30 September 2015Sha LaBare300 words

The Meaning of Treedom

Looking to write an ecography for my Ecology of Everyday Life course, I chose not to choose and let the subject choose me instead: two spruce trees outside my office window, one white (Picea glauca) and one Engelmann (Picea engelmannii). As I developed a personal relationship with these two trees with the texture and tenor of their bark, branches, and needles, with their look and their smell I found myself deeply interested in that extremely popular way of life known as treedom, a way of life convergently developed by all sorts of plant families and species. Trees form the visible backbone of our green world: they give it this colorful name, provide it with its most extensive and effervescent ecologies, and have given birth to what are arguably its most wily and widespread animal inhabitants Homo sapiens. As arborist William Bryant Logan has remarked, if aliens were to find humanity's archaeological remains on some other planet, one thing they could deduce for sure is that humans camefrom a planet with trees. Indeed, the very fingers I use to type these words were made by trees. In thesepages, however, I forget the Lorax and make no effort to speak for the trees, preferring to listen and look instead, to speak with and in them, to embrace treedom and work at becoming a tree or two. As Angela Davis once put it although not, it appears after all, in her book The Meaning of Freedom we should learn to take our identities from our politics, not our politics from our identities. For my part, The Meaning of Treedom involves letting go of being human with all that that entails to explore instead a multispecies becoming with this most rough, prickly, hard and hardy of partners: Picea glauca and Picea engelmannii.