The Trees and Giants in the Earth

I wrote the following in response to a student who reviewed the Arbor Day Foundation which is established in Nebraska.  I appreciate your description of this organization and its founding. One of the things that needs to be explored is our relationship to land and our connection to the landscapes that we grow up with. I am a person of lakes and forest and it is where I want to live even though I love hiking in the desert and the badlands. Home is in the combination of trees and water. For some it is ocean breezes, some need the vast open horizons, some need heat, and some need seasons.

Over the centuries people move and carry with them the ideals of their ancestral home which causes them to go to the green houses and seed stores in an effort to make where they live closer to what is their ideal. Humans are landscape shapers - seldom taking the time as Leopold said to discover the real beauty and sense of place. This has led to the loss of prairie as well as the loss of forest. It has increased invasive species and it has led us to dig up the ridges and hills to fill in the low spots and valleys. People tinker - not satisfied with their "creators" work.

Decades ago I worked for a company that produced filmstrips (a very archaic film style) and we made one that I particularly like about the contrast between two books - The trees by Conrad Richter and Giants of the Earth by Rolvaag. In the trees the woman who is center piece to the trilogy is overwhelmed by the deep dark forest of Pennsylvania and celebrates the cutting of every tree and each new ray of light until at the end of the trilogy one tree is left, fenced in, in the town that has replaced the woods and she is struck by its pathos and the deeds that her people had done.

In Rolvaag's work, the woman that is centerpiece to the epic journey to the Dakotas hates the openness, the lack of limits, the rolling wind across the prairie and the waves in the grass. She needs structure for her eyes, limits to the edges of the world, and an arboreal reference to both size and distance. She is tormented and driven crazy by this and of course wants to plant the prairies in trees.