Written by: Courtney Remacle
I must pass over 1,000 trees on my drive to and from work. It is autumn now, and they are starting to change color. Soon the leaves will turn brown and drop to the forest floor while they will decompose slowly under a blanket of snow. In the darkest depths of winter, I have to remind myself that the trees are not dead; they are just in a deep slumber through the harshest of seasons. They will wake up and shake off the cold and burst with life again, as we all will; as we all must. In the spring the trees will burst forth and bud so robustly that it would be easy to convince ourselves that that the trees are filled with a life-force all their own, but the truth is they draw energy and nutrients from the sun, from the soil, from the tiny beings writhing away underground. The tree, in turn, produces oxygen that sustains the life of the organisms that are in turn sustaining it. Every time you see a tree, you are looking at a tiny system that’s part of a bigger system that’s part of an even larger system and the minute you try to put your finger on the intersection of these systems your cells will explode with the wonder and terror and bigness that is this web of life.
Image via freerangestock.com
Sustainability is human-made concept that has been picked apart and hodge-podged back together; pasted over natural systems and plastered to books and schools and habits so often that it’s becoming meaningless. A tree doesn’t know what sustainability is. A tree doesn’t need to know what sustainability is. All of the life forms and life forces that are sustaining the tree don’t know what sustainability is. But the existence of the tree and all of the things providing it with life are proof that sustainability is real, and important, and possible. To me, this is the essence of sustainability-being rooted deeply in a network of ever-reverberating exchanges that hold us in place and provide us with what we need while calling us to give. It’s a way of living and being that is so simple it is carried out millions of times a day all around us, yet is too complex to become axiomatic or to lend itself easily to charts and definitions. In the moments when I’m able to catch myself, briefly, feeling deeply entrenched in this web of life I am reminded of how trees weather, and grow, and rest and recycle and create beauty and death and life and change with the seasons while remaining firmly planted in their place, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. And this is what I hope for all of us.