Witness Trees

To truly protect trees, we need to make a profound paradigm shift that transcends politics. We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future.

It’s dumbfounding to consider how long native trees can live if they manage to avoid an encounter with a chain saw or an alien microbe. There are living “witness trees,” as they are called, that stood watch over every important event in post-colonial American history. The doomed black walnut was a sapling in the Ohio woods while Washington was crossing the Delaware. Last month, a white pine fell in upstate New York that had stood since 1675, the year one of the accusers during the Salem witch trials was born.  I know this because Susan Orlean just wrote the pine tree’s obituary for The New Yorker.

Her impulse to eulogize a tree should tell us something about what trees really are. They are living, breathing beings. They created the very air we breathe, and they are creating it still.

Margaret Renkl