Do you have a favourite tree?

I don't mean a favourite type of tree, but an actual individual tree. Maybe this is a strange question to ask, sort of like asking if you have a favourite wall or street sign. Trees are just kind of there, not something that often comes to the foreground of our thoughts unless there’s a problem (a tree branch falls on your car or something).

When I was a kid, I had a favourite tree. It was an extra tall one in the forest near a family farm where we spent summers. In the mornings I’d throw some snacks, books and binoculars into a bag and run to it, climb and just spend time sitting there reading or imagining. Oddly, thinking about it gives me a wave of nostalgia, almost as though I’m remembering an old friend.

While that may seem unusual, consider the role that trees have played in the folklore and traditions of communities all around the world. Often associated with wisdom and the interconnection of life, trees have acted as the central gathering spot for both sacred and social rituals. In many Indigenous cultures, trees are deeply intertwined with memory and connection to ancestors. And in some traditions, trees can act as a link between the physical and spiritual realms, places where one might even have a chance encounter with a guiding spirit or trickster god.

It can be humbling to think about all the history and lives that trees bear witness to. Engagements, rites of passage, festivals, quiet moments of reflection, storytelling, memorials, and every other milestone and event that has taken place under or around them. And that’s to say nothing of all the other, non-human living things that enter their presence.

Regrettably, in the history of urbanization, trees are often seen as an obstacle or burden in the way of development — something to destroy, domesticate or relocate rather than work with and around. Maybe this is why so many of us rarely think of trees anymore except as a problem. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are lots of emerging models (drawing on ancient wisdom) in how our built environment can have a healthy relationship with nature.

Evergreen (where I work) began as a tree planting organization in a bid to bring nature back into our cities. For over 30 years, we've been inspired by the way trees work together with one another to create a canopy for life to thrive, offering everything from food, shade, rest to even a safe transportation network for non-human living things. That's why we now invest in the power of public spaces. Just like trees, they too are the vital layers that enable city life to flourish.

Note: this was a piece I wrote for our Evergreen Newsletter this month.

In keeping with the urban theory reading self-guided reading course I'm doing, I thought I'd take a brief sidestep here for a bit of theological take on the topic. It is Sunday after all...

A few years back I read a book on the theology of the built environment by T.J. Gorringe. It's worth noting that my interest in urbanism in large part came from my mdiv where I was taught to see theology as a contextual project, not something that just exists outside of time and space. Not only that, but my professor (and the founder of the particular program I took, Donald Goertz, always said that the bible was primarily urban in nature. Anyways, as a part of one of my directed reading courses, I read this particular book and I thought it might be nice to just share a thought from it today that also builds off Mumford's work on the origin of cities.

Gorringe here is riffing off Mumford and considering how cities do or do not participate in the economy of redemption, that is, creating something that lasts for the betterment of the world.

"If Mumford is right, the Hellenistic city effectively built to celebrate its own achievements, as did Imperial Rome. This ought to be a warning to us, for today we wander about in their ruins. For what gave a new lease of life to Rome was Christianity without which, at several points in the past two millennia, it would probably not have survived. Cities necessarily have markets; they are centres of the arts and of innovation. But without a creative spirituality, a sense of transcendent purpose, they die."

I've always kind of liked the idea that cities have a soul, so to speak, and like people, that soul can be nurtured or starved. I think this puts it in an interesting framing, calling it a transcendent purpose. Going back a few days to what I was reflecting on with Mumford in the way that cities began as spaces for ritual and memory, I think it's interesting to consider what gives a city that spark. We sort of intuitively know when we visit a city that has it. It feels alive and exciting. It might also be why suburban sprawl can feel so soulless, they lack a transcendent purpose.

Mumford traces the evolution from city to empire through a brilliant question. As a city's population grew and the need for more land and food grew with it, how does the city achieve this? He lays out two options: either by cooperation or conquest.

Of course, the trajectory that he has already laid out around the power myth at the core of the development of the city leads to only one answer. But for me this gets at the very myth we need to break as a species. We have continuously chosen conquest to the detriment of our planet. It has brought about ecological ruin and left billions in poverty and exploitation. The power myth of conquest (or competition under capitalism's narrative) has failed us.

What I find interesting is the way he describes the collective ambition of the city as being one of cooperation, people coming together for greater safety and wellbeing. We have just become too dependant on a model that turns to strongmen in order to preserve it. Perhaps the real tension at play is cooperation vs anxiety. Our increased security and comforts feed that anxiety—and so we accept the promises of protection to our own detriment. Maybe the way forward into cooperation requires first dealing with our collective anxieties.

Something Mumford draws attention to is the way organized war is the result of the city rather than something inherent to humanity itself. He notes that as people were drawn in to the promises of cooperation and safety, they gave their protection over to a skilled and powerful leader. This leader was often seen as both spiritual and political leader, with the divine power capable of keeping the community safe from all threats.

I found it particularly interesting the way he roots the origins of this war in the role of human sacrifice. The leader, who had taken the responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of the community, had to have ways to appease the forces of nature they were at the mercy of. Human sacrifice was one way they would do this.

“Beneath all war’s technical improvements lay an irrational belief, still deeply embedded in the collective consciousness: only by wholesale human sacrifice can the community be saved.” (Mumford, 45)

What may have began as small raids to seek out victims, grew to become sizeable numbers in some areas, perhaps representative of the growing collective anxiety the city produced. Mumford's point was that over time, the power of the king became the point: the power to control, subdue, or destroy. Organized war was their invention, used to eliminate threats to their power—real or imagined.

Started reading Lewis Mumford's 'The City in History' this morning as a part of a self-guided reading course I've put together for myself. Something that stood out in today's reading was the role that ritual, particularly related to burial and honouring the dead, played in the formation of permanent settlement. These rituals went beyond just a burial plot to art and other symbolic practices, what he notes as a nod to a way of living that speaks to a more complex need for humans to form societies than merely survival.

It is the same way of life that compels art and performance and other forms of meaning-making ritual in our cities today. From the street artist to the ornate sacred space, these things invite us into a communal life that goes beyond meeting our physical needs to touching on something more transcendent.