Читать книгу Like a Tree - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 15

I came across Joan Dunning, who exemplifies just this, when a title in the used book section at my local bookstore, Book Passage, caught my eye: From the Redwood Forest: Ancient Trees and the Bottom Line: A Headwaters Journey, which she wrote. Joan was asked by a friend, “Will you just come to a meeting?” She said yes simply to get her friend to stop nagging, thinking it would also be token support for her local ecosystem. Joan was a naturalist who studied birds and was asked to read from a chapter she had written on the marbled murrelet, an unusual, robin-sized seabird, which should be a ground nester like the rest of its family but instead makes its nest in the tallest living things on Earth. High in redwood forests, the marbled murrelet incubates one glass-green egg in a depression in a bed of thick lichens.

As Joan read, she became aware of all the emotion behind the observant naturalist that she is. The assignment she took on was this book, written for “the millions of parents who take care of every aspect of their children's lives but one: whether the Earth itself will survive.” Her guides were the young people she met, mostly in their twenties. A young man who spent nights and days in a small hammock suspended high above the ground attached to the trunk of one of these redwoods was one of her teachers. He gave a firsthand description of what he witnessed as these ancient trees are felled, beginning with the creation of the fall-bed to cushion the fall so the massive tree won't splinter, to how just before it falls, it begins to vibrate, tremble, and then shake as if it were still alive, then, slowly at first, begins to lean. Others have said that they sometimes hear a sound like a shrieking cry at the point that a great tree starts to fall.

When she looks up at old growth trees that are still standing, Joan thinks about him and what he willingly did. I like how she described the young activists whose efforts would be only partially successful: “They stand . . . with the majesty of old-growth redwoods . . . straight and tall like the few stands of old growth that still remain” (From the Redwood Forest, 1998, p. 4).