Only faith can save the trees

Let me take you on a walk, as I describe the majesty that surrounds me, just a block from my home here in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. This forest, my classroom, my office, my grocery store, and my place of worship, was created by God's hand. Ten thousand years ago, the ocean retreated, leaving a sandy stretch of land along the Atlantic coast of North America, flat and wind-swept. The land was stoneless, free of top soil. Over the millennia, Pitch Pine forests and cathedral-like cedar swamps emerged. The sweet waters remaining from melted glaciers were tinted tea-coloured by the roots of the trees through which they streamed. In my forest, the water, which was still potable 10 years ago, is tea-coloured. Close to the cedar streams, strange otherworldly flowers compensate for lack of soil nutrients by developing carnivorous strategies, luring insects into deep, sticky interiors, and then releasing enzymes to consume them.

The Pitch Pine, which is the dominant species in the Pine Barrens, is an unusual tree. It could not compete against the more robust deciduous growth, so it evolved a unique strategy: it developed a highly flammable sap and a thick outer bark which allows it to survive conflagration. Lightning, even excess heat, ignites the sap. The forest catches fire, burns out all competing flora, and then regenerates itself. The pitch pine cone opens when exposed to extreme heat, releasing tiny, winged seeds that ride on the thermals caused by a forest fire. Recent encroachment of housing developments has forced fire-fighters to stop these naturally occurring fires, thus changing the biome in favour of deciduous trees.

Threat of forest fires notwithstanding, when I have trouble writing, I take a pad and pencil and head down the street. Recently, I am also armed with flash cards filled with new Bengali words I am studying in my very feeble attempt to master this fascinating language. Somehow, my mind is more focused in the forest than anywhere else, especially when the weather is brisk and the animals are scarce. In the winter, a cold ocean breeze shakes the pines. If you happen to camp out on a mattress of pine needles this time of year, you might wake up with a skunk in your sleeping bag. These fearless creatures with sweet dispositions are universally feared by every creature in the forest. Their spray can be smelled kilometres away, and the smell can last for weeks. But if you do not threaten them, they will cuddle with you for warmth. In the streams, beaver build dams from gnawed branches. Snapping turtles with beaks that are strong enough to break a broom handle bury themselves in the mud to keep warm, and the diving beetles just seem to disappear as winter quiets the forest.

In December, only the white tail deer and the hunter are on the move. The hunter, high in his tree stand, watches for the flicker of a white tail and a quick movement of antlers. The bow hunter knows and loves his quarry. I have been out with hunters who have spared deer because they were too healthy, too vibrant, too important to the herd to let fly the arrow.

Enormous flocks of Canadian geese congregate in meadows and mowed areas near the water. The climate has gotten warmer, and now these geese do not bother to fly south. For the goose, the deer, and the bears that live a little further north, human habitation has caused a lack of natural predators, and an overpopulation problem. Few people hunt or gather anymore, but my family has dined on the bounty of the forest: deer, goose, squirrel, persimmons, cranberries, prickly pear, pine needle and sweet fern tea, even almond-tasting cicadas.

In the dead of winter, after every snowfall, I have a tradition of trudging down to the brook near my house. My footprints are the only ones in the deep snow, besides an occasional coyote, a domestic dog or cat, or perhaps a rabbit. I carry a towel. When I get to the abandoned swimming hole, I break the ice and challenge myself to a swim. The numbing cold is invigorating. I love the feel of snowflakes on my shoulders. After my swim, once I'm dry, I no longer feel the cold.

I find shelter under a thick pine bough, and in the silence of the snowy forest, I become acutely aware of the infinite ever-present hand of God in all of this. Though I am a Catholic, it is a verse I read in the Quran (in English) long ago, which keeps echoing in my thoughts: "Which of God's blessings would you deny?" I am alive, so alive and so grateful for this place and this time.

Spring comes, and with it the swamp maple yields its sugar for those who would tap the tree. The sprigs of the catbrier and the tender shoots of the raspberry and blackberry bushes are edible and delicious. I snack on the wintergreen berries, the tiny wild rose hip raisins, and the cranberries that reveal themselves at the water's edge.

When the summer is upon us, I go to the woods to play with my children and adopted grandchildren, to swim in the brook and to walk the scorching hot sands barefoot to gather bushels of blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. We build fires to ward off the mosquitoes, gather the thick, golden pine pollen to make pancakes, or canoe toward the bay that leads to the ocean. August surrenders its easy treasures to September, and autumn comes to the Pine Barrens. This is the time of acorn gathering, a time when the streams grow red with cranberries. We gather the roots of the pond lilies, and we wait for the persimmon and the beach plum to ripen. Within each passing season, I find new reasons to be grateful, I am surrounded by undeniable blessings from God.

What is remarkable about my forest is that it was nearly ploughed under for a housing development and a church. My two eldest daughters, walking door to door, petitioned the town not to sell the land to developers. The land that they saved, called "The 88 acres" is the last sanctuary left on a busy thoroughfare not to be paved into oblivion. I cannot think of a church that could inspire thoughts of God like this piece of the earth, "laid by God himself, for all of His creatures." Nothing made by the hand of man can compare, and as the world increasingly falls under the control of human development, we are losing our precious connection to the original gift we have been given, and perhaps because of this, our daily lives become less connected with the source. It is much easier to be an atheist if you live in a manmade world.

My friend, Kenneth Little Hawk — a Native American storyteller has often said, "We are not apart from nature, we are a part of nature." In the wild areas, as part of nature, we can find an ecumenical place of worship, a sense of universal belonging, a place that inspires us to contemplate the divine. If we believe this to be the case, then preserving the wild places is a struggle that all God's people must embrace. Conservation cannot and should not be the exclusive purview of the secular world. It is the one point upon all the world's religions can agree. Yet any discussion of the religious significance of environmentalism was, for the most part, absent from the Climate Change summit in Cancun. If you think this is a trivial matter, consider this: besides economic evolution, what is the only factor to ever change individual and societal behaviour on a grand scale? What is the quickest route to reform? Religion, religion, religion.

That is why climate change legislation, conservation, protection of wild places and endangered species, none of it will work until it becomes a cause sanctioned by faith. Religion needs the wilderness, and the wilderness needs religion. The leaders of all faiths, regardless of their differences, can find scripture that relates to the caretaking of the precious planet that was created by God, for all of us. Scientists, alarmed by the cataclysmic trends that are reaching a point of irreversibility might claim that "at this point, only God can save the planet". People of faith would claim that this has been the case since the beginning:

The Jews would say, "But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth and it will teach you; the fish of the sea, they will inform you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Eternal has done this?" (from the book of Job)

The Christians would say, "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — God's eternal power and divine nature — has been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made."

And from my own English copy of the Quran, "He laid the earth for His creatures, with all its fruits and blossom-bearing palm, chaff-covered grain and scented herbs. Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?"

Let us all be able to say, when our life has run its course, that we did not squander or misuse the gift we were given to pass to our great-grandchildren, the natural wonder of God's creation. For if we do, their lack of understanding of things Divine will be on our conscience.

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", is scheduled to be released by Findhorn Press in May of 2011.