Anthropocene too? Thinking it through, I'm sensing that that is my angle. Others (if not many) have written about trees and religion, based on textual or ethnographic or personal experience, and many write about trees in every register. But Anthropocene dendrology seems novel. I'm picturing a first chapter, or perhaps a foreword, which goes from "Welcome to the Anthropoce" to "But trees?"
"Welcome to the Anthropocene" could introduce the concept to readers unfamiliar with it, and spell out some of the Anthropocene's challenges: how much of received human culture is premissed on the now finished stability of the Holocene, and thus irrelevant or even counterproductive? It's tempting to despair of all of it, seeking solace if not hope in the largely "indigenous" traditions presumed perhaps too quickly to be unaffected by it, but that's a category error in several ways. In ever dynamic ways indigenous societies navigated the Holocene too - which, incidentally, wasn't as smooth a ride as the hockey stick graphs imply. Elements of most cultures and civilizations were - and are - innocent of the devastations of the Anthropocene. Suspect are mainly those connected to western colonial, settler colonial, industrial and capitalist cultures. Not everything in those cultures is complicit, either, but modern conceptions of things like nature, and religion, may be presumed to be. Responding to the Anthropocene involves thinking critically but hopefully about the future, the present, and the past too...
Anthropocene stories are not just about how we got here, but also about how things might have been otherwise; a way of reading the past against the grain of the present in order to open up new possibilities for realigning our values, politics, and social practices to live within planetary constraints. (Zalasiewics and Thomas, Strata and Three Stories, 5)
Well and good, "But trees?" Trees tempt us with the ultimate indigeneity: silent, stolid and, we're learning, hubs of worlds of communication, relationship and care. Many tower generously over us, and some are old enough to make our lifespans seem almost comically brief. Ecologists and philosophers have learned from them the virtues of "sessile" life, the ultimate commitment to the planet, locality, and life. But how much of this mythos of trees is neither very old nor very widespread? How much of it is, in fact, part and parcel of the civilizational changes of the western world that brought us to Anthropocene calamity? We need to ask of our myths around trees the same questions we have to pose about religion and religions. As we do so, we can recover what it is like to live with, not just beneath and thanks to trees. Trees as people, as companion species. And maybe spiritual fellow travellers on the way to thinking "against the grain of the present."
