THERE IS NO PLANET B

What we are doing to this planet we call home is akin to killing the goose that lays golden eggs. That’s what this Earth Day (April 22) reminds us to be aware of. Image credit: *ONTARIO PARKS.*

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

As the world marks Earth Day, desis also celebrate the bounties of nature with festivals like Baisakhi, Gudi Padwa, Ugadi, Vishu and Gangaur.

With exuberant dance, songs, colourful clothes and lots of good food.

The festivals are a way of expressing gratitude for the bounty of the earth, for all the gifts it bestows.

In northern climes, we also celebrate the slow return to warmth. We rejoice in the budding green on trees and shrubs.

And yet, how many of us stop to think of ways in which we can give back?

The earth gives of itself so generously and in return, we denude its forests, pollute its waters, turn vast swaths of land into toxic waste sites.

My cousin who was visiting from India surveyed the large linden by our deck with something bordering on wonder. “What’s the purpose of this tree?” he asked.

It doesn’t have conspicuous flowers, no fruit, it just sort of stands there. So why have it?

Because it’s an old tree, and I love the deep shade it provides. As I love the stories about lindens in Native medicine that I read up on when we moved to this house.

“If I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand,” I said, taking refuge in the line from an old ad for Harley Davidson.

It’s okay, he’s a cousin I am very close to, close enough to get away with borderline sass.

Years later, I read that “plants emit bioelectromagnetic fields that are able to influence the state of our organs to varying extents” in The Secret Therapy of Trees by Marco Mencagli and Marco Nieri. That each type or species expresses its energetic personality, and “lindens emit very beneficial signals for all organs, but with a superior intensity on the nervous and lymphatic systems and mucous membranes”.

I store the information away for my cousin’s next visit.

My connection to trees goes way back. Once, my parents’ friend visiting our family after a long gap asked me if I still talked to trees.

And then regaled the gathering with the story of how he spotted me – when I was five or six years old – saying goodbye to plants and trees in our yard on our last day before moving to a new house.

He had the wisdom to let me be, and didn’t intrude on the private communion, for that’s what he saw it as.

“You tried to circle the tree with your little arms, a thorny kikar at that!”

Ghai uncle would have been interested to read in the same book that trees love contact with humans. “The most exciting thing, however, is seeing what happens when a child hugs a tree. The plant reacts with an impressive response, sending signals of great positivity (dextrorotatory) into space on the frequencies of its own immune and nervous systems.”

Mencagli and Nieri describe a sign at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney inviting visitors to hug trees and walk barefoot on the grass.

In another city, in another house, my love for trees grew. We had many trees in our garden in Bangalore. Guava trees with their smooth branches that I perched on with a book, and mango trees on which, mysteriously, fruit ripened only at the very top. Maybe the fact that little kids in search of a treat – green mangoes are delicious with salt and chilli powder – could only reach the lower branches had something to do with it? There were champa trees and mulberry trees. But the silkcotton tree outside my parents’ bedroom window was my favourite. I’d position myself on the wide windowsill with a book and pretend I was in a tree house.

“It goes back to the old Vedic philosophy – we all are the creation of the same creator and we are all connected.” - Professor Shashi Kant.

World-renowned forest economist Dr Shashi Kant (Grants Desi Achiever, 2018) has been recognized as a leading authority in the field of forest resources economics and sustainability management.

The director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management program at University of Toronto Mississauga, and professor, Forest Resource Economics and Management at the Faculty of Forestry, UofT, Professor Kant is the first Canadian to receive the Queen’s Award for Forestry. He was consultant to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and to the Credit Valley Conservation Authority.

Professor Kant has worked with governmental and non-governmental organizations and academic institutions in many parts of the world, helping formulate sustainability policies. He was a consultant to the National Aboriginal Forestry Association on Aboriginal Values and Perceptions and believes there’s much we can learn from Aboriginal people.

“There was a time when their inherent knowledge was dismissed, it wasn’t respected enough,” he had said in a Desi News interview in 2018. Now there’s a recognition of their way of life and their knowledge systems; some space is being created for their values and rights. Some forests are being managed jointly with Native Canadians. City dwellers tend to be distanced from forest/natural issues, but Aboriginal people on reserves have a strong connection to their lands. I learnt a lot from the First Nations people I interacted with over the last 20 years.”

But, he emphasizes, sustainability can’t exist in isolation, one has to look at all aspects.

“In discussing environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and social sustainability separately, people tend to focus on one, to the exclusion of the others. My thinking is that we can’t look at these in separate boxes. We have to look everything with the lens of sustainability that include all aspects.”

He believes sustainability is achievable through true love.

“True love is unconditional and means respect, balance, and integration of diverse views. If we start by respecting ourselves, then each other, a balance will be obtained around us. Before coming to Canada, I worked with tribal communities in Orissa. They saw their trees being cut down to make way for development and others cutting trees for firewood. A primary school teacher went on a hunger strike to protect forests. Others joined him. The movement was not for personal gain, but inspired by Gandhian principles, it was for greater good. That was true love.

“It goes back to the old Vedic philosophy – we all are the creation of the same creator and we are all connected. With each other, with nature. When you observe anything, there is energy transmission, and that energy connects the object and the subject.”

In recent times, and specially during the stress-inducing social distancing months we lived through, there’s been a resurgence of interest in the beneficial powers of nature.

As we celebrate the bountiful gifts that our planet bestows on us, take a moment to reflect on how we treat the planet in turn. Image credit: *ROXANNE SHEWCHUK* on Pexels.

Peter Wohlleben, of course, is the one who enlightened many of us about the community of trees in The Hidden Life of Trees.

He described how trees nurture each other, how they communicate, sending each other messages to trigger a defence response to blight. And how they suffer when isolated.

In Big Lonely Doug, Harley Rustad wrote evocatively about the giant Douglas fir that was left standing while others around it were cut down for timber. People who may not have described themselves as “tree huggers” were so moved by its plight that they showed up in large numbers to give it a hug.

But trees don’t just support each other. They nurture us in myriad ways.

In the face of uncertainty, nature brings solace and sustenance, wrote David Suzuki in his column, Science Matters, in Desi News.

“Research shows time spent in forests – and even just looking at trees or photos of them – boosts immune systems, lowers blood pressure, reduces stress, improves mood and ability to focus, and increases energy levels and sleep quality.”

“We live among trees and if we are to have a future we must be planters and keepers of trees,” writes Harry Thomas in the introduction to the book, Poems About Trees, that he edited.

Architects and designers incorporate greenery into living spaces. These can include everything from green roofs and walls to the column of green plants that rises in the York Region office building in Newmarket.

Mencagli and Nieri provide a long list of objects that release volatile or powdery substances. Upholstery, furniture, paint, electronic equipment, detergents, cosmetic products, plastic objects including toys and air fresheners, etc., all emit substances that are toxic to varying degrees and affect the quality of air we breathe. Plants, they tell us, can help clear the air, quite literally, giving the example of New Delhi entrepreneur Kamal Meattle who has more than 1,500 plants in a 15,000 square meter facility where 300 people work. Worried about Delhi’s high levels of air pollution, he found plants “yield concrete results in terms of employee health and productivity”.

In The Eight Master Lessons of Nature, Gary Ferguson, who has given keynote lectures on the ecological and psychological values of nature, writes that “beauty is right here, within easy reach”.

“You can feel it under the branches of an old maple tree on a summer afternoon, when in a kind, gentle startle it dawns on you that there’s no action for you to take, no problem to solve, no plans to make. Only the shade, the sun, the sound of the breeze in the leaves. And an extraordinary and effortless exchange. You, with every breath out, nurturing the tree. The tree, in turn, giving oxygen for your next breath.

“And so the world turns.

“And so you turn the world.”

And interdependence, suggests Ferguson, is less about saving one species than it is about saving us all. He shares a Pygmy legend: The man killed the bird, and with the bird, the song, and with the song, himself.

Mike Berners-Lee echoes the philosophy in his book, There is No Planet B. Described as a handbook for how humanity can survive by Financial Times, it’s been quoted from by everyone from Banki Moon to Al Gore.

There is no Planet B. So what are doing to Planet A?

TREE HUGGERS, TAKE A LEAF OUT OF THESE BOOKS!

Many of us awoke to the beauty of the community of trees through Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. We learnt how trees nurture each other while nurturing the planet. Here’s a selection of other books on the magic of trees.

The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell, Penguin, $23. Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding natural history writing, David George Haskell reveals how human history, ecology and well-being are intimately intertwined with the lives of trees.

There’s science in his book – tons of it – and philosophy, folklore and poetry. But above all, a music, a primordial symphony that he is uniquely attuned to. He picks ten trees and tells their story, everything from where they thrive to the creatures they share their habitat with, to the sounds that emanate from them.

We hear the rain not through silent falling water but in the many translations delivered by the objects that the rain encounters... The leaves of plants speak the rain’s language with the most eloquence.

In the chapter on balsam fir (Kalabeka, northwestern Ontario) he describes the textures and hues of northern forests. Blue green shades of fir needles, wind-stoked flashes of brightness from trembling aspen and white birch leaves.

And the birdsong that is a complex language if only we knew how to decipher it.

From twenty-six simple geometric shapes we’ve constructed a written language; in a few minutes of attention to their flock, I hear perhaps as many acoustic graphemes.

To listen to a collection of sounds from this book, visit dghaskell.com.

Poems About Trees, edited by Harry Thomas, Everyman’s Library, $19.95. In his preface, which reads like a poem in itself, Stanley Plumley writes that “the Ojebway believe that cutting down living trees is like the wounding and killing of animals”.

He describes woods as sacred, “in-between places where the trees had decided the difference between the past and the future”.

Lovers of poetry will find all their favourites here. William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, DH Lawrence, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, among a host of others, and also Virgil and Homer.

“The trees indeed have hearts. With a certain affection the sun seems to send its farewell ray far and level over the copses to them, and they silently receive it with gratitude, like a group of settlers with their children.” – Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Dec. 20, 1851

“Nothing I ever saw washed off the sins of the world so well as the first snow dropping on trees.” – Nancy Willard (1936 -2017)

The Secret Therapy of Trees by Marco Mencagli and Marco Nieri, Rodale, $25.99. In the United States, along with certain European countries, reserved forestland has doubled from the nation’s birth to today, write Marco Mencagli and Marco Nieri.

They reveal that the increasingly popular forest bathing is not that new, actually. ...inspired by traditional practices conducted in green space in the pursuit of psychophysical well-being, in 1982 the Japanese forest service inaugurated shinrin-yoku, which is a full-immersion journey into the forest atmosphere.

In English, shinrin-yoku is, you guessed it, forest bathing!

They discuss the effects of negative and positive ions on human beings and how plants help regulate the presence of both.

“If we let ourselves, we might even be able to sense a touch of ancient mystery and the sweet, smiling presence of an old ‘spirit of place’.

COVER STORY

THERE IS NO PLANET B

TREE HUGGERS, TAKE A LEAF OUT OF THESE BOOKS!