I presented a workshop titled Trees, Humans & Healing: Alder, Douglas-fir & Hawthorn yesterday at the 2nd Dandelion Seed Conference in Olympia, WA. Though I was sick (with a kidney infection! Argh!), it was a fantastic 2 hours spent with these 3 locally abundant & important tree species.
So why trees as opposed to a general discussion on plants? There’s something a bit different that sets them apart. Trees occupy a special space in our imagination & hearts. Their size & reach for the sky confers a sense of majesty, and the joining of earth & sky. Their long lifespan makes them an instrumental aspect of surroundings & landmarks and provides a sense of continuity that spans generations. Many traditions & cultures employ trees (and related metaphor & imagery) in their spiritual traditions and cosmos. And the branching patterns characteristic of trees are seen in many biological : ecoogical forms: rivers, veins, neurons, etc. So trees touch something deep. They also meet our physical needs with food, shelter, and medicine.
Trees & forests play a critical role in global ecological balance. They produce oxygen, remediate soil, prevent erosion, provide shade, and regulate the global weather. And we’re rapidly changing forests. At the end of the last Ice Age, about half of our planet was forested. Now it’s less than a third, with most deforestation occurring in the last few decades. There are ecological and, arguably, spiritual consequences to this rapid loss of forest ecosystems. And there are public health concerns too–increased exposure to zoonotic infections, poorer air quality, nutrient transition, and others. And, in the Pacific Northwest, our temperate rainforests are special–they have more biomass per hectare than anywhere on Earth.
So as we’re considering community and socioecological health, tree medicine & forests are a necessary component of this conversation.
Feel free to send an email for the notes here. (I’ll also be posting the monographs for these trees over the next several days.)