I was going to wait to write about trees until I could finish the book Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, whose research is revolutionizing the way we think about forests. But then I took part in a beautiful event that compelled me to bring the joy and meaning of trees to the forefront, as well as to remember that my own tradition and culture has much to say about trees and their life-giving essence.

The event was a “mystical and musical” celebration of the lesser-known Jewish holiday of Tu B’shevat, translated as the New Year of the Trees. The Tu B’Shevat ritual, called a seder, is a time to focus on gratitude for the natural world and our role as humans in stewarding nature’s gifts. Haunting cello music, stirring chants and soulful blessings and readings were a reminder of the powerful, grounded and mysterious ways that trees infuse our existence on earth, and how much we’re prone to taking them for granted as we walk through this world. Especially moving was the lyrical “Tree Chant” written by Rabbi Jill Hammer, invoking the names of more than seventy-five varieties of trees in an extended ode to natural diversity and abundance. (You can find “Tree Chant” as well as the text guide for the seder and more information about Tu B’shevat here.)

Still inspired by that experience of gratitude and connection, today I’m thinking about trees, and sharing a few perspectives that illuminate some animating themes of ecofeminism and Big Planet Love.

1) A personal relationship with nature.  In so many places I’ve lived there has been a tree, or a community of trees been a living talisman of peace or healing.  The silver maple that grew outside the kitchen door in early childhood, the first tree I ever climbed. A mysterious downed tree found in the open fields behind a later house, split and stripped of bark, its gnarled and twisted presence speaking to the turbulence of my teenage heart.  The serene and stately birches lining the riverbank in my rural college town, where I found refuge from the hustle of a big state university campus.  And today, the queen-sized ash with its curvaceous, sheltering branches that beckon from the corner of my small urban back yard, which we’re told is the oldest of its species in the city.

2)  The primacy of environmental equity.  Not everyone can take access to trees for granted.  In my own Cambridge neighborhood, literally blocks away from the backyard tree described above, is a large public housing project undergoing renovation. The plans have included removing trees from the grounds to make way for construction.  Across the river in Boston, a recent initiative to widen a major roadway through Roxbury, the historic center of the city’s Black community, was scrapped when residents protested the planned removal of 124 trees. For urban and underserved communities, standing up for trees means standing up for the right to a healthy and safe environment. The organization Speak for the Trees Boston cites numerous ways that trees benefit the mental and physical health of residents, including mitigating global climate change through carbon sequestration, and reduced rates of mortality, cardiovascular disease, stress, and depression.

Living in greener areas is associated with higher levels of happiness, cognitive development, and learning outcomes. These benefits are related to a decrease in exposure to air pollution, noise, and heat, increased contact with nature, and strengthened social cohesion.

3)  The power of women to defend and protect the earth.  The term “tree huggers” has long been used to dismiss environmentalists as privileged do-gooders out of touch with the real world.  But for impoverished women living in the forests of northern India in the 1970s, tree-hugging was a matter of survival.  They were leaders of the Chipko movement  , a nonviolent effort to resist government policies that were destroying the forests villagers relied upon for their livelihoods. Named for the Hindi word for “hug” or “embrace”, Chipko inspired mass tree-hugging demonstrations throughout India, aimed at saving trees from logging and communities from the devastating economic and social impacts of deforestation. During the same decade, a visionary African environmentalist organized thousands of women across Kenya to plant trees to combat increasing deforestation and desertification. The Green Belt Movement became a catalyst for African women’s empowerment, and its founder, Wangari Maatthai, was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership. The movement has planted more than 51 million trees, and helped more than 30,000 women learn skills to make a living while protecting and conserving the land and its resources.

4)  Collaboration, interdependence and community. Now back to Suzanne Simard and Finding the Mother Tree. The book describes Simard’s decades of research, primarily in British Columbia, on how trees evolve in community with one another—an approach that brought the author into conflict with established forest management paradigms that emphasize competition.  Trees help each other to survive and flourish, she says, by communicating and sharing resources through teeming underground networks of fungi, which provide pathways for transmission of vital nutrients and information. Essential to these ecosystems are “mother trees”, towering elders that protect and sustain the younger trees around them. Simard gives us a picture of vibrant forest communities that thrive on complexity, diversity and interdependence, which have “an enormous capacity to self-heal” when threatened by unsustainable practices. It’s not unreasonable to guess that such resilience is due to their robust ecology of interdependence and intergenerational connection. And I can’t help but wonder, what if we saw these forests as models to learn from rather than resources to be exploited?

What about you? Have you had important relationships with trees in your life? Have you experienced the life-giving power of trees in an urban environment–or suffered in their absence? How might Suzanne Simard’s discovery of how trees interact in community impact the way you think about the natural world?  Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.

A couple of notes:

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Land acknowledgement.  Big Planet Love is created in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusett people. We pay respect to the Massachusett elders past and present and recognize with gratitude the importance of indigenous wisdom and practices to the themes that animate this work.