Songs of hope

At the recent conference on religion and the Anthropocene, the only reference to trees - at least the only explicit one - was made by me. So consumed were we with coming to terms with the human - itself a morally problematic simplification - as a "planetary agent" that our discussion touched only peripherally on non-human life, even as it is the biosphere as a whole we now realize we're affecting. There was much talk, of course, of the extinction of species, but when spelled out these seem always to have been animals - along, of course, with their habitats.

I can't claim to have contributed much: it was just a question to a panel, wondering if they found the recent literature on plants significant (they did not). I also asked a plant biologist turned Catholic theologian about it informally, and was told that the anthropomorphism involved in speaking of "the intelligence of plants" is unhelpful.

But I'd just finished David George Haskell's The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Communicators, and it seemed unconscionable - and foolish - not to heed the voices of trees. Haskell's is a wonderful book in many ways, not least for its gorgeous writing. Hear him sing:

Ponderosa pine senses, integrates, weighs, and judges the world in a manner that combines external and internal intelligence. The ponderosa is networked to bacteria and fungi through every leaf and root. The tree also possesses its own hormonal, electrical, and chemical network. The trees' communicative processes are slower than animal nervous systems and they pervade branches and roots, rather than knotting themselves into brains. Like bacteria, they inhabit a reality alien to our own experience of the world. But trees are masters of integration, connecting and unselfing their cells into the soil, the sky, and thousands of other species. Because they are not mobile, to thrive they must know their particular locus on the earth far better than any wandering animal. Trees are the Platos of biology. Through their Dialogues, they are the best-placed creatures of all to make aesthetic and ethical judgments about beauty and good in the world.

Better than Plato, in fact:

Unlike Plato, who sought through beauty to find invariant universals that exist beyond the caved-in mess of human politics and society, ecological aesthetics and ethics emerge from relationships within life's community. They are context dependent, but a contingent near-universality may emerge when many parts of the network converge on similar judgments. (152-53)

Trees, it seemed to me at the conference, might be mediators - arbiters, even - between the time of humans and geological time. In any case, their thoroughly networked existence explodes the pretensions of species autarky, and, indeed, of individuality. His book, divided into chapters each dedicated to a particular tree with which he spent extended time over several years, starts in the Amazonian rainforest with the towering ceibo, home to a world of separate ecosystems.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the ceibo tree is the tree of life in the Waorani creation story. The tree is a hub for so many forest creatures, and it saves lives be maintaining and reconnecting life-giving threads.
This dissolution of individuality into relationship is how the ceibo and all its community survive the rigors of the forest. Where the art of war is so supremely well developed, survival paradoxically involves surrender, giving up the self in a union with allies. (16)

This "surrender" or "unselfing" (a term he borrows from moral philosopher Iris Murdoch) is at the heart of the stories Haskell tells, whether of social insects, symbioses of plants, animals and fungi, or - most provocatively - of the mysteriously emergent cooperation of individual (sic) components of plants, from roots and branches to the pores of leaves. Has it something to teach us about being human? It certainly has something tell us about life on earth, and how estranged from it our knotted brains and wandering hearts may have made us.

As I fiddle with making something more of my own presentation - a guess at how the Book of Job's song will be heard once people have accepted the realities of the Anthropocene - I'm tempted to make trees the hinge of the story. Most contemporary readers, if they attend to the many nature references in the text at all, focus - as the voice from the whirlwind does - on animals. Job seems to, as well, when he enjoins his friends to "ask the beasts" at 12.7. (12.8 might refer to "the plants of the earth," too, but has historically been rendered "speak to the earth" [KJV].) In any case, that's before his ecological conversion. Perhaps future interpreters of Job will not just find that God led him to learn from the wild animals but also from plants! You'd have to interpolate. But there's grounds for it in these pre-conversion words of Job 14:

⁷ “For there is hope for a tree,
    if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,
    and that its shoots will not cease.  

⁸ Though its root grows old in the earth,
    and its stump dies in the ground,  

⁹ yet at the scent of water it will bud
    and put forth branches like a young plant.  

¹⁰ But mortals die, and are laid low;
    humans expire, and where are they?  

¹¹ As waters fail from a lake,
    and a river wastes away and dries up,  

¹² so mortals lie down and do not rise again;
    until the heavens are no more, they will not awake
    or be roused out of their sleep. (NRSV)

On a flat-footed reading, Job is proved wrong by the restoration of his health and, especially, his new family - new shoots from his stump. (Flat-footed in another way is to see this just as an intimation of immortality, that death is not final.) But suppose that future readers have come to know what Haskell has taught us about the relational individuality- and species-transcending life of plants. What might Job's post-ecological conversion understanding of his own life then be?
Might we learn what to hope for in the Anthropocene from the trees?