In California, a young tree looked on as a group of people engineered bark and wood into what would become the first boat. Four thousand years later the same tree, Methuselah, now overlooks a town that hosts a wild, wild west marathon. Trees have witnessed the worst of human nature – lynching, war, and treason – and the best of human nature – sanctuary, glory, and liberty.
Hangman’s elm in NYC’s Washington Square park has attained over 300 years of age. While it seems not to have witnessed any actual executions, in its earliest years this English elm observed the decline of the Lenape Indians, the city’s reduction of slave ownership, the control by British soldiers and the state’s eventual annexation to the newly emergent United States.
The oldest tree in central park is the great London plane near the reservoir. That tree grew up amid rocks and swamps. She lived to see the creation of a park and witnessed the invention of the automobile, the airplane and jogging.
Trees talk to one another. They work together to create forests and parks, forging ecosystems from the available amounts of earth, air and rain.
Psychologists pay a great deal of attention to relationships between people and less so to those between people and the environment. Yet every relationship occurs in a physical space. Remembrances of loved ones often include the spaces and places where they were known.Every human action that imbues consciousness with meaning takes place in a material environment . Psychological knowledge usually excludes those landscapes that inhabit almost every memory and importantly shape the neuro-cognitive and relational bases of personality. (more…)
Ordinary Earth ™ 