Perhaps human beings live best when they remember that they live inside a natural order, that the land includes us and all our schemes and creations, and that when we begin to imagine our lines of kinship and our bonds of responsibility extending out, beyond ourselves and our human families and our nation to the many forms of life and intelligence that comprise our home place, then it is that we will learn how to behave well, not only at home, not only in human society, but as inhabitants of the earth. (Mark Tredinnick)
We were told by the Creator, This is your land. Keep it for me until I come back. (Thomas Banyana, Hopi elder)
Derecho, polar vortexes, bomb cyclones, blizzards, ice storms, straight line winds of hurricane force magnitude — all have taken their toll on the woods in which we live, and in recent years the forest has, in numerous areas, collapsed in on itself. I have marveled at the phenomenon, and agonized over what to do about it. Caught in the ambiguity of, on one hand wanting to be a good steward of the land and do what’s necessary to care for it, and on the other, very aware that the forest as a whole is a living organism which, left in its wildness, provides a rich habitat, and will eventually find its own balance. What to do?
I’m also very aware that I do not live on this 35 acres alone. Possums, raccoons, deer, bears, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, moles, mice — probably more than two dozen species of birds from wild turkeys, great blue herons, and pileated woodpeckers to juncos, cardinals, sparrows, finches. Insects abound. Turn over any rotting log or clump of decaying leaves and you’ll expose a host of wriggling invertibrates. A microscope would reveal even more — mites and spiders, tiny algae and mold, bacteria whose job it is to perforate, ferment, digest, and otherwise transform all the vast residue and waste of my fallen forest into nutrients. How do I serve them, also?
What I do know is that I don’t want to repeat the mistakes and injustices that have been done to this land in the past.
I think Native Americans must have been eternally optimistic. Between 1778 and 1868, tribes signed 370 treaties with the United States government, each one violated and invalidated almost as soon as it was agreed to. At the end of those 90 years, the original Americans retained only about 200,000 square miles. The whites had taken by force or been given treaty rights to about three million square miles of land. Native Americans were herded onto reservations.
The following words of Chief Seattle of the Duwamish League of Puget Sound to President Franklin Pierce in response to an offer to exchange a large area of land for a reservation are probably familiar to most of us, and serve as a haunting and poignant reminder today: Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. . . We are part of the earth and it is a part of us. . . The earth is our mother . . . Whatever befalls the earth befalls us . . . We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand on it . . . Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves . . .
Perhaps the Native American understood what we latter Americans only began to comprehend later: that the land is never owned, but only held in trust. And now as I walk this land which is in my trust and smell the pungent aroma of the cut cedars, see the destroyed wildlife habitats, wonder whether these changes that I’ve chosen to make are truly necessary, I am keenly aware of what biologist George Haskell refers to as the ‘songs of trees,’ the way they speak: whispering pines, falling branches, crackling leaves, the steady hum that can buzz through a forest. And of what a friend recently told me about research demonstrating below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction, allowing the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism, with “mother-trees” managing information flow. This interconnectedness and exchange is communication, albeit in a language that is alien to us. Some researchers are even speculating that trees are not competitors that struggle against each other, for light, for space, but rather seem to have some investment in keeping other trees alive, with mother trees being connected to hundreds of other trees, sending excess carbon to other root systems and seeds through this underground network.
As this forest is being “repaired,” I think of all these things, and what I have chosen to do hurts, at the same time it feels necessary. The ambiguity of life sometimes feels too much to hold. I am so pulled to want to believe in the either-or, the good or the bad, the right or the wrong choice, when all the time I know in my heart that the natural order of things holds both-and, that life is circular, and that all will be well. I hope my heart can convince my mind. Or maybe vice-versa.