Lessons from our friends

The finest place to be during the hot, humid days of high summer is with your best friends. The place to find them is in the forest because that’s where they live.

Although we don’t always realize it, our best friends are trees. There is no more giving and sheltering species on our planet.

A storybook version of the unselfishness of a tree is found in the1964 children’s classic The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. It is the touching story of an apple tree that gives a boy selfless love.

The tree offers a place to play, a trunk to climb and branches on which to swing. It offers him apples to eat and later as he becomes a man, apples to sell. It allows him to cut its branches to built his home and a boat.

After a lifetime the tree is reduced to a stump and has nothing else to offer the boy, who has become an old man. Yet it does have one more thing to give – its stump as a place to sit and rest.

It is a touching story with a major flaw. It treats the tree as an object. In fact, a tree is a living being, which is born, lives and dies in a fashion similar to a human being. Some scientists even believe that trees communicate with each other through a network of soil fungi.

Most of us treat trees as objects from which we can take what we need, or simply want. Fuel, lumber for tools, homes and furniture, paper, shelter from sun, wind and other elements.

Trees offer us more than just stuff. Their colours, their stateliness, their scents soothe and relax us. Green, for instance, is a calming colour believed to relieve stress and aid healing.

More importantly trees have a critical role in balancing our environment. They block hot sun, damaging winds, snow and heavy rain. Without trees, soils bake and are washed away by water erosion, leaving a lifeless moonscape.

Trees are air conditioners that do not use electricity. Water evaporating from leaf surfaces removes heat energy from the air, therefore cooling it.

A project by North Carolina State University contends that evaporation for one tree can produce the cooling effect of 10 room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.

Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help grow their tissues, and at the same time release oxygen. Cars and trucks spew carbon dioxide along our streets and highways while roadside trees absorb it and give off life-giving oxygen.

Some research suggests one large tree releases enough oxygen to keep four people breathing each day.

Carbon is considered a main cause of global warming but we can never plant enough trees to counter the world’s rising carbon levels. Trees are doing their part by absorbing tons of carbon dioxide but they can only do so much. It is up to us to figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions, and we are working on that.

Trees also are teachers who give us lessons on living. When we see them burdened by freezing rain, or clinging to life on a rocky slope, or fighting drowning waters in a flooded area they teach us about tenacity and endurance and resisting any urge to give in.

Trees of course are rooted to one spot and cannot move, giving the message that you must carry on the best you can with the situation you are given.

Another important lesson we find in trees is the importance of strong roots. Understanding our roots and drawing strength from them helps us stay firm against the many tempests life hurls at us.

Also, trees teach us that nothing ever should be wasted. Even dead leaves and branches serve a purpose, decaying to provide soils with nutrients needed for sustaining life.

Above all other lessons trees teach us about community. Forests are communities of trees, which science is beginning to show communicate and help each other.

Just as no tree is a forest, no person is a community. There are a lot of people, certainly many business and political leaders, who should look into the forest and think hard on that.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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When statues speak

Statues cannot speak audible words but they had much to tell us last week.

In New York City July 4, Therese Okoumou, 44, was arrested for climbing the Statue of Liberty to protest the U.S. government’s arrest and separation of illegal immigrant families.

Liberty, the ‘Mother of Exiles,’ surely wept as armed police hauled Ms. Okoumou, an American citizen, off to jail and charged her with trespassing, disorderly conduct and interfering with government-agency functions.

Meanwhile 2,400 kilometres west, a statue as globally anonymous as Liberty is famous broadcast a serene smile of grace and hope across the plains surrounding the Missouri River in South Dakota.

That statue is a 15-metre high stainless steel sculpture of a Sioux woman receiving her Star Blanket from the sky. She was placed on a bluff overlooking the Missouri two years ago to honour the culture of the Sioux peoples.

Star Blankets are quilts that have powerful meaning among the Indigenous peoples of the American Plains and Canadian Prairies. They are given as gifts to show respect, honour and admiration for a person’s accomplishments and generosity.

To me the sculpture honours not only the generosity and accomplishments of Indigenous people, but the strength and the promise of women around the world.

Our world is a dangerous mess. We face catastrophic weather changes, massive human displacements, severe environmental problems, swelling inequality, cultural declines and rampant intolerance just to name a few. And to help us through all that, western societies increasingly elect hostile and vacuous politicians.

Lady Liberty’s torch, once a beacon of hope for the world, has become a sputtering candle flame unable to illuminate the path to a better life.

The Sioux woman gazing out over the South Dakota plains tells us not to despair. She shows us that people with the strength of their convictions and their traditions can resist and persevere through the worst that the world has to offer. She knows because her people, and other people like hers, have suffered the worst the world can deliver.

Indigenous women were the backbone of their societies. They created new life and sustained it through building shelter, providing food and comfort and cultural teachings. They were, and still are, the quiet and unseen decision makers of their communities.

Examples of their strengths and perseverance are found in the lives of Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who made possible the Lewis and Clark exploration of the American West. And, Charlotte Small, the Métis wife of Canadian explorer and map-maker David Thompson. Two of many Indigenous women leaders who endured racial discrimination while trying to keep traditional Indigenous life from being destroyed.

That’s why it is so disgusting when the president of the United States sneeringly refers to Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas because of her claim of having some Indigenous blood.

Women are providing more and more out front leadership in our societies, and it is much needed.

Studies have shown that female leadership is compassionate and inclusive, while male leadership tends to be hierarchal and exclusive. Woman are better at negotiating compromises.

Most importantly, women bring something too often missing today, notably in politics. It is called dignity, the state of being worthy of honour or respect.

Dignity is what you see in the face of Sioux woman standing above Missouri. That likely is why the folks who designed and placed the statue named her simply: Dignity.

 “My hope is that the sculpture might serve as a symbol of respect and promise for the future,” says Dale Lamphere, lead sculptor for Dignity.

No one defines Dignity better than Susan Claussen Bunger, an instructor of Native American social structures at South Dakota’s Augustana University. Here is what she said in a column in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader:

"She literally owns a spine of steel and reminds me of the injustice in the world, but also of strength, perseverance and survival. She signifies people who have prevailed through the centuries. She represents all who resist and strive forward. She portrays a rallying cry for those who wish to be heard and valued. She stands strong and proud . . . .”

Spines of steel, rallying cries, strength and perseverance and dignity are what the world needs to save us from ourselves.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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My mysterious bush visitors

Each spring at the start of bug season I receive mysterious visitors to the fringes of a bush lot I have along Highway 35.

They arrive in a white van, park on the edge of the highway then scurry into the woods with black garbage bags. From a distance they seem to be digging small plants and placing them in the bags.

Whenever I try to approach to ask them what they are doing, they scurry back to the van and drive off. They wear mosquito head nets so I can’t tell who they are except that they are middle age and speak what sounds like an Asian language. Usually there is a man and two women.

I don’t really care that they are on my property because I suspect they are gathering spring shoots of some kind for cooking and eating. But I would really like to know because it might be something interesting that I might want to cook and eat.

Various friends and family have offered guesses: Fiddleheads (ours are not the tasty delicacies found on the East Coast); wild asparagus (I would have found and eaten that before them), wild leeks (a possibility).

There are many possibilities because our woods are filled with dozens of edible low growing plants that most of us know nothing about.

Someone recently raised another possibility: “Is it ginseng they are digging up?”

Ginseng? I never knew that Ontario had wild American Ginseng, the roots of which have been used for thousands of years by our Indigenous people and other cultures as a traditional medicine.

We do indeed have it. It is found in the bottom half of Ontario, western Quebec and 34 U.S. states. It grows in mature hardwood forests that offer dark rich soil.

North American ginseng is similar to the Asian ginsengs and like the Asians our Indigenous peoples used it as an important medicine for ailments ranging from fevers to indigestion and headaches.

Father Joseph-François Lafitau, a French Jesuit priest, is credited with finding ginseng in the New World. He had read about Asian ginseng in reports from Jesuits in China and believed Canada had similar climate and surroundings and started looking for it.

In 1718 he found a ginseng plant growing near Montreal and was able to identify it definitely with the help of the Iroquois, who of course had been using it forever.

After that, trade in ginseng root exploded. Ginseng became a major export of New France, second only to furs. Trappers and frontiersmen made small fortunes digging it and selling it.

John Jacob Astor, the American fur baron, sold a boat load of ginseng to China, and legendary woodsman Daniel Boone is said to have dug the plants and sold loads of roots to China.

Like with so many other things, the European takeover of the New World began exhausting ginseng supplies.

Overharvesting and habitat loss have resulted in wild ginseng being declared a species at risk in Canada. It is illegal to harvest it. The penalty is as severe as a $250,000 fine and up to five years jail time.

Our Canadian courts often are too kind and poachers generally receive a fine of a few thousand dollars and a suspended sentence.

One wild ginseng root the size of an adult finger can bring a poacher $1,000 or more on the black market.

Ginseng scarcity is driving up prices and it has become an important cultivated crop in southern Ontario. Interestingly, some of Ontario’s new cultivated ginseng industry is operating on fields that once grew tobacco.

The Ontario Ginseng Growers Association reports that it now has about 160 members producing cultivated ginseng, much of which is sold to Asian markets. Ginseng demand is increasing in Asia        because of improving economies and a growing middle class.

The federal government says that Canada exported 263 million kilograms of cultivated ginseng, worth $239 million, to Asia in 2016.

It is a valuable plant but I don’t think that’s what the visitors to my property were after. They were picking some kind of shoot to eat, much like my wife and I sometimes go looking for tender young dandelions for salad.

  

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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