Drawing by Shel Silverstein, from “The Giving Tree”
On the morning of the first Earth Day a seven-year-old boy seached for salamanders in a creek. He didn’t know adults were launching a new holiday to encourage care for creation. His heart and mind were filled with amazement at the critters who lived under the damp mossy rocks. After lunch he climbed one of his favorite trees.
Boys can be very protective of the things they love. At age ten he co-authored his first editorial — a missive to City Fathers from his fourth grade class at Lincoln Elementary School. Adults were deciding whether to permit the destruction of a beloved forest to make way for a new shopping mall. The boy and his classmates were compelled to speak for the woodland creatures who had no voice in the decision.
Today the mall struggles to compete with big-box chains located further out on the sprawl of concrete and pavement that was once fields and creeks and trees. For decades politicians have funneled tax dollars into utilities and services to support that spreading new development, even as they have neglected existing urban needs.
This is the pattern for communities around the planet. Moneylenders gamble on urban growth as the ticket to economic gain. Developers proclaim it will expand the tax base. Politicians raise taxes (or cut core services) to pay for growing expenses. And when the game goes bust, here in America, leaders use public money to bail out the gamers who’re deemed too big to fail.
The power it takes to feed this speculative growth is more and more costly and dangerous. Extracting and burning fossil fuels breeds destruction — massive spills of oil and coal slurry, demolished mountaintops, dirty tar sands, poisoned water and earthquakes from hydraulic fracturing. Not to mention climate change. And problems with nuclear energy are equally distressing.
Yet politicians and their core supporters seem unbothered about what happens to creation. Republicans plot to burn down the school of environmental ethics. Democrats cheat while flirting with the school’s teachers in hopes of getting a passing grade.
Either things get worse, or we change.
Man’s conscience is in need of repair. Something is lodged in our psyches that disconnects our minds from our hearts. It shields us from feeling remorse for our dead-end behavior — what religious authorities call “sin.”
The boy inside me has an idea. For many years I’ve tried to communicate it, in columns published in small newspapers. I’ll try again.
Way back when I was first scouting for salamanders, a Sunday school teacher read me “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. The book chronicles the relationship between a boy and a benevolent green friend. On the surface it seems sweet and tender. Beginning with mutual love between these central characters, the story becomes increasingly one-sided as the boy grows into a man. He appropriates everything his friend has to offer, including her fruit and trunk and limbs. He does this without reciprocation, existing solely to take whatever he wants. She exists solely to give.
A commercial success, Silverstein’s story made me sad and mad because it sugar-coated the consequences of man’s selfishness. That’s how I felt and still feel.
Similar emotions swept over me the last time I listened to a children’s sermon in church. The cleric passed out candy canes to the lambs he shepherded down to the alter. The red-colored swirls on the treats became props for his message about sacrifice.
“Christ’s blood is sweet,” declared the cleric, linking the birth of a loving boy with his future torture and murder at the hands of the mob, church, and state.
Religious doctrine teaches us that the death of Jesus was a blood sacrifice — a sweet gift to cleanse the world of sin. We call the day he was killed “Good Friday,” and celebrate his resurrection with lamb dinners. I always piled on the mint jelly.
Easter, Passover, Earth Day, Mother’s Day — these religious and secular holidays coincide with the greening that revives us this time of year. As a member of America’s chief spiritual tradition, I was indoctrinated at a young age to believe that all of life turns on the human sacrifice of Jesus. I was taught that his execution was the primal benevolent act that enables believers to live for eternity, regardless of what we do.
That event was also a hideos taking of life, an abomination of human judgement, and we tend to overlook that part in our interpretation. The oversight seems linked with the response to a question I once asked of a former Sunday school teacher.
“What about man’s pollution of the earth?” I asked. “How do we reconcile that with our spiritual convictions?”
“There will always be trade offs,” he said matter-of-factly, without missing a beat. And that was the end of the conversation.
Spring this year leaves me feeling like a decrepit old man, slumped on a stump where the tree of life once offered beautiful shade. Indeed, as I slump I’m also deeply grateful for creation’s gifts of renewal that surround me.
Yet for what man has taken, greedily and without conscience, I am bereaved and utterly ashamed.
Lord help men mend our existence.
I too grieve for the green, Brother Watt. Not only do the priests tell us that the sacrifice of Jesus was a good thing for believers, but the secular priests tell us that the sacrifice of other species for certain people’s economic gain is a good thing for everyone.
I have to disagree a little about The Giving Tree. I think there’s a deeper relationship between the giving tree and the taking man. The kind of sacrifice the tree undergoes somehow makes more sense to me than rampant development or sacrificing Jesus, or Isaac, for that matter. The tree and the man needed each other, and grew up, and died, together.
It’s tough to preach restraint to man when his actions don’t always have immediate consequences. But I agree with you that it should be obvious to everyone that the loss of green, with all its contained life, is a sacrifice that is not good for everyone, or really for anyone.
Each spring I marvel at nature’s ability to produce huge quantities of biomass of all shapes and sizes in a very short time, and then I see the giant grass-cutting monster going down the streets here, cutting it all down, or the chainsaws, or the pesticides. I should take tons of photos of the prolific growth before it’s sacrificed for fire safety or just someone’s idea of a good view.
Eloquent words Watt. Rabbi, maybe the Giving Tree could have a sequel.
The old man will look at the tree stump, and go through a transformation, engaging his grandchildren to plant a little forest around it.
Humans have an innate desire to search for redemption. It can be our undoing, or our salvation.
Any cleric worth his salt can turn violent texts into loving testaments.
Shel Silverstein wasn’t an ordained cleric, but his Giving Tree does what many clerics do. It delivers a moral message when approached from a certain angle, while simultaneously upholding an orthodox worldview. It purports that the Earth exists solely to serve man’s desires. If we’re moved by the story perhaps we won’t work her too hard cause we want our grandkids to have plenty of wood.
What does it mean to husband the Earth? Was she made to be a giant warehouse to supply our desires? Or were we made to be her caretakers, to tend to the least of our fellow creatures as a heroic rabbi admonished us to do?
The status of human husbandry is illustrated in a parody song written by Silverstein that became a country hit in the 70s — Put Another Log on the Fire. The clip reminds me of man’s continued disregard for both women and the Earth. It’s a fitting bite of cautionary humor in preparation for Mother’s Day.
But my favorite piece by Silverstein is Where the Sidewalk Ends.
I forgot to include one of my favorite songs for around this time of year, Nothing But Flowers, by the Talking Heads. It talks of some time in the future, when all the malls have reverted to fields – “this was a Pizza Hut; now it’s covered with daisies…” or “I caught a rattlesnake; now I have something for dinner.” It’s a lament sang by someone who remembers fondly the parking lots, chain stores, and highways of the past. Can we reverse the development trends of the present? Only if we can imagine a different future. Thanks, David Byrne.
Keep preaching, Brother Watt. We’re listening.
You are, as ever, so eloquent and poignant in your writing. I know the frog ponds of my youth and the woods where we found morels are gone. I mourn them deeply. I long for the days when the landscape did not change so rapidly. I’ve always been an optimist and optimism is getting harder to come by. Yet so many people coming in my gallery are telling me that they’re downsizing, trying to live a simpler life and not buy so much. Guess I (we) can only do my best to take care of what’s around me (us). Less is more. It can work if we all do it. Pass it on.
It is just so true that the entire system in/under which we live is warped and distorted, despite what wonder individual human beings may bring. Any system that purports to create individual gain without equal compensation for the “other” is doomed to failure. It is the peak of delusion that one (anyone) can continue to take without giving back in equal measure; and with reverence and love. Capitalism is a delusional system created out of greed and ignorance. Our ancient ancestors, the tribal people, lived for thousands of years without ransacking the Earth (and I am truly not supporting the mythopoeic notion that they lived in Edenic peace and harmony with each other), but they always did so with the Great Mother; and they knew each other in that greater context and felt themselves connected in that manner constantly. That is ultimately what has been obfuscated and destroyed by the supposedly “enlightened” cognitive mindset under which we have labored for so long.
Peace, Love and Blessings
Stefan