DECEMBER 4 2016
“IT IS ONLY OUT OF THE FUTURE THAT THE PRESENT CAN BE LIVED.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
When I look through our patio door I see that enormous oak tree just a few meters from our house. It must be 250 to 300 years old and, somehow, has survived the fate most other trees there suffered: lost to the axe that cleared the land to the south of us.
In that same stretch of woods – where a bear ducked away not too long ago – there also are some mature sugar maple trees, trees I will tap in a few months for their sap.
But that oak tree is the more fascinating: it’s the king of the forest. It dominates all other trees on our property, entrusted to us for safe keeping. By all accounts it will outlast us, and, as matters accelerate in the atmosphere, of which there are a lot of indications, it will witness the coming of the Lord in all his glory. That tree too looks forward to the ultimate event because before that happens, that majestic specimen also will go through a time of severe suffering. Does it already sense this?
I think so. Trees are more than just inert wood and some green growth: they are living creatures, with feelings and emotions. The sense of dread now pervading the world with the ascent of Trump and accelerating Climate Change, is also shared by trees, especially this oak, because it has a long memory, a memory as far back as the Napoleonic wars when thousands of trees were prematurely cut to be used for the Royal Navy, mostly oak, the most sturdy of woods, the most lasting of materials. It fears WAR more than anything else. And today it’s all- out war against creation and trees in particular. Just as we are emotionally vulnerable in these days of die-offs, of universal tension, of rapid extinctions, of drought and famine, trees too are suffering immensely.
Below are some excerpts from an excellent article in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, discussing Fiona Stafford’s The Long, Long Life of Trees.
“All trees are threatened by a pair of lethal diseases from Asia. Fifty years ago we lost most of our elm trees to a fungus from China, spread by a beetle laying infected eggs under the bark, unjustly called “Dutch” elm disease. Today new enemies—sudden oak death, acute oak decline, beech wilt, sweet chestnut blight, and so on—are decimating our parks and forests.”
I believe that “As trees go, so go we.”
“The trees are life. Already contaminated air has weakened them and so has drought, sickening trees everywhere. In Europe the most immediate problem is Chalara, a fungus that leads to dieback—the death of leaves and branches—in ash trees, believed to have been introduced in the 1990s from Asia on infected crates or pallet wood. In Denmark 80 percent of the European ashes have already died. The plague has now reached Britain and Ireland and is expected to be just as devastating there.
“We, in North America, must cope with an even more pitiless Asian enemy behind Chalara—the emerald ash borer, Agrilus planipennis, a bright green Chinese beetle that has already devastated many forests in North America.
“In her chapter on oaks, Stafford explores the tangled history of Britain’s infatuation with the species. The oak was a symbol of power and strength from classical times. It was the tree of Zeus, king of the gods. It was the oracular tree at Dodona in Greece, meaning that it could predict the future. Augustus Caesar, ever conscious of his image, faced the Roman public wearing a civic crown of oak leaves. The tree’s “manly” virtues made it a choice as a symbol for any country, like Britain, seeking to impress its neighbors. Effortlessly it became the national tree of Britain, although the claim was not uncontested. The oak: “Sturdy, stalwart and stubborn,” Stafford writes, “The oak has always been admired for its staying power…. No other tree is so self-possessed, so evidently at one with the world. Unlike the beech, horse chestnut or sycamore, whose branches reach up towards the sky, the solid, craggy trunk of a mature oak spreads out, as if with open arms, to create a vast hemisphere of thick, clotted leaves.
“A great oak is a world in itself. “This is the King of the Trees,” Stafford writes exultantly, “the head, heart and habitat of an entire civilisation.”
“IT IS ONLY OUT OF THE FUTURE THAT THE PRESENT CAN BE LIVED.”
Just as trees are dying, so are we. The U.S. Forest Service has identified an additional 36 million dead trees across California since its last aerial survey in May 2016. This brings the total number of dead trees since 2010 to over 102 million on 7.7 million acres of California’s drought stricken forests. In 2016 alone, 62 million trees have died, representing more than a 100 percent increase in dead trees across the state from 2015. Millions of additional trees are weakened and expected to die in the coming months and years.
We are rushing to the end.
The election of Trump has caused the race to go into overdrive, is rocketing the earth toward its ultimate demise.
The future looks deadly and we have become incapable to change the future. Still we must strive for change and for this to happen we must imagine what the real future looks like, because it is only out of the future that the present can be lived, which brings me, of course, to the last Bible chapter: Revelation 22, where it says that:
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission, the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes. Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and that healing also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.
The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.
The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet.
I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. It’s not the fault of creation that it is dying. Time, of course, is immaterial for the Lord for whom a day is as a thousand years.
Forest fires.
We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire (2 Peter 3). For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.
For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.
We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.
But trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it. Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungus, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals. This is an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. All of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.
That’s why: “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”
The leaves absorb the CO2 that has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.
So what about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.
Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life: No trees, no life; sick trees, sick lives.
Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 again: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.” Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Before the humans return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!
So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
How then shall we live?
That is the question that is new for every age. For us, in these last days, it all has to do with trees, which feature prominently in our future.
It’s only out of that future that the present can be lived. Treat trees with the utmost love because our life depends in it, including eternal life.