The Giving Tree
I thought about the Wolf River apple tree outside the window, one among others that still remain from an orchard planted long ago, that has provided apples, beauty, shade, and pleasure and, in turn, been appreciated and tended. It is such a contrast to another apple tree, also on my mind: the one in Shel Silverstein's children's classic, The Giving Tree. There are lessons and choices for us in contrasting these two.
The Giving Tree is an illustrated book about a boy and a huge apple tree. It begins: “A long time ago, there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.” He climbed the tree, ate her apples, took a nap in her shade. He loved the tree and the tree loved to play with him. As the boy grows older, he no longer comes to play. One day the boy returns to the tree and he looks sad. When the tree finds that the boy is sad because he wants money, the tree happily gives him all her apples to sell. Each time, the boy returns to the tree, he is older. The next time, he is a man and he wants a house. The tree tells him, “You can chop off my branches to build your house.” The boy takes the branches and leaves happily. The next time the boy returns, he is getting old and wants a boat to go sailing and relax. The tree says, “Use my trunk to build your boat.” So the boy does and leaves happily. Finally, after many more years go by, the boy, who is now an old man, comes back to the tree. The tree is sad because she is nothing more than a stump, and has nothing more to offer, but the boy says he doesn't need much anymore, just a place to rest. “Come boy, sit down and be happy,” said the tree, and he did and the tree was happy. The end.
The story of the Giving Tree and the boy is troublesome. The relationship it models is natural and healthy only when a child is very young. An infant's needs and wants are pretty much the same, and when her baby is content, his mother is happy. A toddler who wants what he wants when he wants it, and is always indulged, becomes a selfish boy with a sense of entitlement, and if the pattern continues into adulthood, he will remain the narcissistic boy with the expectation that his mother and mother-surrogates will be his Giving Tree. Or, as we are seeing, he—as a symbol of human narcissism—will treat the planet as the Giving Tree, with the End being the end of the beauty and abundance of Earth as we know it.
Earth Photographed from Outer Space
In 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts took photographs of Earth from outer space. For the very first time, it was possible to see the Earth as separate from us. We saw the beautiful sphere that is Earth: there were swirls of white clouds and the deep blue of oceans, and here and there, under the clouds, some brown and green that are partial glimpses of the continents. We saw Our Mother, the Earth, for the first time and she was beautiful. Seen against the vast void of space, she also appeared vulnerable.
Until we become adults psychologically, we see our personal mother (and judge her) in terms of how well she did or didn't meet our needs and wants. Only when we become mature can we see our mother as separate from our expectations of her, and at that point in our lives, she is aging and more fragile than before. If we are not narcissistic, we can see her as she is, love her, and realize that it is now up to us to take care of whatever she cannot do for herself. This is where humanity is in relationship to Mother Earth.
Trees and our Earth take such good care of us and all they ask in return is that we do the same for them. This beautiful home we all live on wants to give to us forever. But if we don't take good care of it and if we continue cutting down all the trees, eventually it will have nothing left to give us.
—JULIA BUTTERFLY HILL
Global Warming and Tree Forests
Mother Earth is a giving tree that has brought forth life of all kinds, including humanity, Homo sapiens sapiens, a relative latecomer. Once established and dominant, humanity has treated the Earth like the little boy in the children's book. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the mid-twentieth century, human beings have treated the planet, especially trees, like an inexhaustible resource. Individuals and corporations look at trees and see only their monetary value. With current machinery and technology, trees that took from years to millennia to grow can be cut down in very little time, carted to mills, and made into lumber, or brought to factories to become pulp and turned into paper products. A tree is then merely raw material.
Deforestation combined with population growth results in global warming, the effects of which are not immediately obvious. Human beings and institutions have heard the experts, seen the graphs and statistics, and respond in much the same way that individuals who are addicted to cigarettes hear but do not heed the necessity to stop smoking. The beginning effects of global warming are insidious and even disputable. The attitude is that there is nothing to get excited about even if the experts are right.
Once before, an alarm went off that wasn't initially heeded. This was the crisis over the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 1960s. Some people then were like those that warn against global warming now, who think that people are reasonable and will respond to information. Numbers, statistics of those affected depending on how close or how far from ground zero, were given. There were photographs of mushroom clouds caused by nuclear bombs. Experts as well as activists in the beginnings of an anti–nuclear proliferation movement were speaking out. Children were taught to duck under their desks in school and people were building bomb shelters in their backyards.
In photographs of the Earth from space, our atmosphere can be seen as a very thin translucent blue layer covering the planet. These photographs move us by their beauty and the knowledge that this is our home planet. The photographs of Earth are in the shape of a mandala, the Sanskrit word for “circle” that has come to refer to Tibetan sacred paintings, and the geometric symbol as C. G. Jung described, for the archetype of the Self, the meaning-giving center of the psyche and a shorthand designation for the many names of divinity. All of which may have subliminally or subconsciously contributed to the effect of scientist and author Carl Sagan's words. He described how in even a very limited nuclear war, so much pollution would be sent into the atmosphere from the destruction that this lovely halo would become a dirty pall, preventing sunlight from reaching the Earth. The beautiful blue and white sphere that is our Mother the Earth would cease to be an abundant, life-giving and life-sustaining planet.
If any country initiated a nuclear war and the other retaliated, radioactive dust and debris from the destruction would be sent into the atmosphere, and wind patterns would distribute this over the entire Earth. “Nuclear winter” would result. There can be no photosynthesis without sunlight, so all green vegetation and life that depends on vegetation for food would starve. Trees would die. Temperatures would drop. Earth would become a wasteland.
On top of the experts and activists that had sounded the warning, I think it likely that the beautiful photographs of the Earth as it is, contrasted to how it could be if the nuclear arms race continued, contributed to bringing that race to an end.
Now there are many other countries that have nuclear capability or are intent on acquiring it (Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran). The situation is analogous to having stopped the growth of a potentially fatal cancer, which temporarily went into remission, and now finding that it has metastasized.
Global Warming and Tree Forests: Flying over Montana
When I traveled to the Feathered Pipe Ranch outside of Helena, Montana, I could see from the air the indirect damage to trees brought about by climate change. There were large swaths of reddish brown running through hills that used to be covered by green trees. Montana is called “Big Sky Country” for the visual impact of vast blue skies over mountainous horizons. Only now, it was more like flying into Los Angeles on a smog-alert day. Fires set off by lightning had hit parts of the forests that were now tinderboxes.
Once on the ground and driving up through Colorado Gulch to the ranch, I could see individual rust-colored dead lodge pole pines everywhere.