A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

The Leaves of the Trees

The good thing about global warming is that it allows for deeper south species of plants to grow in the upper south. Zone 6, meet zone 7, and both of you should get to know zone 8. Pretty soon Ohio Valley gardeners will be going positively tropical.

Ten years ago I brought a number of trees from Alabama to our new Kentucky home. Most of them survived regular re-potting rituals while growing from foot-long seedlings into plantable saplings. Among these are a few specifically heart-of-dixie varieties: water oak, post oak, and loblolly pine. All are doing quite well in this higher latitude and lower USDA zone.

But this spring was hard on them, as it was on almost every brand of tree, import and native. Cued by a mild February, March entered warm and stayed warm. Temperatures in the seventies and eighties brought out the fattest buds ever you saw on the branches of the trees, with leaves following quickly. The landscape was on a wild rush to green.

In April, winter came screaming back. A week of nights in the twenties with days struggling to rise above freezing mule-kicked spring right where it lives. Fully leafed-out trees suddenly drooped brown, like defeated ex-champions. Napalm raining from the skies could not have been a more effective de-foliant.

Weeks passed before we knew if they would recover. Most did, though some still show signs of trauma. Among my more recently planted family of oaks, the white oak, king apparent of the forest, took the cold snap the worst, dropping every single leaf almost instantly. But now it blushes with renewed health. My current favorite in oak-dom, perhaps its queen, is the willow oak. The specimen I’ve been nursing took the longest to get out of re-hab. It was as if it had to squeeze out one new little leaf at a time, and now, by the first of July, it lacks some of that old regal bearing.

The evergreens seemed to fare the best. The loblolly did not skip a beat. But then one day I looked out the window and my heart sank like a stone. Its highest and newest “candles” of bushy needles were all but stripped bare. Inspection revealed a host of small green caterpillars engaged in a needle eating contest. I picked off every one I could, then and over the next week, until they stopped replacing themselves. Halfway through that sequence, I noticed a flock of sparrows feasting on the caterpillars, which was good for the tree. I did wonder, though, if the sparrows had difficulty choking them back, because after picking them off the tree, my hands reeked of pine tar the rest of the day, no matter how much I washed them.

Now that pine tree is in recovery, living into mid-summer. That’s fortunate, because we’re going to need its leaves, just as we’re going to need the wider foliage of the oaks and their deciduous cousins. One might argue that God’s breath of life blows through them — and every other green thing, including the plankton forests of the oceans. We are utterly dependent upon certain botanical facts of life.

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, John the Revelator says, as he wraps up the last book in the New Testament. He speaks of the tree of life growing on each side of the river that flows from the throne of God and through the holy city. That is part of John’s vision, part of his peek behind the curtain separating this world and the next. John speaks apocalyptically, of course, but on another level — the natural level — his words have never been more true.

It’s all about the trees, and it’s all about carbon. We are fixated on carbon and its fixation by the trees. More than any other, carbon is the element that defines us and everything else that lives. It is life’s building block; the presence of carbon flags the organic as its absence does the inorganic, the nonliving.

But now there’s too much of this good thing. We are burning hydrocarbons — coal and petroleum — at a rate that cannot be absorbed by the environment. The chemical core of life is becoming toxic to all its forms, including ours. We may have been created a little lower than the angels, but how far have the high and mighty fallen. We may have been charged to be tenders of God’s garden, but we are failing our Creator with a failed stewardship based more on waste than resourcefulness.

You’ve read the papers; you know what’s at stake. One nightmare finds the Eden that is the Southeastern United States turned into a desert, with Florida and most coast lands under water. Think of the Amazon without the rainfall to sustain a forest paradise. And without the Amazon. Maybe it takes five hundred years for all that to happen; 25 generations. Seems like forever, but it’s a finger snap in geologic time. Just half-way to a watch in the night for God.

If that’s where mindless sin is taking us, then I know a white oak, a loblolly pine, and a willow oak who will be working their little heartwoods out, doing all they can to restore equilibrium to an interchange of gases that is spiraling woefully out of whack. They will inhale carbon dioxide, exhale oxygen, and store — capture , fixate, sequester — carbon in every fiber of their being, releasing it slowly after they die and fall back to the earth.

Those three will need a lot of help, of course. They can’t clean up the air all by themselves. We can do our part in choices concerning things such as light bulbs, appliances, thermostats, automobiles, and airline travel. We can use locally produced food, and try to vote for wise people who take the long and careful view. Planetary well-being might best improve as

we trust more in a merciful God, love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves, and seek and pursue peace in all affairs. While we’re at it, we could stand to bring back old fashioned concepts like thrift and self-sacrifice into our home and national economies. Enough people making enough changes (bearing fruits that befit repentance, as John the Baptizer would say) would make all the difference in the world. The world God made good, green, and wonderful.

Are we going to let our machinery and gadgetry do us in? Will our technology (from the Farm-all tractor to the Boeing 747 to the iPhone) prove that diabolical? Is feeding the fuel tank more important than feeding the children of the earth, those whom God entrusts to our care? I don’t think so. There’s a better way, and thinking and feeling and believing people can find it.

The One who created us is the One who redeems us. Our God is engaged with life in all of its abundantly rich complexity, and that describes us, too. Our gift and our quest is life — in spite of death, beyond death with its tyranny and nihilism. We can’t make that happen by ourselves, but we can step out of the Creator’s way (and creation’s way) when it does happen. Should we be especially blessed, God will invite us to participate in the healing of the nations. And the healing is in the leaves.

It is in the leaves of the tree of life — the trees of life that you and I are going to plant and keep on planting on every open spot of ground available and in whose pleasant shade we will work, play, and rest. Or we could just stop mowing every square inch of real estate and let the trees grow on their own, which they are all too willing to do. Trees stand, as we live and breath, and we can do neither without them. And even if we could, who would want to?

Dee Wade is Pastor at Anchorage Presbyterian Church, Anchorage, Ky.