Maya Angelou’s poem When Great Trees Fall comes close to what I mean. She begins with the physical disturbance caused by the death of a great tree and then moves toward the death of a great human being. When something large and living disappears, the world around it is altered.

 

By George Cassidy Payne

I have spent a surprising amount of time photographing trees.

For a few years, I carried a camera around Rochester and took pictures of whatever caught my eye, like trees along Exchange Street, Mount Hope Cemetery, and the Genesee River. Trees in Highland Park and Genesee Valley Park. Trees standing behind houses, along roads, beside abandoned farms.

I wasn’t trying to make a botanical record. I couldn’t have identified many of the trees I photographed.

I liked the way they looked, and what happened to a familiar place when I stopped long enough to notice the trees in it.

There are trees I remember more clearly than I remember the streets around them. I remember the shape of a particular trunk, the way a branch leaned over a path, the color of leaves in late afternoon. I remember standing beside the Genesee with a camera while the river moved below me and realizing that the tree I had stopped to photograph had probably been there through thousands of mornings when no one was looking at it.

We tend to think of trees as part of the scenery. They are so ordinary that we can walk past the same one for years without really seeing it. Then one day it is gone and the sidewalk looks different.

I experienced this most clearly at Mount Hope Cemetery.

The cemetery is full of human memory: people who lived and died in a particular stretch of history. But the trees complicate that history. Some have been growing there for generations. They have stood through funerals, weddings, storms, summers, winters and the slow changes of the city. A person is buried beneath one of them, and the tree keeps growing.

Maya Angelou’s poem When Great Trees Fall comes close to what I mean. She begins with the physical disturbance caused by the death of a great tree and then moves toward the death of a great human being. When something large and living disappears, the world around it is altered.

That seems obvious when you think about a forest. Remove a mature tree and you change the light, the soil, the habitat and the space around it. It is also true of people. We are less separate from one another than we imagine. The death of someone changes the people who remain. The loss of a tree changes a neighborhood. A neglected river changes the people who live beside it, even when they rarely think about the river at all.

An arboretum is a strange human invention. We take trees that could simply be growing somewhere and create a place specifically for people to walk among them, learn their names and pay attention. There are signs telling us what we are looking at-and paths telling us where to walk and benches telling us where to sit. The trees themselves don’t need any of this—we do. We have become so accustomed to moving quickly through the world that we sometimes need a designated place in order to slow down.

I don’t mean this as a criticism; I understand the impulse. Most days are full of things that need to be done. Even a walk in the park can become another item on a schedule. Trees are indifferent to schedules. A mature tree can spend decades becoming something recognizable. That is why I find them reassuring.

They also make me think about what we mean when we say that we care about nature. There are plenty of practical reasons to protect trees. They absorb carbon dioxide, provide shade, reduce heat, support wildlife and help protect soil and water. In cities, trees can make a remarkable difference in the experience of a neighborhood.

But I have never been convinced that usefulness is the deepest reason to care for something.

I don’t love a tree because it produces oxygen, I love it because it is alive. If the only argument for protecting the natural world is that it benefits human beings, then we have never really escaped the idea that the world exists for us. We have simply developed a more sophisticated way of explaining why it is useful.

We can decide that the world has value that doesn’t depend entirely on what it does for us. A tree can be worth protecting even when nobody is sitting beneath it. A wetland can matter even when no one has plans to build a house there. A river can deserve clean water before we calculate its economic value.

This is where environmentalism begins to touch something spiritual for me. To revere something is to recognize that it is not merely ours.

I learned some of this through the people I met doing environmental and community work in Rochester. I remember cleanups along the river and in city parks, people picking up litter on cold mornings, talking about what could be restored and what had been neglected. I remember the Lower Falls area before and during efforts to bring attention back to the gorge. None of it was particularly glamorous. Mostly it involved people showing up.

That is part of activism I trust most, not the photograph of the ribbon cutting, the statements, or the grand language. It’s the person who comes back next Saturday. The person who brings another pair of gloves. The person who notices that the same piece of ground needs attention again.

There is a connection here to the nonviolence I have studied and practiced over the years. Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence was never simply about refusing to hit someone. It involved changing the way we understand our relationship to other forms of life and to one another.

If I see a river only as something to use, I will treat it differently than if I understand myself as belonging to the same living system.

If I see a neighborhood as disposable, I will treat it differently than if I believe the people who live there deserve beauty and care. And if I see a tree as an obstacle to development, I will treat it differently than if I have spent enough time beside it to wonder how long it has been there.

Attention changes the relationship. Trees have taught me that much. And photography helped me learn it. When I lift a camera, I have to stop moving. I have to decide what deserves to be inside the frame, to look at the light, the background, the branches, the space around the tree. The camera gives me an excuse to pay attention. But eventually the camera becomes unnecessary. You can stand beneath a tree without photographing it and you can sit on a bench and watch the leaves move. You can notice the birds. You can put your hand on the bark. You can simply be there.

We underestimate what this kind of attention does to us.

The environmental crisis is so enormous that it can become almost impossible to feel. We hear about atmospheric carbon, rising temperatures, habitat loss and species decline. The numbers are difficult to hold in the mind. It is easier to turn away.

A tree gives the problem a scale we can live with. We see its leaves, when they return, when they fall. We notice when a branch dies. We can recognize the tree the next year. That kind of knowledge doesn’t replace science, but it gives science somewhere to land.

I think about this when I see young trees planted along a city street. They are small and need watering. They need protection. Someone has to care for them while they establish themselves. The person planting the tree may never sit beneath it as an old tree. That doesn’t make the planting pointless.

There is a sublime generosity about doing work whose full reward belongs to someone else. That is one of the better ways to think about stewardship. We leave something behind that we will not necessarily get to enjoy. A tree grows tall enough to shade a child we will never meet. A restored river becomes habitat for fish that do not know we exist. A park becomes a place where another generation can walk. And somewhere, years from now, someone with a camera may stop beneath a tree and look up. They won’t know who planted it, or who protected it. They won’t know who picked up the trash around it or carried water to it during a dry summer. They will simply find it there.

I like that idea.

Not because it makes us insignificant, though it does. Because it gives us something to do with our brief time here. Take care of what you can. Leave a little more life behind than you found. And when you come across a tree that has been standing there longer than you have been alive, stop for a minute.

You don’t have to photograph it.

Just look.

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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