| These essays are an extended meditation on the fact and symbol of tree. Written in the genre of the nature essay, they combine personal experience, locale, natural history, and symbolic interpretation. They spring from a reflection that, for the first time in human history, human beings contemplate the possibility of a world without trees. They seek to reveal the relationship between artificial and natural and to present clearly the radicality of the present situation in which "wild nature" is increasingly a human fabrication. The essays explore human perceptions of nature, contemporary and historical, uncovering our paradoxical beliefs in nature as home, as savior, and as tool. The reflections on how human beings perceive and relate to trees reveal as well how we perceive and relate to one another. Being autobiographical, these essays also record the author's path to self-discovery.; The work is divided into four locales: the pine-forested Keeweenaw serves as a touchstone; Baltimore, childhood neighborhood of sycamores, concentrates on psychological relationships; the Calamus leaf at Pilgrim Sands rainforest camp in Australia reveals the global plight of nature; Chicago, with its Tree of Heaven growing in places like hell, reinforces the paradoxes epitomized by tree-loving humans perpetuating a world in which nature no long serves as model. Throughout, the insights of Henry David Thoreau are essential to the author's understanding of human-tree relationships. |
