Teaching the Trees

Bald Cypress

96 It was a hot, muggy July day and I was standing in the black muck of a swamp looking up at the top of a bald cypress tree (Taxodium distichum) four times my height. I saw green, round cones in the top of the tree—the seeds of future generations. I looked down and saw wooden bumps poking up from the muck—the characteristic knees of the bald cypress . I was thrilled—I planted this tree fourteen years ago! Standing in that hot swamp I was happier than I could ever be in the cool, luxurious stateroom of a cruise ship. for days afterward I could think of nothing else but time. It is, perhaps, the central enigma of human nature that we behave as if our lives were going to continue forever, in much the same form they have now, all the while knowing, but not admitting,even to ourselves,that in just a short while wewillnolongerexistinfleshandblood.Theinsanityofsuch Bald Cypress 97 behavior has only been magnified by our culture. The technological and economical forces at work in our lives cause most of us to focus on an ever-smaller wedge of time. Our global systems have turned time into what Joanna Macy describes as “an ever-shrinking box, in which we race on a treadmill at increasingly frenetic speeds.”1 We are caught in a time trap, she says, where the economy and its technologies depend on decisions made at lightning speed for short-term goals. We go faster and faster but have less time instead of more. To understand how aberrant the human concept of time has become, you must understand how other species use time. All other species are future-motivated. Plant or animal, the most important thing for each is the success of future generations. Plants spend a huge part of their energy budget making flowers, producing nectar, provisioning seeds, and making the seeds attractive to dispersers—all for the sake of the next generation. New seedlings will not help the parent plant; some may even become competitors, eventually shortening the parent’s life. The important thing, the reason for the energy expenditure, is to send one’s genes into the next generation. Animals are likewise future-oriented . Animals put themselves at risk by mating—at risk from contagious diseases, at risk from predators, and, in the case of female mammals, at risk from giving birth. Yet it is the first imperative of every organism to mate, no matter how short its life span or how dangerous mating may be.All biological organisms are future-oriented because the genes that make them so are the genes that survive. Most human societies and human economies, however, have become focused on the now. We may be putting away dollars for our children’s college tuition or our own retirement ,but at the same time we are leaving future generations 99 fewer forests, fewer coral reefs, less farmland, and less clean water. The irony is that in order to change this scenario we turn to government and politics, and to be effective in that realm we must work in the little box of contemporary now time.And that very time-style is what has divorced us from ecological time—the time we most need to be in if we are to cure the earth’s ills and reconnect with other species and future generations of humans. We learn our time-behavior as we are acculturated into our particular society. Some societies—not many—are still living in ecological time, a circular time; but the concept of linear time, now-oriented time, is spreading rapidly, and it is without doubt the time culture dominating the global business world. Recognizing that our treatment of time is a societal construct is a first step toward practicing a different type of time. Joanna Macy, whose innovative work helps to clarify our situation, suggests that we practice experiencing what she calls Deep Time.The Deep Time exercises she has developed are designed to get us out of our now box, out of even the limitations of the human life span, and reconnect us with both the long past of our species (including its evolutionary development) and our, hopefully, long future.2 It is her hope that by practicing Deep Time we can see our lives in their proper context, as a bridge between those who have gone before us...