So this is where I've been playing hooky this past week: the 20th anniversary conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, held in la Serenissima, Venezia!
The conference theme was "foundations and fluidity," and it took me a while to think of a way of bringing my tree work to it. Trees are foundational for us, of course. But increasingly, as climate change pushes temperate forests toward the poles, they are in flux. Aha!
So I proposed to move from an account of how the fixedness of trees has oriented human life to an overview of the unnerving movement of forests in the Anthropocene. I'd follow this with discussion of two ways of responding to a world where trees are unmoored, the idea of "tree migration" and my pash David George Haskell's inversion of the parable of the fool who built his house on sand. The former I'd caution against, as there's a reassuring cylicality in the migrations of animals which might provide false hope, in favor of the latter, which keys into the way all trees (indeed all plants) are on the move from generation to generation. Haskell's illustration is the sabal palm which, he quips, surfs on the sand dunes. They stand as long as they can, then help shape future dunes with their fallen trunk, rootball and stiff leaves, while their seeds are carried far away by birds and tides.
But I also like participatory presentations, and, especially when it became clear mine was to be the first paper on one of the morning panels on the conference's final day, I decided we'd start with movement.
Some of you can probably do vrksasana [the yoga "tree pose"]. I can’t. But we can all pretend to be a tree, so let’s try.
You decide whether your roots begin at your waist or your ankles, and what kind of tree you are, whether your branches—woefully underrepresented by just two arms—go up or out or down or all of the above. Picture growing a little, moving in a wind, a gentle one and one not so gentle. Feel the pressure of ice or rain or snow; it might snap one of your branches.
And feel yourself full of life, as animals and fungi and other plants, too, skitter up and down and through your branches and leaves and roots. You are their world. There might even be human people in your branches or below them.
People played along pleasingly, then I changed course:
Now… take a step to the side. Move somewhere else...
Except you can’t, can you?
Don’t! We humans count on you not to.
We count on you to be there when we need your shade, or a place to climb or hide, and when we come back to do it again. We know that even the so-called walking trees don’t really walk. We count on you to connect us to our ancestors, to our histories, to our treaties, to our anguish, to our own childhoods, and to futures yet unlived. You anchor time.
We count on you to reach up to the sky and down the underworld, or perhaps to keep them apart, keep them from squashing us. For you define the place, the critical zone within the critical zone, in which our life has unfolded.
And yet now, with increasing frequency, when we come back for you, you are gone. And even if you are still here, we half expect you to be gone, and know in our gut that there may well be a time when you are gone—not just you, replaced by one of your kin, but your whole species, no longer at home on this land, in this shared world you had anchored and defined for us.
This seemed a little gimmicky at first, but in the end worked out rather nicely, I think, because my ode to the way trees anchor human life made use of my favorite Robert Frost poem, which encourages us to think of both trees and ourselves as potentially moving but sometimes deciding to stay.
The poet, I said, is able to set forth for somewhere, to go - but also to return - because the trees, growing wiser and older, mean to stay.
This was all intro, of course! I sped through my understanding of trees as cosmogonic (making worlds), forest range shift, the way forests' spreading and receding in tandem with glaciations isn't like animal migration (especially now that the glacial-interglacial cycle of the past 100,000 years is over), and how the sabal palm's dance with sand and water offered ways of responding to the anthropogenic unmooring of familiar cycles that faces all of us. If moving is part of how trees stay, perhaps we need to be less reckless in our setting forth, more aware of our capacity to make as well as unmake place. Our assistance may be needed, for instance, in helping trees to adapt, or forests to migrate.
In the Anthropocene, I ended, we should make common cause with trees, accepting that terrain is ever changing - and more quickly and chaotically now - and that we can stand tall and make worlds with and for others more safely if we don't pretend, as Haskell puts it, "that sand is stone," that permanence is an option. We need foundations, but also need to accept their contingency.
I’ve suggested that there’s a sense in which every tree is a migrant, but our awareness of cyclical migrations makes thinking of arboreal flux in terms of migration problematic. There’s no assurance that forests pushed out of a place by climate weirding will ever return there. We need to be able to dwell with this reality without subsiding in longing for a larger narrative.
So next time you stand tall and still like a tree, let it be a surfing tree. Know that it will not stand forever. But also that you can, for a time, be like Frost’s trees.
In the dance of the Anthropocene, we must tag-team the work of staying and going, of staying so that the other might go, maybe even one day return, of anchoring each other, and knowing how to lift anchor.
It was a bit much, I confess, and pointed farther than I realized until I got going. I didn't plan for Frost's poem to suggest ways in which trees and humans might "tag team." But I'm glad I let myself get carried away.
Speaking of getting carried away, "Foundations and Fluidity" was not just a way of celebrating continuity and development in the fields ISSRNC channels but an oblique reference to the glory and plight of our host city. There wasn't much explicit engagement with Venice in the presentations I heard, but I paid my respects. Did you know that Venice has been anchored by wooden staves and logs for a millennium and a half, representing perhaps as many as ten million trees? I found a pretext to mention this, and described Venice as a tree house city!
