The real ancients of place

The younger of two girls making my life so much fun and wonderful these days told me, "Aren’t trees wonderful? They were here long before us and would outlive us." I was so proud that she could have this insight that most often adults are too jaded to cultivate. The girls go with me as we marvel at trees on campus, in neighborhoods, even on photographs. Lately, we even had our favorite snacks in a garden where everything was "sculpted," where the line where Nature ends and art begins is joyfully blurred, in the form of bonsai art. I think if we really "knew" trees, not just in terms of their names and their kinds but in their nature as trees, we would spend sometime getting to know them well because since they have been around longer than humans have, they "know" you more than you know them.

The first appearance of terrestrial plants was in the Silurian Period 440 million years ago. By the Devonian Period 408 million years ago, forests already extensively covered the Earth. This period also saw the first appearance of plants with seeds. By the Pennsylvanian Period 323 million years ago, large trees in swamps reached critical mass to make up coal or carboniferous forests. It was only about 120 million to 100 million years ago that the flow of evolution saw it ripe for flowering trees/plants to be.

Trees evolved from smaller plants and they grew upwards to the heights they did most likely because of the competition for sunlight. This is what most natural scientists like Richard Fortey in his book Life (Richard Fortey. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, Vintage Books, NY 1999) suspect. He explains that the drive upwards and the many variations in size and shape of leaves evolved to "shade out" rivals. Just spend sometime underneath a big tree that offers a generous shade and you will appreciate this fact. Fortey also marvels at the engineering marvel that a tree is. You see, the taller the tree, the bigger the need for the tree to draw up nutrients, through the trunk and through its branches and leaves for sustenance. In order to accomplish this feat, some kind of hydraulic mechanism is at work which many botanists and plant physiologists are still trying to understand. Fortey’s take is that "evaporation" from leaves through "capillary action" draws water from below, resisting gravity, and distributing it throughout its canopy. Although this helps us a bit, it still does not explain "how" the tree does this without a moving part, like a pumping vessel such as a heart in animals.

In a book called Trees (Australian Geographic, 1999), Peter Solness, an Australian photographer, decided to take photographs of trees, accompanied with how Australians identify with them. In it he asked the question "Why is it all right to publish magazine articles detailing a person’s love for a motor car or home, but to love a tree is considered curious, if not a trifle odd?" I pose the same question and it need not even be just about loving a tree. Why does it seem that we are far removed from the real "ancients" of our land such as our forests, our waters and animals? What happened to us between the composing of our national anthem that included "sa dagat at bundok, sa simoy at sa langit mong bughaw" and now, when we, as a people, seem to have lost the meaning of what it means to belong to a place?

We engage in a frenzy lobbying in streets, in Congress, "green" battles here and there, treaties, big and small fund appropriations for saving this and that protected area. But I think we have lost something profound and fundamental that could not be recovered by these activities. We may have all the money, all the agreements, all the laws, and all the tools to save the environment but Stephen Jay Gould said it well, "We cannot fight for what we do not love." And you cannot fund, force, legislate "love for place."

Do we really still love our place or have we been so used to only "fighting" for our place, that we have failed to know it and enjoy it? The late Donella Meadows (Club of Rome), an environmental activist herself, in an article called "Slow Down" published in 1997, also re-examined the frenzy accompanying the green movement, saying that maybe one good answer to the world’s environmental problems is to "slow down," in our cooking, in our driving, in our judgments. She also said that it is our basic fundamental personal commitment to land that really matters. I agree. I get very unsettled when I encounter a so-called environmentalist who does not care that their office toilet leaks.

I think in order to love a place, you have to "know" and try to "understand" the place. Science can help here but the rest is the work of history, literature, songs and dances and your own capacity for joy.