iStock Image #504096802, by itman__47, Used by permission
We are reminded by the scripture readings today that the Bible begins and ends with trees. So let’s not be distracted by the apple tree of the Garden of Eden—that’s in chapters 2 and 3! We have heard endless interpretations of that story of the first sin. But I want us to recall the tree of Genesis 1, or really the vast multiplicity of trees: “trees of every kind bearing fruit…” Not just apples! And I’m hoping we can hold that original grove in relation to the tree of the Bible’s last chapter: the tree of life. Singular; yet it bears different fruit each month, and grows on either side of the river in the New Jerusalem: so it seems to be far more than one. An urban park?
We must not get too literal about these trees. But my point today is that we should not get too purely symbolic either: the power of these tree metaphors is rooted in the physicality of the earth’s tree cover. And those trees precede our species by about 380 million years. So those arboreal symbols of life grow from deep material roots. And that tree-matter may be more important now than at any time in these couple of millennia since the biblical texts were written.
I’m thinking about climate change. As you know trees are essential to our breathable atmosphere: they draw down and then store excess carbon dioxide; in other words, trees are constraining global warming. And on the first day in office the current US president not only withdrew from the Paris Agreement. He fired 3,400 US Forest Service workers. And another directive immediately opened half of our national forests—half—for logging. The tree trunks are already piling up—(no I didn’t say tree Trumps. ) At the same time he froze all foreign aid, which includes billions of dollars in climate finance. He is axing environmental legislation and withholding federal funds from all grants that mention global warming.
And the warmer it gets the more the forests burn; the more forests burn the warmer it gets. The last two summers have been the hottest ever recorded. Drill baby drill. Burn baby burn.
As the globe heats up, so do threats to democracy. We seem to be spinning in a vicious circle of ecology and politics: ecological degradation leads to extreme weather and rising seas; which forces mass migration, which bolsters right-wing politics, which empowers climate denialism and corporate deregulation, and so leads to greater ecological degradation.
In other words, the vicious circle of the planetary climate and the political climate is spinning into a dangerous ecopolitical moment—which is why I thought I better meditate with you on the ancient Apocalypse, authored by John of Patmos. The Book of Revelation is all about the circle of political and planetary catastrophe, caused by systemic injustice: injustice symbolized in the marriage of the Beast, representing the greatest power, with the so-called Whore of Babylon, representing the greatest wealth. Of course, I am not identifying the Beast and the Whore with any current individuals; the vision is of systemic injustice. I am not saying Revelation predicts the union of the most powerful man today with the most wealthy one. Really, I’m not…
But there are really creepy correlations to the last book with the current climate: Rev 8:7: “The first angel blew his trumpet, and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were hurled to the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up…” A third of the trees?
Permit me to cite this current bit of data from the World Research Institute: “Fire is ..making up a larger share of global tree cover loss compared to other drivers like…/forestry. While fires only accounted for ..20% of tree cover loss in 2001, they now account for roughly 33%....” I repeat John of Patmos: “and a third of the trees were burned up.” No, I am not a biblical literalist!!.
But I am suggesting that the language of the apocalypse cannot be avoided. Not in our earth-trumping climate…We won’t be able to block out echoes of that ancient metaphor. For good and for ill. Many echoes come from an anti-environmentalist perspective. Partly that is because the apocalyptic literalism of white reactionary Christianity remains key to the political right. That has been true since the Reagan 80’s. If The End is fast approaching—what does ecology matter? Let the trees burn. In the meantime, we have dominion and can do whatever we want to trees and all subhuman creatures. That is emphatically not the Genesis meaning of dominion, which can only be rightly read as responsible stewardship.
But the kind of dominion our civilization has exercised may really bring on an eco-political apocalypse. One reads of how the superrich are preparing “their high tech private domains as fortressed escape pods..giving them and their children an edge for an increasingly barbarous future.” In a recent article for the Guardian, Naomi Klein wrote this: “To put it bluntly-- the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.” Through the climate-change denying economics of carbon emissions. The name of her article is disturbing: “The Rise of Endtimes Fascism.” Klein claims that “we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before.”
Certainly, the current right-wing combination of secular and religious apocalypse must not be underestimated. But I also worry about how the left performs its own apocalypse. Increasingly I hear the quiet belief that it probably IS too late. And if it is too late, why seriously bother? So a kind of liberal nihilism can mirror the conservative denialism. And can paralyze action on behalf of all of us creatures.
This is why those of us who are not conservative climate denialists or liberal nihilists need our own version of the apocalypse. It starts with insisting that prophecy is not the same as prediction. Prophecy is an intuitive reading of a future, a future not yet fixed in concrete: a future not to get fixed by divine intervention. The kind of God who can help now may not be the all-controller—the omnipotent one who lets the trees burn in the first place, for his own ends. [yes, His.] But it may be another kind of God, one who does control but invites. Who offers possibility —what process theology (which I think y’all have encountered) calls the divine lure. Prophets like John of Patmos warn of nightmarish destruction to the human and nonhuman world due to systemic evil—but nowhere in the Bible is there in a literal sense The End of the World. It is not biblical language.
So what does apocalypse mean? The word —really literally--means dis/closure: not closure. Not The End of the World, but the opening of new possibility. It exposes the systemic destructiveness of our civilization only to reveal a vision of radical transformation. The hope. Not the same as a guarantee. As the theologian Karl Barth said almost a century ago: We as Christians are neither optimistic nor pessimistic: we are hopeful.
And that hope has a history. Not just biblical history. I was amazed to read an 1865 US book on the danger. It was Charles Perkins Marsh who wrote: “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime …would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism and perhaps even extinction of the species.” 1865. And Marsh’s prime example of the crime is the felling of the US forests. He tracks the services the forests provide,…how they cool their surroundings, ‘mitigate extremes’ of hot and cold…So the only chance he sees is what he calls—“the new creation.” Not God stepping in and doing our work for us. But humanity stepping up to the plate; finding what he called “higher motives.” Restraining the cutting, establishing protections, and becoming a “planter of woods.” Much of this did take off within 5 years of his book. With the founding of Forest Service etc.
But now those US protections against forest cutting are themselves getting cut. So we face the consequences of the now inevitable rise to two and a half degrees centigrade. Apocalyptic, yes, catastrophic—but not the End of our earth habitat. That kicks in with 3 degrees.
Our dominion still has a chance to transform into responsibility. But it’s hard, isn’t it, to press the importance of that little half degree Centrigrade of annual difference. It sounds abstract, even trivial; how can it be heard against the daily news din of human suffering? Gaza; Ukraine; immigrants… nonwhite and lgbtqcitizens…the folk your food kitchen serves…And I’m talking about trees?
Well, what we can do is insist that these diverse issues not compete with each other. The most socially vulnerable populations will be the ones most affected by global warming. Our divergent issues intersect. And that intersectionality is not just real and needed: it is deeply ecological. Ecology is all about the branching connections of all creatures. And about our responsibility, our ability to respond to beings different from humans—and to very different humans as well.
The Darwinian competition at play in nature is not in question. So the biblical Genesis of all of us good creatures kicked quickly into human sin—and we were quickly kicked out of Eden. The New Jerusalem is not a return to Eden. It signals the regenesis that is possible--even for this species so susceptible to that Beast-Whore pair. In John’s Apocalypse, those two turn on each other with chaotic effects. Chaos can offer-- openings. As it may in our lives, personally and collectively. New possibilities arise, new lures can be felt. In the midst of whatever chaos –we might remind ourselves that the new creation is a reprise of the Genesis creation: which is not, at least not in the bible, creation from nothing: it is from the tohuvabohu and the oceanic deep, the primal chaos. The creation from nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a post-biblical concept. And the world chaos of the apocalypse attests to how the hoped-for new creation also comes not out of nothing but out of great struggle. ….
Of course, our civilization may just proceed with the crucifixion of the natural environment. As I realized this Good Friday—we might see the cross itself with different eyes now. It is dead wood. A dead tree bearing an executed messiah. A double kill. But crucifixion does not get the last word. The new creation of the Bible’s last chapter dreams a material resurrection of our shared planetary life: New Jerusalem, a new atmosphere and earth. And it now depends not on God stepping in for the final fix; but upon what Pope Francis called care for our common home.
That care needs a lot of tree planting and protecting. Which needs understanding trees better. Of course, they live on a whole other time scale, making it hard for us to understand them. There’s a spruce in Sweden more than 9,500 years old. Trees take their time. And I have only recently learned that trees communicate with each other. The latest science demonstrates that trees have what the German forest manager Peter Wohlleben calls a hidden life. They pass electrical impulses through their roots to other trees; mediated by fungus. Trees help each other, for instance by warning of toxic pests. And they are startlingly social: the trees in “a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down, feeding it sugars and other nutrients, keeping it alive.” Not surprisingly, isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living in a forest. We are now hearing of the wood-wide web.
And New York? Tree-wise, we aren’t doing so bad, for a US city: we have a greater tree canopy than Philadelphia or LA, but smaller than Dallas! Staten Island is our leafiest borough, with about 31% canopy cover. Brooklyn, the most populous borough, is the most sparsely covered, at less than 18%: “All too predictably, lower-income communities and communities of color tend to have less coverage, which is a big part of what makes them more vulnerable to heat.” With all the historic redlining, and lesser access to cooling, safe housing and health care that systemic racism implies.
Even with such disparities, it is our common home that is under threat. And we are not likely to answer the threat without a livelier sense of that common home, human and otherwise. And a credible hope. Occasional meditation under a tree—like one of your splendid Thornless Honeylocusts—might help.
We might still rescue and regrow our wood-wide web of solidarity. Including the urban parks—like the riverside trees in the New Jerusalem. We may yet refresh the river of life spiritually and materially. Tuning to the Genesis goodness of all of us creatures. But is a planetary regeneration, a regenesis, not realistically speaking impossible? Or is such wood-wide and world-wide solidarity still possible? Like, even in this nation? Of course, I have to give John of Patmos the last word: “And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”