychological explanation) or the Homo sapiens morphic field (Rupert Sheldrake's biological explanation), a symbol comes from and resonates with the deeper layers of the human psyche.
Like a Tree circles around the subject of tree: the result is a series of views, from many different perspectives. Mythology and archetypal psychology are sources of information about the symbolic meaning of the tree. Botany and biology classify and describe. To learn about trees is to appreciate them as a species. Beliefs about sacred trees and symbols of them have been part of many religions, and turned trees into casualties of religious conflicts. The unintended consequences of cutting down all the trees on Easter Island were disastrous, with applicable parallels to the fate of the planet. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement engaged rural women to plant trees. When this became known through honoring the founder, Wangari Maathai, thirty million trees had been planted and, in 2004, she became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
As I went deeper and deeper into the subject of trees, I entered a complex and diverse forest of knowledge, from archeological to mystical. I learned that we wouldn't be here at all—we, the mammals and humans on this planet—if not for trees. Whether huge forests or a single specimen that is one of the oldest living things on Earth, trees continue to be cut down by corporations or individuals motivated by greed or poverty, who are ignorant of or indifferent to the consequences or meaning of what they do. I learned that reforestation was the difference between cultures that stayed in place and thrived, and those that cut down the trees and did not: these are very applicable object lessons for humanity now. It's possible to learn from past history and see what will befall us or how trees may save us.
I've grasped a parallel learning from going to the United Nations when the Commission on the Status of Women meets. Women and girls are a resource. Educate a girl, and she will marry later, have fewer, healthier children, and almost all her earnings will benefit her family. With microcredit loans, women start their own small businesses. When there are enough women in high enough positions, such as in Liberia and Rwanda, the previous culture of corruption and violence disappears. Priorities shift to safety, education, and health. With peace, the economy grows. A convincing case can be made that participation by women is the missing key element in finding solutions for the financial, environmental, and military problems that underlie the instability of our world and the questions of survival or sustainability. Valuing girls is like valuing trees. It's good for them and for the planet.
There is a proliferation of grassroots activism. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been cropping up all over the world, numbering in the millions, including in China and Russia as well as Africa. Women grow small businesses into larger ones, and have been creating NGOs (80 percent are created by women) with the potential to change collective thinking. Ideas now can spread like a virus, which overcomes resistance to become commonplace. For a tree person who reads my words, whose awareness and concern have not yet extended beyond caring about particular trees, my intention is to take your consciousness deeper, as mine has gone, to involve your heart, mind, and imagination as the first step toward participation in saving trees and girls.
All that was left of my Monterey pine when I came home was the substantial stump; it was broad, irregularly shaped, beautiful in a way, still raw from the cutting and oozing sap. There was also an empty space against the sky where it once towered over my walk.
During the week I was away, when my tree was cut down, I talked to Gloria Steinem about my unsucessful saga to save my tree. She said, “Remember Jean, you are a writer and a writer can have the last word.” Many trees are cut down to make paper, which is the usual way a tree can become a book. My tree lives on through the words and spirit in this book.
1
STANDING LIKE A TREE
I often walk among the ancient soaring coast redwood trees in Muir Woods, the national park close to where I live in California. I have to crane my neck to look up at them, much like a toddler who would otherwise just see kneecaps or legs of adults. Though in proportion to the height of these trees, I'm not even at toenail level. These tall conifers are descendants of the green leafy tree ferns and first trees, without which Earth would not have breathable air, soil, or rainwater. As the BBC documentary Planet Earth succinctly said of our biological relationship to trees, “If they didn't live here, neither would we.” My study of trees began with looking up specific information about the Monterey pine (Pinus radiata), which is how I learned why it had been particularly suited to where I live. About the same time, I had begun a practice of taking early morning walks in Muir Woods. Both led me metaphorically deeper into the trees.
My wonder of trees keeps growing as I learn more about what they are and do. It has also been learning for the sake of it. Trees seem so ordinary and familiar and unmoving: they just stand wherever they took root and, until we know better, don't seem to be doing anything much. Those with the oldest lineage are members of the conifer family. The conifers do nothing showy—no autumn colors, spring blossoms, or glorious fruit—but when they are noticed and we understand how wonderful they are, a depth and poetic appreciation can result. Out of their wonder and love of the trees they study, naturalists have written about them with poetic sensibility. John Muir, America's most famous and influential naturalist, for example, described a juniper as “a sturdy storm-enduring mountaineer of a tree, living on sunshine and snow, maintaining tough health on his diet for perhaps more than a thousand years” (Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911, p. 146). Muir's ability to describe what he saw in the high Sierras and Yosemite Valley, to write of the awe he felt in the presence of the ancient redwoods, and to influence others had a significant role in preserving them, including Muir Woods.
In The Tree, a comprehensive book on the subject, the English author and naturalist Colin Tudge compares the building of a beautiful cathedral with how a tree grows, a comparison in which the tree comes out ahead:
[A] cathedral or a mosque is built; it does not grow. Until it is complete it is useless, and probably unstable. It must be held up by scaffold. When it is finished it remains as it was made for as long as it lasts—or until some later architect designs it afresh, and rebuilds. A tree, by contrast, may grow to be tall as a church and yet must be fully functional from the moment it germinates. It must fashion and refashion itself as it grows, for as it increases in size so the stresses alter—the tension and compression on each part. To achieve hugeness and yet be self-building—no