When I saw I’d be the last speaker on our second panel I wasn’t sure what to say – would anyone remember anything I said anyway? - so I picked this soothing gif. It's the Lang courtyard maples!
To get your attention I could also say: The courtyard maples are dying!
It would be true too. I shot this picture last summer. It looks different now.
I’ll say it again at the end, to make sure you remember it. But in the meantime, enjoy the gif!
For four minutes until then, I want to invite you into my current research and teaching project which has the resonant and appealing name “Religion of Trees.” I know it’s resonant and appealing because I picked it for the sound of it, and it’s drawn great interest, including from students here. What’s it about? While resonant, it’s a novel enough concatenation of terms that ChatGPT draws a blank.
But trees are, you might have noticed, having a moment. Jill Lepore noticed in The New Yorker, and pronounced trees the new polar bears. Ecocritic Rob Nixon has marveled at how trees, and forests, and fungal networks have been getting incredible attention – not least because of Richard Powers’ book The Overstory – and that this is because new (or newly recovered) knowledge about tree sentience and communication offers an alternative to the neoliberal mindset. The forest, he writes, "seems to offer ways of re-imagining the balance between self-inerest and shared flourishing that in most human socieities is badly out of whack."
Can trees get us out of this fix? Dutch literary scholar Pieter Vermeulen, responding to Nixon, observes that the networks Nixon claims to find among trees and other species sound very like the newer forms of neoliberal thinking, which like nothing better than for people to despair of understanding the whole, but commit instead to the local which they know, while trusting that a greater wisdom will manifest… Trees and representations of trees, clearly, are ideological.
Now I’m coming at all this from the very paradise of ideology, religion. Not wisdom of trees or mother trees or plant thinking or wood wide webs but religion of trees, and the strange self-evidence of that phrase to people. What’s going on? Way back in the prehistory of religious studies, Max Müller, musing on the ubiquity of tree worship around the world, suggested it was an intelligible and even appropriate response to the way that trees present to us the infinite in finite form. Phenomenologist of religion Mircea Eliade a century later argued that in trees we experience “the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself.”
Trees invite reverence, promise care. They create shelter, sustain worlds. They reassure us with their age, their constancy, their – to our ears – silence. Maybe they’re available as allies in struggles for climate justice and understanding the Anthropocene? It was beneath a tree, after all, that the Buddha achieved enlightenment.
My current thinking is that, whatever our forebears knew, our intuitive understanding of trees today is not helpful. It’s too distanced, too spectatorial, too – reverent. We like trees because they give us the illusion of seeing a whole, Overstory-style. We don’t see them as fuel, as food, as shelter, as medicine, not to mention as people, as kin who exchange fuel, food, shelter, medicine for our care and thanks. We aren’t aware of living in what Robin Wall Kimmerer would have us recognize as maple nation.
My project takes the appeal of trees especially to those weary of “religion” as a point of departure for seeking a spirituality wise to the realities and challenges of the Anthropocene. I push back at the relation-severing view of trees as commodities, as standing reserve, or as objects of contemplation and awe. Before fossil fuels uncoupled us from cycles of living reciprocity, we lived with trees as other nations with whom we maintained regularly renegotiated relations. Planting, pruning, coppice and grafting were among the gifts we bore in exchange for their care. Our lives were entangled. Tree devotion wasn’t about the infinite and the abstract but about the drama and miracle of sharing, co-creating a world.
Surfacing these embodied interpersonal relationships with trees might offer us forms of devotion and engagement which point beyond both the distanced dendrolatry of the fossil fuel age and the neoliberal mysticism of the wood wide web. I’m not sure what forms it will take. I’d love to know what you think.
But my time is up. And the Lang courtyard maples are still dying.
Check them out next time you go through the courtyard. I count at least eight leafless in distress; one, its base munched by mushrooms, toppled just this week.
