My point here is not that we are ignorant and disconnected (as true as that may be), but something much more heartening: while we are kept physically alive by trees that grow far away, we are sustained on different but still profound and beautiful levels—psychological, spiritual, emotional, even intellectual—by the odd collection of trees in our urban midst. Our dependence on these close-to-home trees is real, essential, but more difficult to quantify. We know, both from experience and now from published scientific studies, that being among trees, or simply viewing trees through a window, makes people calmer, and even happier. Trees counteract the psychological and physical stresses of urban life. Views of trees from school or home will decrease ADHD symptoms in all age groups. Studies at a public housing project in inner-city Chicago showed that girls who could see trees out the window had higher concentration levels and more self-discipline than girls who couldn’t, and their mothers were better able to cope with major life stresses; even one tree can make a measurable difference. The presence of trees in cities lowers human blood pressure, decreases anxiety, and may help prevent disease. Postoperative patients recover more quickly when they have a view of trees, and women who live near big trees during pregnancy are less likely to birth underweight babies.
It is good to be able to say, “Scientific research shows…” But we do not really need to be told that trees bring us calm and happiness, do we? We know these things as if by heart, and we know other things about trees and through trees, things that have yet to be proven by science. We know things about connection and wildness and life. We know that we have, at some time in our lives, felt watched over by a tree. We know that we have, even if it is a childhood memory, at some time felt the hair on our heads and arms as leaves in a breeze. (The Aberdeen Bestiary says, “The highest parts of the tree are called flagella, whiplashes, because they catch repeated gusts of wind.”) We know that tree time is not human time. Who has not felt the peculiar, exquisite lostness of tree time, a time measured in light and spaciousness and a suspension of minutes or hours, rather than their swift passing? In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when Rosalind asks Orlando, “I pray you, what is’t o’clock?” he answers, “You should ask me what time o’ day, there’s no clock in the forest.” And in fairy tales, we all know that when the child steps into the forest, we might as well throw our watches to the wind, as tree time is about to reign absolute. We know, too, that when we stand openly beneath overhead branches, we can be lifted into our own wildness—out of our heads, our places, our little lives; or, no, more deeply into all of these things. And who has not, lying beneath a tree, felt her own body rooted, and earthen—the invitation to horizontal gravity that only trees offer? And giving in to this gravity, to this moment of lying in that space between the spread of roots and the spread of branches, a recognition that yes, the world can make do without us, and in the not-too-distant future will do just that.
Are trees beings? Creatures? Sentient? Relational? Proper residents of the urban bestiary? I know that people of science and literature and possessing the wisdom of age have said so. I know that some trees themselves seem to have said so too. I know that I love certain trees as much as I’ve loved almost anything. My argument is not for the sentience of trees, not necessarily—it is for possibility. What if? What if we live in a constant and mutual relationship with trees, and all this while—while we have admired, loved, and worshipped them, lived off their fruits and in the shelter of their forms—what if we modern humans have not yet properly understood the dimensions of tree-human interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh calls “the interconnection of all things”? Imagine what life-giving delight may be in store for us, walking about, knowing of our true relationship with trees. Are the trees branching beasts? If the poets, visionaries, botanists, Buddhists, and even the trees themselves are proclaiming their unique sentience, then why on earth would any of us argue?
Birds and Trees
For many urban birds, the presence or lack of a tree means the difference between the birds’ flourishing and dying. In tremendous part, the trees that are with us determine what animals are with us. In the first study of its kind, research by scientists at Australian National University showed that urban trees were vital, “urgently needed” for sustaining biodiversity for all animals, and birds in particular. We have long known that large native trees are keystone structures for wildlife in forest or agricultural settings. But the new research shows that even in cities, more trees correlates directly with higher numbers of birds and more bird species, including species that are considered woodland-dependent. This is especially true for big trees, and parks or even backyards with more large trees have more bird species than those with only smaller trees. Study author Karen Stagoll is not above stating the obvious: “It takes decades for a newly planted sapling to grow into a large tree. We need to think and act early.” The removal of large trees has to be reconsidered in this light—public concerns about the threat posed by older trees might be managed by fencing, education, and protective landscaping.
There is no one way to plan for trees and wildlife in urban places, no one philosophy for all occasions. For decades, the wisdom from conservation biology has involved the preservation of large forest fragments—the bigger the better—and this was viewed as the most important thing. And it’s true—leaving remaining woodlands undisturbed is essential. But we’re learning that there are other elements at play—when we decrease impervious surfaces, increase the number of trees (especially native trees, including conifers, where appropriate), and work to create a multilayered botanical structure, more native forest bird species turn up, even in the denser urban matrix. By the work of our own hands, we can turn city neighborhoods that host mainly crows, starlings, pigeons, house sparrows, robins, and flickers into places that also support more sensitive birds that can flourish alongside human habitation when attention is paid to their requirements: migratory warblers, various woodland thrushes, western or scarlet tanagers, downy or hairy woodpeckers, Pacific or winter wrens, and many others.
An Appointment with an Oak
American naturalist John Burroughs was enamored of Henry David Thoreau’s commitment to natural observation and immersion: “He would go any number of miles to interview a muskrat or a woodchuck, or to keep an ‘appointment with an oak-tree.’ ” Never mind that it wasn’t an oak. Thoreau wrote: “I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”
There are many ways to become more conversant with the trees we live with, to “keep appointments” with our own versions of Thoreau’s beech. One suggestion I have heard is to choose a “year tree,” a tree in your yard or neighborhood, and commit to visiting that tree each day, sketching it or making notes about the goings-on in its limbs, leaves, and roots. I undertook a different kind of experiment during the writing of this chapter—I decided to make my own appointment with a huge bigleaf maple in the wooded park near my home. I would spend the entire day in the company of this sprawling tree, from dawn to dark. I chose the tree on a walk before the day of the appointment and packed my bag with a mixture of simplicity and opulence. On the simple side, I brought no books, no devices, no phone, nothing to occupy myself except a wooden pencil and a notebook. On the deluxe side, I brought my favorite tattered quilt upon which to spread an inspiring picnic of farmers’-market cheeses, strawberries, baguette, chocolate, and one of those tiny bottles of red wine. Certainly Thoreau would not have objected, even though there would, thank God, be no trudging through snow. This was a sunny, dappled, late-summer day. I confess to hoping for some kind of botanico-philosophical revelation during my many hours of tree immersion, maybe the kind of direct communication that Ann Linnea had described. But these expectations dissolved early on as I found I was receiving something much better: nothing in particular. Hours passed, chickadees and kinglets gave way to Steller’s jays and quick rushes from overfed park squirrels, up, do
wn, up. The shadows moved across the grass, and I moved my quilt to follow them. I watched, leaned against the tree, napped extravagantly. I wrote—small thoughts, tree thoughts. I wished for everyone such a day with a tree.
Human
Home Practice for a Person-Size Animal
Human mammals are funny-looking. Think of us, walking along in our human-animal skins. Notably, when compared to other mammals, we are standing upright on two flat feet, fully bipedal without bending to rest, ever, on our knuckles. Almost as strikingly, we are furless. Naked and cold, sparsely covered with hairlets, topped with a shock of thicker hair but no undercoat. Other than a slightly protruding nose, the human face is flat and singularly snoutless. Female humans, unlike any other mammal, have breasts that are swollen year-round, and men’s penises hang down, the genitals fully exposed (even in species that display the genitals, such as East Africa’s bright blue–testicled vervet monkeys, the penis is rarely so vulnerable). Physically, we are virtually defenseless—more so for our size than any other mammal, including a mouse. The skin on our hands and feet is a little callused, but not very. We are not hoofed or protectively padded. We have no sharp teeth, no claws, no armor, no plates, no scales. We have no venom, no bitter taste or mild toxicity in our skin, no chemical defenses. All that we have done to create beauty; to raise culture; to dominate the earth, other species, and one another, we have done with little to recommend us but the play between our thumbs and fingers and our wondrous human brains.
Giving humans a place in the bestiary is not an original idea—the author of the Aberdeen Bestiary gave a full section to the creation and functioning of man. As usual, Isidore finds both philosophical and scientific explication in the Latin words for his subjects’ names and parts. “Man, homo, is so called,” he writes, “because he is made from the soil, humus, as it says in the book of Genesis: ‘And the Lord God formed the man of the dust of the ground.’ ” (The etymology is false, of course. Homo is self-defining, from the Latin for “man,” though in this same myth, the human’s Hebrew name, Adam, is derived from adamah, earth.) But the notion is a lovely one, an early statement of our absolute continuity with the soil, with the earth.
This story in Genesis 2 is from the creation mythology of ancient Israel and may have been penned by J, one of the four main authors of the Pentateuch, in the ninth century BCE. In this myth, animals are not created before the man, as in the first chapter of Genesis, but after him, as his companions. The Genesis 2 story echoes a common thread in human creation stories from around the globe: people are brought forth from the stuff of the earth.
In one Norse myth, the first man and woman are formed out of an ash tree and an elm tree. They reside with their descendants in Middle Earth, created for them by the god Odin—the whole universe is propped up by Yggdrasil, the world ash (so even the first humans have to deal with troubles from squirrels like Ratatoskr). The Quiche Maya of Guatemala’s ancient highlands tell of people created by a trio of gods: Maker, Heart of Sky, and Feathered Serpent. After forming humans of wood, the gods disconcertedly realize that though the people can move and speak and look as people should look, the wood people have no minds, and no hearts, and do not remember their makers. So the people are re-created out of a more supple medium—yellow and white corn, fruits, and vegetables, all fixed together with honey and flowers. The bodies and minds of the first true people are gardens.
In one telling of a myth from the Yoruban people of West Africa, the god Olorun is dismayed by the mess of chaos beneath him—scattered mud and stone and smoke. He orders his good lackey Orisha to make something of it, and to help Orisha along on the task, Olorun provides him with the most helpful of things: a shell full of magic earth, a pigeon, a five-toed hen, and, to oversee it all, a very particular chameleon. Orisha spills the magic earth upon the chaos, and the birds go to work, pecking and scratching, until they have separated the mess into masses of earth and sea. They continue working until the chameleon inspects their work and calls it finished. Rain falls, and forests flourish. Orisha forms people from the mud of the beautiful new earth, and Olorun, pleased, breathes life into them.
I love the frugal practicality of such myths—we were created from what was at hand, as a pioneer woman would have pieced a quilt. And I love the continuity these stories spell: no wonder we are capable of feeling such residence upon this earth, such interconnectedness with its processes, stones, and soil. Of course we do. We were born from these things.
But something strange has happened to our earthen human-animal selves. We have grown large, much larger than our individual physical bodies, spread farther in the world than we can perceive. In the past few years, I have been in conversation with Dr. William Catton, a provocative environmental sociologist and the author of Overshoot, the seminal work on the relationship between human population and the earthen biosphere. In considering the force of modern urban humans, Catton has adopted the medical concept of a prosthesis, a manufactured object that extends the ability of the human biological form—a fabricated substitute for something damaged or missing. Typically, we think of prosthetics as replacements for lost limbs or organs or as devices to enhance limited abilities. A false hand, or a glass eye. A prosthetic does not have to be physically built in; it can also be carried. Canes are a variety of prosthetic, as are eyeglasses. But Catton has begun to view the other built apparatuses we use in our daily lives—structures and devices that enhance the efforts of our physical bodies, or actually do things for us—as another kind of prosthetic. Phones are a prosthetic for communication, allowing our voices to carry farther; cars take us beyond the places we can easily walk, and they take us there faster. These are obvious examples. But once we start seeing everyday objects as prosthetic intermediaries for our own physical activity, it is difficult to stop seeing them, and there are far more of them today than when Catton began thinking of such things just a few short decades ago: we now unlock car doors with buttons rather than our hands; we manage our television screens with remotes instead of getting off our bums and walking the few feet to change the channel. I’ve been embarrassed to find myself, purportedly a nature writer, checking the current temperature and weather conditions on my iPhone weather app rather than taking a step out the door to feel the elements on my own face.
All animals need things beyond their bodies (food and oxygen at the very least). Ecosystem studies teach us that energy, as it wends its way through the food web, is lost, and only about 10 percent of food energy passes from one trophic level to the next. Thus it is normal, it is natural, to take up more energetic space than the simple physical space of our biological bodies. It is true of all animals. But the prostheses of modern human life, all of which must be manufactured, obtained, maintained, and eventually disposed of, have made this space we as humans take up—our “outside-the-body metabolism”—a great deal larger than it has ever been. We know that our fuel-based way of life reaches into the past for petrological sustenance, using energy stores from long before humans evolved; it touches the air and soil of the present; it spreads toward the future via waste products that are visible (physical refuse to be dumped—our cell phones, plastic pens, outworn shoes, demolished buildings) as well as via invisible heat, held in the diminishing atmosphere where it will affect future generations of human and nonhuman lives. The energetic and physical refuse of our lives stretches across the earth—elsewhere, but also, Catton writes, else when—inviting an understanding that is as poetic as it is bio-geological. Our current activities are rich with meaning beyond the moment in which we enjoy them. The most striking detail of Catton’s prosthetic thesis is the specific diagramming of the extra-body, or “exo-somatic being,” as he calls it, of the ecosystemic space we each require. A modern urban human moves in the landscape with the physical shadow of a sperm whale or a large dinosaur.
I want to be a human-size animal. As human-size as I can be, an animal with a just-right shadow, appropriate to my body and place, with awareness of the other bodies, near
and far, human and more-than-human, those that share my neighborhood and those I will never see. Thinking of myself walking out the door in the shape of an apatosaurus is enough to make me ride that pretty bicycle of mine in spite of all the hills in Seattle. I do not want to move through the world as a dinosaur. I do not want to displace a sperm whale’s worth of seawater when I dip my toe into the sandy shoreline waves at the Puget Sound beach near our home, holding my daughter’s hand and watching an osprey dive again for salmon smolt, no larger than her own feathered self.
In 1500 CE, a human took up as much ecosystemic space as a Risso’s dolphin. Today, an urban human is more like a sperm whale.
No one is advocating for a return to pretechnological existence, and I would not suggest it even if it were possible (though if the peak-oil folks have it right, we won’t have much choice). I live richly and gratefully amid the blessings of the modern world—its travel, its medicine, its art, its science. I love the technological elegance of my iPhone almost as much as I love my fountain pen. This isn’t about regressing into primitivism, but rather about choosing thoughtfully how we live and what we use, and living closer to scale. In his classic book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E. F. Schumacher suggested “a lifestyle designed for permanence” and “technology with a human face.” I want to remember that as many blessings as my beautiful prostheses confer, it is often without them that I enter my own multifaceted intelligence most deeply.
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