The Trees and the Forest

Part of the joy of engaging in environmental work is the extended field of literature it calls me to visit. Today, I am reading Forests: the shadow of civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison.

I was pulled to it for two reasons.

One, I am somewhat ashamed to say, is my small delight in one-word titles. All of my book titles are a bit clumsy and long, with fistfuls of letters and words to get the point across. Books with one word titles like: Wood. Salt. Coal. (all of which I have read) seem to promise a no-nonsense, clear-minded adventure into the arcane history of a most common topic. So it is with Forests. Only, the writing here is somewhat dense and the material handled is high or arcane literature. Not easy going. Still and all, it is a rewarding read.


Two, I am eager to explore the rich use of tree as religious object and image in Judaism - and this was a good start, to get to know how other cultures saw trees and how others writers wrote about those cultures.

Harrison dives deep here and on page 63 mines an essential but unmarketable and largely unnoticed value of forests. Forests are not just a collection of trees. Forests are places where one tree plus one tree plus one tree equals darkness before sunset; limited visibility; a place where one gets turned around; loss of way; strange noises; and dangers of all kinds. Forests are wooded wilderness. As such, they are outside the bounds and the rules of civilization.

As Harrison says: "When we look into the forests... we see a strange reflection of the order to which they remained external. [This means that the forest is like a bizarre mirror, distorting the image of the civilization it bounds.] From this external perspective the institutional world reveals its absurdity, or corruption, or contradictions, or arbitrariness, or even its virtues. But one way or another it [the institutional world] reveals something essential about itself which often remains invisible or inaccessible to the internal perspective."

In other words, we cannot see ourselves clearly unless we look at ourselves through the mirror of a forest. It tosses our ordered world around til the fluff is blown away and the essence all drops to the bottom. We project onto the forest the qualities of civilization we seek to banish, or that we seek but cannot find.

This is a powerful argument for the intangible values of nature. Along with the spiritual healing that we find when following in the trail of a deer, and along with the refuge, solitude and protection we can feel when held snugly in the midst of a wooded thicket, the forests graciously show us for what we really are.

The gifts of nature for us individually and collectively continue to unfold. And my fascination with trees, with knowing them and planting them and experiencing them, just keeps growing. Go ahead, give it a try.

Take a walk in the forest. Plant a tree with your own hands in your yard or apartment. Learn one name of a tree every week. It will do us all good.

Oh, what I neglected to mention in my pre-Shavuot post, is that the rabbis taught us that the health of the upcoming harvest of the trees is determined, judged in its word, on Shavuot. [Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2] Tu B'shvat may be the day all the trees turn one year older. But it is on Shavuot that the trees' produce is judged. Based on what, the mishnah doesn't say.