The illustrations accompanying this essay are from Endangered Species: Portraits Of A Dying Millenium, a provocative new book of drawings by Dierdre Luzwick.
Luzwick’ s fifty-three charcoal images are as haunting as the nightly news and as surreal as our dreams. As Trent Myers writes in the book’s foreword, “These drawings do not catalog or illustrate social ills, nor do they seem to promote a particular political or social agenda. The power of Luzwick’s drawings is that they give form to the deep-seated feelings and fears that have built up slowly over the years of exposure to the facts and statistics we read in the paper.”
— Ed.
The illustrations from this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.
A dream: there was a small clearing in the forest, just a break in the trees, cut through by a railroad track. A train of flat cars flew along the track, through the clearing, each car carrying a huge butt log of beech. The logs had the beech’s characteristic gray smoothness, punctuated by wrinkled knobs; there were round, white wounds where limbs had been cut off; the logs flared where they’d been cut from the ground. They were not tied down, but shook and bounced as if alive. Suddenly, a metamorphosis: the trees were now rhinos, leaping off the flying train and galloping about, crazed and disoriented.
On the way to my studio, I used to walk past a small yard with a large ailanthus tree. Ailanthus bark is almost as smooth and free of pattern as that of beech. This particular tree had a pattern underneath its tight skin: it was as though two cables had been wound around the trunk from the ground up, in opposite directions. They formed a double spiral — the double helix, a clear image of rising force. The pattern is the same one discovered in the nucleus of a cell: the structure of DNA, which contains the genetic code of all living things.
One day, the ailanthus — at least all of it above the fifteen-foot level — was cut down. The lower trunk was probably left because of the removal cost.
Ailanthus is generally despised as a weed because it grows so fast (from nothing to twelve feet tall in one season); because it will grow anywhere (between stones on a sheer wall); and because it’s impossible to get rid of without digging up the whole root network down to the fine hairs. Every time I see an ailanthus tree I feel the threat with which it lives. But the double helix tree had been allowed to attain a diameter of two-and-a-half feet, and I had thought it was safe. I thought it had proven itself to be a tree among trees, the equal of oaks and maples, a generous shade-giver, dazzling in a summer wind.
People in the city fear that trees will fall on their houses. Not far from the big ailanthus, a woman asked the Department of Public Works to remove a maple. If it fell, she fretted, it could block the street, crush her fence, tear her shingles, snap her power lines. Then came the hurricane of September 1985. We were on the edge of it, getting gusts of seventy-five miles per hour. The maple stood while other trees fell. Nevertheless, the tree was eventually cut down.
Trees cool the earth; they consume carbon dioxide, one of the gases contributing to global warming. Hurricanes feed on heat; they are born out of the warm waters around the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. On a warming globe these Cape Verde waters — and all waters to the west — can help a young hurricane grow bigger and fiercer as it makes its way toward the Caribbean and the American continent. In the long run, removing trees for fear they’ll be blown down actually increases that likelihood.
People have other reasons for tree removal. In my city, homeowners from Mediterranean countries do not, generally speaking, accept the local trees as they find them. Husbandry, to them, is a body of knowledge extending back hundreds of years. The purpose of plants, as they see it, is food production, and the business of cultivating, pruning, and grafting plays as big a part in that outcome as does photosynthesis. The yard of an Italian, Portuguese, or Greek is usually unmistakable. Often every square foot of earth is cultivated, with a second story of fruit trees and grape arbors above. Wild oaks and maples — which take up space, block the sun, and produce nothing edible — are worthless to them.
My neighbors are re-enacting the drama that is their legacy. In ancient times, heavy forests thrived in the northern Mediterranean. But between the wastefulness of the Roman Empire and the food requirements of a growing population, the region was gradually deforested. Some of it has passed from farmland into desert.
I came upon a bulldozed field heaped with cut trees. The expanse of jumbled gray hulks resembled a log jam on a river, so full of potential movement that it didn’t seem possible the logs would just lie there, first drying and then rotting. Under the summer sun, the bark was splitting open in sheets and detaching from the boles. The sliced ends of trunks and branches were bleaching to a ghostly white. The carnage amounted to tons of wood, much of it still salvageable to make into flooring, furniture, violins, boat keels, and gunnels.
I kept returning to that place. One day a truck arrived with fresh logs, and I learned from the driver that this was where the town of Peabody dumped its tree cuttings. I could imagine some public-works official droning out the reasons that the wood couldn’t be used, that the songs and the sailing must stay locked up: not commercially viable; insufficient quantity for a mill to bother with; the town might be liable if people got hurt collecting the wood; and so on. It’s the voice of our time: a voice justifying waste.
My first glimmer of understanding about mythology came when I read that the ancient Norse image of the world is the World Tree, Yggdrasil, an ash. The tree is nourished by three women, the Norns, who represent what was, what is, and what shall be. The roots of the tree are under constant attack by a serpent, Nidhögg. This seemed to me more than symbolic and less than ancient; it was a true picture of our world today, where some defend nature and some destroy it.
In my painting of the tree graveyard, Odin is stretched out on one of the logs. Odin was impaled on the World Tree, and afterward spoke these words, as recorded in the Norse Edda:
I know that I hung in the wind-torn tree Nine whole nights, spear-pierced, Consecrated to Odin, myself to my Self Above me in the tree Whose root no one knows whence it sprang. None brought me bread, none served me drink; I searched the depths, spied runes of wisdom; Raised them with song, and fell once more thence. . . . I began to thrive, to grow wise, To grow greater, and enjoy; For me words led from words to new words; For me deeds led from deeds to new deeds.
Odin may or may not have been a real person. I find him most effective as an invention, allowing him to be universal and timeless, a free-floating shaman with as much of a future as a past, who can represent anyone’s striving for wisdom. To hang on a tree that represents the world — what could be clearer in meaning? Jesus hung there for humanity, once and for all, but Odin’s message is different: if we are to grow wise, we must do it in the here and now. Jesus died and went to another world; Odin becomes more conscious and stays here.
The conflict between the Norns and Nidhögg illustrates the plight of the earth throughout the ages. Norse mythology developed in a land whose most fertile areas — Denmark, southern Sweden, and Norway — were being deforested as early as 2500 B.C. by slash-and-burn methods for crops and grazing. When Norsemen first sailed to Iceland in 861 A.D., its southern lands were probably comprised of forests from mountain to shore. By the time the Edda was written there, in the thirteenth century, the forests were gone. In the Middle East, lands once covered by the cedars of Lebanon were farmed and pastured to desert. The fertile Tigris and Euphrates region, which grew two crops a year around 2000 B.C., was eventually buried under the silt and salt of its overworked irrigation system. In vain, Plato warned of the dangers of a deforested Greece. In India and China, the huge populations of this century have changed the land from forest to cultivated fields to cattle pasture to goat pasture to desert. The Caribbean Islands were solid rain forest when Columbus arrived; not so today. In Guatemala and the Yucatán, the great Mayan centers began to be abandoned around 800 A.D. because the population had grown too large, the forests had been cut, and the soil had yielded its last crops. The Spanish conquistadores came upon the aftermath of high Mayan culture; much of it had already been reclaimed by the forest. On a side trip from Mexico City to the southern Yucatán in 1524, Cortés found no fabulous temples, only a few ill and hungry Indians. The achievements in mathematics and astronomy had been the fruit of luxury, of an elite class, and had been completely forgotten over many generations of the baser struggle for enough to eat. It was left to another wave of explorers, the nineteenth-century archaeologists, to discover the earlier achievements, as they dug in what amounted to a second virgin forest that had been growing unhindered for almost a thousand years.
The demise of all these ancient forests throughout the centuries was never sufficient to affect world climate. But in our time, the conflict between millennia-old intelligence and millennia-old folly has expanded to involve too many places at once, and thus affects the whole earth.
I had an eye out for symbols while painting the logs. At first there was no ash among the maples and oaks and willows. The truck came now and then to add to the pile, and one day I found a huge ash trunk in two pieces. Nearby a snake lay coiled, warming itself on open ground in the early summer sun. As I approached it slid for cover toward the ash.
Throughout the summer, the man who drove the truck watched the progress of my painting, and eventually said he wanted to buy it. This happens sometimes when I’m painting outdoors, and it embarrasses me. I’m asked the price; I hem and haw. To say twenty thousand dollars to a public works employee would have killed the friendly relations that had grown between us. I would need to explain that twenty thousand was a gallery fabrication, a very long shot, and that I would get only half of whatever the sale price might be — less than half counting the framing cost. Still, a sum of money in the thousands would have surely sounded crazy to him. So I told him I needed the picture for my next show and the dealer would set the price.
Not that I thought this was a satisfactory end to the matter. He and I were both in the gulf that exists between our society and nature. I was trying to paint my way out of the gulf and into nature; paradoxically, I offered my pictures on the opposite shore, to those with the wealth that fuels the development that destroys nature and maintains the gulf. I offered them without much hope that a buyer would become a convert any more than would the man who dumped the trees. His thought was just to buy a souvenir of his job.
On most days I saw no one. I heard the birds and the endless high-speed swish from a nearby high way, from which I’d first spotted the tree dump. I’d figured out a how to get to it on a detailed map. Now and then, still fascinated with the bird’s-eye view of the swooping, looping lines, I opened the map to look at the network of interchanges with an artistic eye. Its similarity to Norse and Celtic designs is uncanny: both have the same dense basketry weave and interlocked spirals and curlicues; both are as knotted and free-flowing as a fancy signature. On the map, the main lines are decorated with many side flourishes, circling offshoots, and doublings back, with adjacent roads of an older time meandering through like streams. No small part of my fascination comes from knowing that none of this elegant network was laid down for aesthetic reasons; it is pure practicality, every inch.
Norse and Celtic artists synthesized their designs out of the forest — roots, vines, stems, branches, twigs, animals’ tails — all of whose lines are paths of energy. Similarly, interchanges are built for speed and flow. If there’s a traffic jam and we’re forced to stand still, we get angry at the anomaly, at the system’s failure. We are units of energy being thwarted.
While reading about Odin, I looked up Runes in an encyclopedia. With the text was a photo of a rune stone in Sweden, an ancient monolith on whose face was carved a serpent coiled upon itself. The serpent formed a design resembling several intertwined figure eights. While browsing through the volume, I came upon Road, with an accompanying aerial photo of the Manhattan end of the George Washington Bridge. It was so much like the carving on the stone that I imagined an editor creating the match-up on purpose for readers to discover.
Across the highway from the tree graveyard was a different landfill, one of the mountainous variety where real trash is brought. Hundreds of scavenging seagulls spend the day on its slopes. On a hot afternoon of swelling clouds, I looked up at the gray belly of a large cumulus and saw a circle of gulls, not flapping their wings, but coasting. There were perhaps twenty gulls, some circling clockwise, some counterclockwise. They kept getting smaller, until they finally shrank from specks to nothing against the cloud.
This was a thermal updraft in action. I’d observed thermals many times before in the workings of clouds. That day, in fact, I’d watched the upward twisting ropes of gray within gray, and the exploding white domes pushing heat up into the cool realms. But the movement of the gulls was different: they chose to take this ride, with whatever equivalent of human joy is felt by birds. Why else would they accept the warm push under their wings, steering in a circle to keep it there, then, in concert with their fellows, soar up and up to where they certainly knew there was no food, and nothing to do ultimately but come back down? That evening, I visualized the pattern made by the gulls’ dance: it was the double helix.
To draw trees, I pick up my charcoal, take a deep breath, and go as fast as I can without analyzing or thinking. I used to see trees as products; I think I’m closer to the truth now in seeing them as energy. The surge of light and wind through them is as integral to their being as trunk and branch. My speed in drawing has nothing to do with confidence or ability, but with an equivalent surge in myself. When I don’t feel it, when I’m tired, the energy of the trees will sometimes pull me along.
Once, in Maine, I looked at a photo taken in 1900. It showed a vista of fields and pastures undulating to the horizon, dotted at wide intervals by single trees and bushy clumps. I took the photo in hand and set out to find the spot where the photographer had stood. It couldn’t be done. The spot was now buried in the middle of a forest that covered all but a few isolated scraps of the once-open land. An innocent eye might well assume that solid forest had stood there since the last glacier retreated; there was no sign to the contrary.
We know things change, but what we see has such weighty presence that we think of the visible world as fixed. We see results, not process. The experience in Maine taught me something about creation: if a landscape can change so much in so little time — and it changed itself, for not a single tree there was planted by hand — then every moment is one of creation, equal to any other moment. I’m always in the thick of the process, no matter when I arrive on the scene.
To me, this fact makes crucial the acts of seeing and drawing, because they allow two forces — mine and nature’s — to meet. A past burdened with self-criticism is transcended by the pregnant possibility of the moment, as I see with my own eyes a forest growing. The rampant wind and sun have no history in the way humans do, and for a time, with them, neither do I. Greater than my thirty years of effort is the innocent and unstoppable urge to try again now.
Art sophisticates tend to dismiss nature painting as retrograde and out of touch with contemporary issues; often they are correct. Indeed, it is necessary to paint through the bucolic, the nostalgic, the escapist, the anthropomorphic — which is a form of human domination — through surface beauty to where beauty belongs to the dynamics of nature, and is not just a respite from human ugliness; to where beauty serves as a defense, in the same way the beauty of children works its magic on us to ensure that we take care of them. It is necessary to paint through to this and touch nature on the nerve.
Would this not also touch a huge contemporary issue? The pressing issue for us Westerners, the famously alienated, is that our relationship to the world is that of master to slave. We think we’ve solved slavery in the human realm by turning iron shackles into low paychecks. But the shackles on nature grow tighter. In Brazil, a chain stretched between two Caterpillar tractors mows down forests.
Masters don’t need to understand slaves in order to use them. In fact, understanding them — seeing their likeness to themselves — would get in the way of exploitation. Nineteenth-century slaveholders turned against slavery when they understood that black people are human. Today, many still don’t understand that without plants there would be no homo sapiens.
Australian aborigines paint animals to ensure that the real ones remain. The pictures serve as a prayer for the animals’ continuity and a commitment to assist in their survival. When a species dies, it is partly or wholly because humans did not live up to their commitment. They also believe that the well-being of sacred places depends on periodic visits by people charged with their care. If the visits are broken off, the places are endangered.
When I think of these very few aboriginal people arrayed against the modern world’s greed and the technological forces that feed it, I am overwhelmed by the frailty and poignant hopelessness of their faith. At the same time, I think their reason for making art is the most durable one there is. It is the original one, the one that decorated the prehistoric caves of Europe, roofing the free-ranging human mind into the life around it and carrying the wisdom of interdependency.
The aborigines’ fears are well-founded. Today the animals and the sacred places are disappearing because we have withdrawn our commitment. And our nature art is made not in the spirit of sacred trust, but for consumption.
The white man is a recent arrival in the thousands of years of aboriginal life. He makes his appearance on a rock wall painting in northern Australia: a very white figure who stands with his hands in his pockets and tells the natives what to do. Today I hear him say, “I keep my hands in my pockets because I’ve done enough damage. You tell me what to do.”
A slide talk was given, not by Peruvian Indian Milly Sangama, as announced, but by her husband, an American named Beaver. Both are guides in the Peruvian rain forest; they have their own tourist business. One of their offerings is a four-day excursion in which participants, carrying only machetes and the clothes on their backs, must procure all their food and shelter. Heat and cold don’t pose a problem under the trees: temperatures stay in the seventies and eighties year-round.
Beaver is a rangy, broad-shouldered young man whose amiability and guilelessness speak well for the effect of paradise on one’s character. He told us about the natural delights of the forest and the human horrors imposed on it. He described flowers as big as compact cars, forty-foot anacondas, six-inch beetles, monkeys as small as parrots, river dolphins that, according to native lore, shift into human form. He told of a smiling sloth that, saved from drowning, bonded itself with a tenacious hug to one of his canoe party. He told us that several tribes still have almost no contact with the outside. One tribe had a glimpse of what is out here and decided to kill all its newborns. Members of another tribe — Milly Sangama’s — receive gifts from a timber company and then are forced to work to pay for them many times over; if they refuse, their fingers and hands are cut off.
Milly and Beaver are sanctioned to operate because tourism, like logging, brings money to Peru. Except for tourism, the government sees no reason to protect the rain forest. Like other poor countries, Peru has many problems to solve before it can worry about global climate. Its slogan, out of necessity, is closer to think locally, act locally.
Rain forests are complex beyond present understanding. Half of the plants and animals on earth are there, and many species — including some already wiped out — are unknown and unnamed except by the local tribes. The rain forests are like the 90 percent of the human brain that is barely used. They are the large unknown compared to the small known. Killing the rain forests is worse than book-burning; it is burning original manuscripts before they are read or reproduced.
The problems causing their destruction, though complex, are not beyond understanding: they involve great wealth and great poverty, with ignorance spanning the two. Solutions to halt the destruction are simple; these solutions, however, belong to a world more just, unified, tolerant, and willing to share wealth and forego development. There are no solutions for the trees without solutions for numerous groups of people.
A rain forest is the earth in microcosm, and a tribe of forest dwellers, the earth’s population. To destroy a forest is to destroy a tribe through murder, disease, and the spirit-death of displacement. Native people, who generally do not write books, have much to tell us; we can learn the lessons they offer by watching their lives. They are the most vulnerable of humans because they are still part of nature. Industrialized society first destroys plants and animals, then natives, then its own people. In the space of a few years, a rain-forest tribe enacts the long-term fate of all. The whole biosphere is as fragile as several square miles of Amazonia or Sarawak or Zaire.
Coal miners used to take caged canaries underground with them, because leaking gas would affect the canaries first. A dead canary told the miners to get out at once. Dead and dying tribes are the canaries of the world, but we are drawing no conclusions from their deaths.
There are few trees in the industrial area where I now live, and this is a relief. From a window of my former apartment, I saw my neighbor cut down an apple tree in his back yard during the first week of May, when the tree was one huge white blossom. Why he chose this moment to kill it I don’t know; probably the time was convenient for him and the blossoming a coincidence.
When a new landlord took over my building, his first act was to operate on two very small but healthy apple trees in our tiny back yard, cutting them back to stumps with leafless arms. I phoned him to ask why, and he said, “Oh, I just cut some branches so they won’t rub the house. It helps the trees, too. I wouldn’t harm trees. I love trees.” (Quite likely, he believed he had done an expert pruning job. He was descended from those to whom Plato had talked in vain.) A week before the surgery, the trees had been host to a children’s birthday party, with laughter and balloons for blossoms. This was to be their last flowering. Eventually the trunks rotted at the base and were kicked over.
The little yard was partly asphalt driveway, and most years the family downstairs planted the rest of it with a vegetable garden. The landlord told me, “I’m thinking of paving the whole yard. Tell me your opinion, because I like opinions.” I doubted I could convince where Plato had failed. I moved before the paving crew arrived.
From the window of my current home, the only nearby trees are ailanthus, the trees despised for being hardy — a positive quality made negative by calling it “weedy.” They also “litter” heavily; that is, they drop their leaves in the fall. The crime, of course, is characteristic of all broadleaves and not restricted to its lower classes. (Sometimes the penalty is death even among higher-ups. Once, I did carpentry work for a woman who talked of getting rid of a large white oak in her yard because she disliked picking up after it.)
The ailanthus trees that I see from my window grow in a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with concertina wire that encloses the yard of a body shop. They are usually cut back each fall. In the next growing season, they shoot above the wire and are cut back again, and I always wonder why. I see a good reason for leaving them. The old saplings are so enmeshed that they can’t be removed lower down; they’re braided with the wire and could function as extra fence posts were they not cut at their bases. I don’t see why they’re hated. Is it their determination, a will that seems stronger than ours? Do we see our mortality mocked by their constant rebirth?
In the city we take refuge from wildness, and cultivate our ignorance of the foundations of life. So it is only through higher education, through a study of biology or meteorology, that one may learn how ailanthus, and other trees, consume their share of carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen. They draw their share of water from the ground and evaporate it through their leaves to the sky. In the process they create themselves, a bushy avenue of silver-green in a fence line, waving at us. Strange and ludicrous as it seems, amid the despised soil and rust, they are probably thought by the shop owners to be unsightly.
The ailanthus tree came here from Indonesia, where its name means Tree of Paradise.
Do I have any right to tell people in poor countries not to sell or otherwise destroy their trees? I believe I do, for five reasons.
- The Earth is one biological unit. Interdependency, including the role of forests, is ages-old native wisdom and well known to modern science.
- The Earth is one social unit as well. North American appetite for cocaine gives Latin Americans the right to blame us for havoc wrought by the drug trade in their country. The agricultural health of the Great Plains is a valid concern of hungry people around the world who benefit from our grain surplus. The health of the rain forests is everyone’s concern, too.
- Destroying rain forests makes a few people rich, leaves many with a wasteland, and subjects everyone to a dangerously changing climate.
- The World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Asian Development Bank all fund dams and roads in the rain forests, thereby encouraging and accelerating their destruction. The U.S. contributes a lot of money to these banks; the money comes from the U.S. Treasury. Therefore, my personal income-tax dollars are implicated.
- Forests are being destroyed by people who never set foot in them. For instance, a Los Angeles conglomerate, Maxxam, purchased Pacific Lumber in 1985 with the help of junk bonds. Thereafter, Pacific Lumber accelerated the cutting of its ancient redwoods to pay for the bonds. If a man moving papers around on Wall Street or in Washington can contribute to the destruction of a forest he has never seen, then I can speak for the saving of a forest I have never seen — and speak with knowledge and feeling. I know enough about my local forest to be able to turn inside out Ronald Reagan’s despicable comment, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all”: if I’ve felt the life of one tree, I’ve felt the life of them all. To feel a tree’s life is to feel one’s own. I know now why I’ve been attracted to trees since I was a child: they are my mother. They created the oxygen that allowed my species to be born. And I can never be weaned, but will need oxygen every minute of my life.
I didn’t know how the Maypole ritual was to be carried out, only that the women were to do one part and the men another. With my three-year-old daughter Rania in tow, I was a little late. We hurried to join the men’s group as it was moving to the edge of the woods. I assumed we were to have a meeting. By the time we worked our way to where we could see what was going on, the men had become perfectly still and focused on Andras, who held with both hands above his head a large ceremonial sword. Its point touched the trunk of a tall paper birch. Suddenly, I realized I was not in a meeting, but was part of the ritual itself.
Up to that moment I was busy being impatient with Rania, cajoling her, ministering to her whines; it was hot, where was my hat, who were all these people? Instantly all my annoyance vanished. In the same moment I knew what ritual is: a drama with no spectators, only participants. What made me part of it was the presence of a common ground beyond the personal — summoned by the tense image of the man, the sword, and the tree. I also understood that the ritual moment is not of clock and calendar time. The midday sunlight sifting through the leaves became a timeless light on a timeless drama. The hush was fierce.
Andras spoke some plain words to the tree, haltingly and apparently unrehearsed. He asked its forgiveness, telling it that because of its slenderness and height we were choosing it to take part in a union between people and nature; that although it would die, it would be reborn as a symbol. He lowered the sword and stood aside as a younger man, bare to the waist, stepped up with an ax and began chopping the tree with strong blows. The group began a chant:
Hoof and horn, hoof and horn, All that dies shall be reborn. Corn and grain, corn and grain, All that falls shall rise again.
The words, belted out, seemed a necessary release of feeling as well as a justification for the violence being dealt to the tree. The tree fell and the man with the ax trimmed off the branches and the tip. A group of men hoisted the tree to their shoulders and carried it toward the center of the field; the rest of us walked beside them. All the while the chant continued loudly.
In the center of the field the women swayed and chanted in a circle. They opened the circle as the men approached, and the tree was marched through. The women’s chant was different from ours:
Air I am, Fire I am, Water, Earth, and Spirit I am.
The two chants continued in counterpoint. Inside the circle, the tree was laid on the ground. There was a lot of closely packed movement. By now I was carrying Rania, who was somewhat scared. The ritual moment still held, but I slipped from it enough to reflect that the enchantment of it, the changing of everyday reality and light into something longed for and glimpsed in dreams, was known to me from Fellini’s films. I wished for a movie camera on my shoulder to capture this line of men and their long burden, and the breakup of the march and circle into separate flurries and vignettes: a man crouching over the laid-out tree, hypnotically patting the white bark with a sprig from the tree while he sobbed, sunlight like fine golden sand glinting on his bald head; Andras with a drum, pausing and leaning over this man, his staring eyes, as solid and dark as chestnuts, like the eyes of a figure from an early Renaissance fresco; women tying ribbons to the upper end of the tree, the blazing color of their clothes mixing with that of the ribbons.
The tree was raised and bolstered with rocks in a hole that the women had dug. The ritual moment faded. The chanting and the activity dissolved into conversation and relaxed milling around.
Children were invited to take the hanging ribbons and walk away from the pole. Some adults took up the remaining ribbons, and in this way a cone of spokes was formed. Participants counted off around the circle, and even numbers began dancing in one direction, odd numbers in the other, weaving around each other and ducking under one another’s ribbons. There was much tangling, halting, and laughing, but the weaving progressed to the accompaniment of drumming.
The effect of all this was that individual ribbons were braided from the upper end of the tree slowly downward, and the braids were wrapped around the tree in two directions. This gradually drew the people inward, shrinking the circle and pulling the braiding tighter and tighter. At length the circle became so tight and hilarious that the chaining was given up. The final braiding and wrapping were done by individuals at the base of the trunk, and the ends were tied to the tree with loose ribbon. Meanwhile the drumming speeded up, and everyone danced or raced round the pole in a wild, yelping rout that ended, except for heavy breathing, in stillness and silence.
The entire ritual and all its props represented the bonds of earthly life — or, rather, enacted those bonds, since it was a true ritual and not a show. Bringing the birch pole into the circle of women who had dug a hole was an act of sexual union. If one had watched from a hundred feet in the air, one would have seen an image that neolithic people the world over carved into rocks, known as a “cup and ring” mark: a straight, wavy, or zigzag line penetrating to the center of a circle, a series of circles, or a spiral. The aerial vantage point would also match an electron microscope’s view of a male sperm cell joining with a female egg. Once the union of the tree-phallus in the womb of earth was made, and there was conception, that image dissolved and another one formed: the pole became the tree of life, and the threads dangling from it were woven into a symbol of community among ourselves and between us and nature.
It occurred to me: had we not violated rather than honored our bonds to nature? We had killed a tree and disturbed the soil. This was different only in magnitude from the seven square miles of rain forest that were killed elsewhere on the globe during the hour of our ritual. Only the alchemy of ritual could make acceptable the paradox of killing a tree to consecrate it to life. The words, “All that dies shall be reborn,” did not burst idly from the men’s throats at the first blows of the ax. If we had not recognized that life feeds on life, we couldn’t have dared to swing the ax. Surely it is best to acknowledge that fact ceremonially with all one’s powers of concentration; thus, we are reminded that the sacrifice occurs daily, with no ceremony whatsoever.
Slash-and-burn farmers can’t be blamed for continuing a forty-five hundred-year-old folly; they are too poor to plan more than two years ahead. These people, and all the rest of us, are part of a world population growth curve that began in the 1700s, when it rose from the plateau it had wended for nearly eighteen thousand years, since the beginning of agriculture. It hit a forty-five-degree slope around 1950, and now stands nearly vertical.
In the world of money and industry, consumers control the fate of the trees. For instance, we would rather buy lauan plywood, which is very cheap, than timber cut and milled locally. Lauan is so cheap that we can afford to destroy it twice: once in the Philippine forest and again in our local dumpsters as development rubble, thrown in with the ailanthus.
The birch in the forest and the ailanthus in the yard will be reborn, because in the temperate North the nutrients are in the soil. But the rain forests grow on poor soil, and, once cut, will not return until people have let them be for hundreds of years.
Their beauty is no defense; their necessity to us is no defense. News of the immolation of nature floats to us daily on the information stream. Some of us — like the man who wept and patted the tree on Mayday — take the news straight into our bloodstream. Yes, life feeds on life. But to cannibalize our mother!
Late in the day, I came back to look at our pole with its complex and many-layered wrapping. Wadded bits of paper now dangled among the ribbons. They were personal notes, spelling out vows, resolutions, and the names of beloved people dead or otherwise lost to the ritual participants. The pattern that completely covered the white bark, the product of the twining dance — though ragged, imperfect, and with more than a few loose ends — was the double helix.
In my metamorphosing dream of the beech trunks, they did not take their death and trip to market lying down, but changed into angry rhinos — one gray-skinned beast into another. Their track was the evolutionary one on which plants create the biosphere that allows animals to live. But nature had gone haywire. The plants were corpses and the animals desperate. What was this place, this strange gap in the forest? Understanding that I owed to the plants and animals my birth, and my ascent on the DNA ladder — my place in the World Tree — I had two fears as the rhinos swung their heads toward me: that they would trample me, and that my kind had already harmed them beyond helping. I, too, should not stand still. In the last instant of the dream I formed the thought that I had to go and tell someone who would know what to do — but I had no idea who that might be.
Our thanks to HarperSanFrancisco for permission to reprint. All drawings copyright © 1992 by Dierdre Luzwick.
— Ed.
