Conversion to Tree Hugger

I always appreciated that there were tree huggers and thought it unfortunate that this was used as a pejorative insult.  But I wasn't a tree hugger.   Sure I always appreciated that trees were beautiful, but that was pretty much it for me.

But then while doing my climate work I started working on protecting trees because they are carbon sinks.   This is old paradigm thinking.  It is still seeing them as things which serve humans.   But you know the simple fact that they remove greenhouse gases from the air was not enough to convince Seattle City Council members or three Mayors that we needed a new ordinance to protect them. 

However in the course of trying to convince them I learned the following things about trees:

• They remove pollution from the air - thereby reducing asthma rates where they live
• They are literally removing Co2 and creating oxygen for us
• They provide enough shade to prevent "heat islands" and greatly reduce air conditioning
• They are more effective at storm management than our technological "solutions"
• Studies show just being able to see a tree reduces depression in humans
• They are habitat for birds and bugs that we won't have otherwise
• They share nutrients and communicate with each other under the earth through thin root like threads.  They look out for each other (more than I can say for many humans).
• The older the tree the more carbon they are sequestering per year.

I started to realize that the trees were providing critical "eco-services" to us and we were taking them completely for granted.  The more I was trying to promote their protection in a city undergoing a huge building boom (and in which trees were disappearing at an alarming rate), the more I could hear the language - how others were thinking about them.  They were thinking of them as "things" and they saw them as: to be cut and used (ie as wood), as in the way (that blocks my view or I want to build there), as money to be made (board feet) or as not even as living.

How did we become so cut off from the eco system that keeps us alive that we don't understand that we are in relationship with trees?

One of my friends was talking about putting her hands on a tree and talking to it.  I was agnostic about that idea.   Then I had a really bad tree lobbying day.  I pulled up to my office where a row of 20" diameter trees head the parking lot.  I walked up to the tree and put my hands on it and said: "Mark (name changed) is ruining this for our whole group".   The tree said back to me without pause:  "Mark loves trees too."   It was a good reminder that my screwed up allie did have a common goal with me.  At the next meeting I asked us all to share before we started what our favorite tree was.  Mark broke into a broad smile and talked fondly about his feelings for Maples.   It did reconnect me to Mark. 

It has continued.  During a very upsetting meeting at my church where someone was behaving in a very toxic way I headed out in the yard and to the nearest tree.  I put my hands on the tree and said: "This is awful!"  The tree responded: "Send the toxins down into the earth like we do".     Now when I say the tree responded you may think either I am crazy or that I am anthropomorphically attributing to the tree what I want to hear (like an imaginary tree).   But all I can tell you is those are the words I heard and they were NOT at all what I expected.  If I had made up my own answers they would have been quite different (and not nearly so helpful). I was surprised how quickly the trees spoke, how they needed no time to gather there thoughts.

One of the campaigns created by a colleague to protect the trees was called Save the 6,000 (Lidar had showed that Seattle had just 6,000 exceptional trees - those over 24" in diameter left from its second growth).  For this campaign people were invited to find trees of this size in their neighborhood and take pictures of them and post them on the website for the campaign, so that we could identify where they were in order to protect them (but also to help bind people to these trees in their neighborhood).  https://www.thelast6000.org/how-you-can-help.html

I had gone with great enthusiasm to take pictures of some of my favorite trees - ones that I had lived with and stared at for a number of years.  I excitedly went to submit them on the website and then discovered that they were asking me what kind of tree it was?   What kind of tree?  Wow for a tree advocate I felt so incredibly stupid.  I did not grow up here.  I could tell you a lot of deciduous tree types in Illinois ....but here well it was good that the term Evergreen sort of covered everything.  Except that was not going to work on this website.   So I spent a lot of time looking at websites trying to figure it out.  I realized I should have paid attention to the cones which are incredibly helpful clues and also more about how the needles are on the branches.

But this interesting thing happened.  It was like you went to the same bus station every day and saw the same person till the bus got there.  Suddenly one day you start to talk and you exchange names.  They go from being a stranger to being a "real person" in your life.  Over more time maybe even a friend.   Well suddenly when I was walking past trees noticing their size and beginning to wonder their species - their name mind you, well the trees stopped being strangers in my life.  I'd already learned how amazing they were - Now I wanted to know them all by name.   That was probably the cross over point to being a bonafide tree hugger.


I have known people who have gotten arrested sitting in large trees so they would not get cut down.  In some ways I respected that they could care that much about one living being.  But in some other way it has seemed to me like focusing on one drop of water in an ocean.   Like there are so many social evils in the world, so many good causes, why not get arrested protesting a whole issue, a whole cause - something bigger.

I don't see it that way any more.   Now to be arrested with my arms wrapped around a tree protecting it feels like making a much bigger statement about needing to stand up for our eco-systems, protect the life forms that provide for us, to actually literally rejoin the Living Earth within which I am simply one breathing life form in an interdependent web of life.

As Robin Well Kimmerer says: "You cannot take something without giving back.  The tree takes care of us, so we have to take care of it."