For vigilante tree pruners past present & future

Plus: Sacajawea, People of Corn, Nucleated Forestry, Schools of Attention, Fireflies

For vigilante tree pruners past present & future

the day before the world changed,
when I had already cast my vote for
and was riding high on my confidence in
a First Woman President,
contractors came to cut our
    leafless sickly
    red maple street tree
down to logs
down to stump,
and one contractor looked at me,
excited,
and said:
"Vote for Trump!"

The city arborist recommended
(yes, the city has an arborist!
a small mustachioed man
named Bower
who one often sees
staring at trees
consternated)
the katsura.
"it has slender branches,"
he said
and what a sales pitch!
what other criteria should we use,
to discern among two pages
of pictureless, descriptionless
common and latin names?
we went with katsura.
convinced our neighbors,
four doors north,
fellow dead-red-maple havers,
to choose likewise.
filled the forms,
sent the check,
waited the months.
and one day,
unannounced,
while we were out,
the crew came.
mulched the stump,
planted the sapling,
gave the lesson:
fill the water bag
weekly, for a year.
maybe two.
Katya, we named her.
Katya Katsura.
May she grow as tall, as old, as grand
as the oak across the street.

So imagine our horror
when her branches started falling!
Causes most unnatural;
clean cuts with shears!
One branch this day;
days later: another!
Over and over,
someone with malintent
and proper tools
harming our baby!

only—

she grew taller?
less eye-pokey,
more sun-reachy?
over the roofline
in just a few years?
brighter green leaves
than the four-doors-north neighbors'
(though maybe that's because of the shade
from the tree in between)

The street trees in Barcelona
are great vaulted ceilings,
first branches appearing
at the roofline,
it must be,
of my city's short buildings.
Their octogon blocks
make every intersection
a diamond-shaped parklet,
and trees bloom over
like great living umbrellas.
Many crews, I'd wager,
earn their keep
keeping them pruned.

This year, this season,
Season of Trees Poke Eyes,
I became my old nemesis.
Catalyzed by a stabby bush of a tree,
neighbors doing the limbo to make it past.
Pruning shears in fanny pack,
I headed out. Morning run interrupted,
    punctuated,
       enlivened
six, seven, eight times
to chop a tree up to size.
Man with a trash can, volunteering,
de-littering cemetery's border,
binned my smaller tossed red bud branches,
and asked if I was with the North East Neighbors.
No, I said.
Unaffiliated.
He thanked me.
They always mean to get to this
sooner.
Older woman, walking dog,
thanked me. I'm visually impaired,
she said. And sometimes the branches
poke me in the eyes.
I'm not visually impaired,
I said. And sometimes the branches
poke me in the eyes.
She chit-chatted while I pruned
and a man came out of the bottle shop
and told me off.
We prune our own trees! He said.
Ok, I said. And put my shears away.

Vandalism?
Or care?

You can too.

Dear tree neighbors:
I will help your reputation with the humans.
I will guide you away from cars,
from eyes,
from carried children's eyes.
I will help you reach toward the light.

Dear human neighbors:
if you do not have
    the time
    the tools
    the confidence
to prune your own trees:
I got you.
It takes a village
to raise a tree.
Let's vault these ceilings.

The world didn't change all at once that day.
It grew
    shoot by shoot,
    branch by branch,
and me,
    walking past,
    over and over,
oblivious,
until it poked me in the eye.

It's time to grab your shears.
Stop waiting for permission.
We've got pruning to do.

paying it forward, pruning someone else’s katsura

Scientific Animism in the wild

Links to Scientific Animist resources, notes on Scientific Animist-flavored meetups, and maybe some nature observations/questions.

The Lost Journals of Sacajawea

I just finished The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Magpie Earling. I’d categorize it as more straight-animist than scientific-animist, but still an important and worthwhile read, written in a voice like no other. The voice is at once the most challenging and most rewarding part of the book. It took a while to get into the flow of it. I put the book down for a while, then picked it up again and read the rest fast. It helped that it starts moving faster about halfway through. I loved being immersed in her world; her perspective; her indigenous worldview at that poignant moment when so much was about to be lost. It did that thing that good sci-fi does: defamiliarization.

The book is many things, but if I were to sum it up in two of its own quotes, I’d pick this, spoken by Clark’s slave York:

And I’d pick this one, spoken by The Woman Who Never Dies, who wears a dress of mirrors:

Old Woman’s mirrors begin to glitter, to twitch with stories, to shine with voices.
Do not trust anyone who tells you you cannot tell your story.
Do not trust anyone who tells you there is only one story.
If there were only one story
Or one way of seeing things all stories would die.

Having grown up white on the east coast, I feel some disconnect from Sacajawea and the Lewis & Clark expedition. It’s not something we have a lot of interaction with here. Since reading it, I’ve looked up interviews with the author, and it seems like The West is steeped in Lewis & Clark mythos. If that were my context, this book would hit even harder. To oversimplify Earling on the Vulgar History podcast: Lewis & Clark are to The West what the confederate flag is to The South.

I’ve started to adopt some of the language of Earling’s Sacajawea. Seven-year-old Sacajawea pities the white man, blind to all but four seasons. She has one for every moon. She has names for them.

Season of Budding Moon.

Season of Rutting Moon.

What are twelve nameable seasons where I live?

Season of Trees Poke Eyes is ending. The trees, thanks in part to my efforts, are much less likely to poke us in the eyes now, compared to a month ago.

The next season could have many names.

• Season of Fools Poison Ground, as all the verdant green finding its way in sidewalk cracks and street tree beds gets herbicided.

• Season of Cicada Moon. I heard my first couple cicadas a few days ago, heralding the change of season.

• Season of Mosquito Moon. A month ago: no mosquitoes. Now? 😭 Horse-fly-sized tiger mosquitoes swarm us in our yard, rush in the door after us, bite our feet and legs while we eat dinner.

What season is it, where you live?

Braiding Sweetgrass

Finally finished it! 😂 Spent almost a year working through it bit-by-bit on audiobook. It has found its way into the rhythm of our family life: my five-year-old frequently requests it on car trips, and raves that Robin Wall Kimmerer is “the best storyteller.”

I have at least one friend who quit the book during the chapter “Witness to the Rain,” where Kimmerer describes the varied sounds of raindrops falling from different leaves. On audiobook, I thought this chapter was great! Short, engaging, and wise. But I also want to say: if you dropped out at this point, pick the book back up! That’s the last chapter before the “Burning Sweetgrass” section of the book, where things really get, you know, fiery!

I especially loved “People of Corn, People of Light.” Its call to action forms a good vision statement for this newsletter. I’ve added the following to the “Your Words Here” section of the About page:

What writing qualifies as Scientific Animist? I covered this a little bit in my Scientific Animist Reading List, but I think RWK said it better in the “People of Corn, People of Light” chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass. She notes that patient observation, the hallmark of scientific study, fosters a profound respect and empathy for the larger world. That many scientists feel reverence for the more-than-human, and are the first to learn their lessons, to hear their voices. And yet, what we think of as “The Scientific Worldview” often manifests as a reductionist, materialist perspective, and much of academic and scientific writing deepens our societal alienation from nature.

She calls on scientists and science-minded people to bridge this gap; to write about scientific inquiry in a way that fosters humility and reverence toward the rest of the world.

On Being: On Nature’s Wisdom For Humanity

My favorite part of this episode was the bit about nucleated forestry. If you want to reforest a clear cut, rather than planting trees like trad ag corn in rank and file across the whole field, you plant a great abundance of species, clustered in welcoming islands here and there. Nucleuses of baby forests, with just 16% of the coverage you’d need in the “trees as corn” approach, plus a few posts where birds can land and shit, spreading seeds from the welcoming islands.

Then the circles of healing grow toward each other.

[Until] if we were to reach out our hand in the dark… we might find another hand.

The discussion pairs beautifully with the Braiding Sweetgrass chapter “Old-Growth Children.”

My hope for Scientific Animism is that its practitioners might be part of these circles of healing, repairing our broken relationship with the earth. And maybe not even as part of the final Old Growth landscape.

Maybe this is just the early ground cover needed to protect the nutrients that are still in the soil, or to prevent further erosion—a “weed species” as this On Being episode puts it, and which Kimmerer calls a “pioneer species” (not sure which is the bigger insult, tbqh!). Or maybe it’s the brambles and berries that come after that. If it’s not a permanent fixture in a repaired, steady-state ecology, I’m ok with that.

Attentional Triad

1. Sophie Strand
   on Disappearing Stars and Fake Realism. Maybe the deep truths of life are too dim to see in the direct gaze of realism. “The issues we face exceed our sensory apparatus. They are too big for our direct vision. We must instead approach them like cats – like stars – from the side and from behind.”

2. Nathan Heller for The New Yorker on The Battle for Attention. Gotta make it to New York City for a class / “Attention Lab” held by the Friends of Attention. Or maybe an action by the Order of the Third Bird? I would love for Scientific Animism to emulate their “decentralized, ungoverned” operating model, where any member across many dispersed local chapters can call actions. “Everything I saw in life disclosed the same thing: the world is more interesting than the image of it in my head.”

3. Ezra Klein interviewing one of the main characters from the New Yorker article above in Your Mind is Being Fracked gets into more detail on the Attention Experiments of the Friends of Attention. These would make good cold-weather Scientific Animist practice/ritual/ceremony, when it’s harder to be contemplative out in nature for long stretches. “Each of [these institutions—religion, education, art—has] meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention… an attention that isn’t triggerable. It won’t target. You can’t bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows not.”

Shoutout to friend Audrey for telling me about the New Yorker article when I told her about the Ezra Klein episode, and for letting me borrow her physical copy. Much better for attention that a screen!

Firefly Social

Lancaster Cemetery is the best place to see fireflies in our city, and Tim Freund knows it. Tim is part of the team that manages the cemetery, and helped make the Tree Funeral the success it was. Tim posted a public invite for a Firefly Social on Reddit, which coincided almost perfectly with the full moon and solstice. I thought this seemed like great Scientific Animist ritual for a full moon, which I picture as more social, chatty events (New Moons being more quiet & contemplative). I asked if he’d be ok with me promoting it to my circles. He was. I sent a Partiful invite to many people, but in the end couldn’t even go. Lots of other people enjoyed each others’ company and some glowing bugs.

Feel free to use any or all of this to organize your own Firefly Social! What a cute event name! Great job, Tim!

And actually, the solstice turned out to be just a couple days too early for this. By a few nights later, the fireflies were much more abundant. As I write this, they’re going wild. (I guess we are also now in the Season of Firefly Moon.)

What are these bugs?

On a walk in said cemetery looking for fireflies, I heard a tiny fluttering noise in what I think is a holly tree. I almost pressed onward to the thing I thought I was there to see, which was the glowing bugs ahead. But decided to slow down and be open to the world. The sound was bugs, flying in and out, in and out of the holly tree, their wings beating against the leaves. They almost looked like fireflies, in the way they flew, but they weren’t lighting up. And I’m a big baby when it comes to touching unfamiliar flying insects in the dark, and didn’t let one land on me. What are they? What are they up to? You can hear and see them below, along with some real-time commentary from me.