The Leaves of the Tree

Two springs ago, a major late winter storm knocked down a number of trees near my community garden plot on the grounds of a nearby hospital. By the time planting season rolled around, the grounds crew had turned it all into woodchips, speckled with shredded leaves, and left them heaped up on a back lot.

I discovered this lot one night while cycling home from the garden. Right next to it I found something else: an immense pile of leaves that had been collected around the hospital grounds and were now slowly decomposing. It was clear there was no plan for either of these piles. They had been dumped out of the way and were well on their way to being forgotten, of little value to anyone at the hospital.

To a gardener, however, these piles were of immense value. As my garden took root that spring and early summer, I took load after wheelbarrow load of wood chips and leaves back to my garden to use as mulch, mixing them with the grass clippings that the large hospital mower had left behind on its rounds. By the middle of the summer my bean, cucumber, tomato, and squash plants were surrounded by nearly a foot of mulch. I knew the mulch would retain moisture and ensure that the soil would stay damp, so when I went away on vacation later in the summer, I didn’t bother to ask anyone to water. When I came back, the garden was flourishing in a way I had rarely seen before. That fall, when I was putting the garden to bed for the winter, I left the mulch in place to continue decomposing. In the spring, I found the soil both richer and airier than I had ever known it to be.

Trees are having a bit of a moment – or perhaps it is more accurate to say that many of us are finally beginning to acknowledge what has been true all along. As the urgency of the climate crisis increases, we are realizing the significance of trees to the ecosystem. Trees help absorb rainwater from increasingly torrential downpours. They offer shade on scorching summer days. They remove carbon dioxide from the air and provide habitat for animals. Not surprisingly, the city of Montreal is planting trees at a rapid clip, including on the grounds of the hospital where I garden (mulching the new saplings with, perversely, imported wood chips that come in plastic bags). We are also becoming aware in this city of the connection between trees and justice. Flying back to Montreal recently, I flew over two adjacent boroughs of the city, one carpeted by a canopy of beautiful green, the other decidedly not. It was a sea of green next to a warren of hard, dark asphalt and concrete. No need to guess which of these boroughs is full of million-dollar homes, good schools, and a Tesla dealership, and which is the one where home ownership rates are low and schools perform less well.

The forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has become a minor celebrity in Canada and beyond with her bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree. Her lifetime of research has been dedicated to exploring the ways in which trees work in a cooperative manner to ensure their sustained growth and flourishing. Simard has explored the way that fungal networks connect trees underground and the way in which a single “mother tree” serves as an anchor and nurturer to a whole community of its offspring. Trees, we are realizing, have a lot to teach us about how we can live together in ways that work toward our mutual flourishing.

Photograph by D. Jakli / Adobe Stock.

The significance of trees to human flourishing is also apparent in the frequent mention of trees in the Bible. Abraham welcomes three strangers under the oak at Mamre. At a moment of contention when Israelites are wandering in the wilderness, God turns Aaron’s staff into an almond tree as an indication of his favor. Jonah learns a lesson of God’s providence from a fig tree. The cedars of Lebanon form the structure of Solomon’s temple and also provide a metaphor for God’s caring protection in the shade they offer. In the New Testament, Jesus explicitly picks up on shade as a metaphor for life in his kingdom, only this time the shade is provided not by towering cedars but by a scraggly mustard bush. Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree, the better to see Jesus.

And, of course, trees are there at the beginning and at the end. The Garden of Eden is a kind of forest: “Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9). So, too, a tree stands at the center of the New Jerusalem described at the end of Revelation: “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).

But today, trees are grabbing our attention for another reason as well: they’re on fire. When I took the wheelbarrow loads of leaves and wood chips back to my garden, I did so on the rare clear days in the midst of a summer that saw wildfire smoke become Canada’s leading export. And it’s not just Canada but also the American West, Spain, Greece, Chile, Australia. We are learning the names of communities just as they get wiped from the map: Paradise, Lahaina, Fort MacMurray, Jasper. Trees are burning at unprecedented rates because humans have so dramatically changed the climate. Extended droughts and scorching temperatures are turning trees from a vital part of our ecosystems into tinder just waiting to be set ablaze, simultaneously dumping tons of carbon into the air and eliminating a valuable carbon sink.

As I pushed those wheelbarrow loads of leaves back to my garden on those summer evenings, I found myself revisiting that last passage. Revelation promises the healing of the nations. The need for such healing is obvious in places of raging conflict such as Sudan, Gaza, or Ukraine. But it is a need that we all share as we face a planet-wide climate emergency and struggle to meaningfully coordinate our action in response. Too many other values – national autonomy, economic wealth, cost of living – crowd out our ability to respond and allow the planet to work toward its own healing and stability.

A Christian orientation to God’s future action reminds me that the brokenness of this world will never be fully healed until God fulfills all things. The full healing of the nations promised in Revelation may be out of our reach. But because Christians know what this future will be like, we are called to work toward it now in anticipation of what will one day be. And Revelation sees clearly that our redemption will involve trees – and leaves. I know how trees can be part of our response to climate change. I also see how they are a testimony to the damage we have already done. But Revelation is quite specific. It is the leaves of the tree that are to be for the healing of the nations. What value could there be in something so apparently disposable and insignificant?

I grew up in New England. Both there and here in Quebec, autumn is a time when tourists turn out to see the brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows of the leaves before they fall to the ground – generating along the way revenue for hotels, restaurants, and tour guides. Aside from this “leaf peeping,” I can think of no economic value for leaves. In logging, the most economically oriented of all our relationships with trees, the value is found in the trunk. When a cut block is clear-cut, as often happens in Quebec, the trees are limbed and the trunks loaded onto trucks for transport to the mill. The slash, the branches that remain, are heaped in a pile and burned, or left behind while the crew moves on to a new block. And it’s not just in logging operations. Arborists and tree specialists need to chip what they cut down, which imposes a cost. If there is a value, it’s a negative one.

Yet while leaves may not have much economic value, their ecological value is tremendous. In forests, leaves decompose into the earth, creating the rich humus that nurtures the growth of trees and other life. Leaves contain the carbon and nutrients that are at the root of all life.

In an economically driven society, the logic of the market shapes most interactions. When a market is involved, the only value that matters is the price arrived at between a buyer and seller. The reach of this logic continues to grow. There are fewer and fewer goods, services, and collective acts beyond the reach of the market. Everything, from the names of sports stadiums to the time spent waiting in line, from surge pricing for concert tickets to short-term housing rental policy, is determined by the market. As the philosopher Michael Sandel argues in his book What Money Can’t Buy, we have moved from “having a market economy to being a market society.” The former is a valuable tool; the latter is a way of life in which “social relations are made over in the image of the market.” The discontent and rage that course through our politics, from left and right, in the United States and beyond, are an indication that people have noneconomic values that aren’t being heard. Values like community, kinship, and neighborliness in a thriving public square are central to how so many of us approach the world. Yet political discourse – wrapped up as it is in promoting consumer confidence, household income, and gross domestic product growth – has become so overwhelmed by an economic frame for value that all else is left to the side. Yes, the cost of living matters and a market economy is a fine tool for managing some aspects of human interactions. But neither is – nor should be – the end of politics or the sole tool for building a thriving human society. Locking ourselves into a market-oriented society has left us with a shriveled conception of value and a blindness to the many forms of noneconomic value that are needed for a thriving world.

This past summer I again spent evenings with leaves, carting them over to my garden. I don’t do this because it makes economic sense or because it is an efficient use of my time. I do so because it makes ecological sense, because at least in this respect I can see worth outside the logic of the market. Leaves are astonishingly fragile and insubstantial. They last a season and then fall away, never once bought or sold. They contribute almost nothing measurable to GDP and cannot lower the cost of living. Yet their value to the ecosystem, to current and to future life, is tremendous. Leaves remind us that just because something doesn’t have a price doesn’t mean it has no value. They are not worthless. They are invaluable. Leaves can heal the nations.

There’s a wonderful subtlety in the phrase “for the healing of the nations.” It implies that this healing has not yet happened – it is a future event. For a book that is often understood to be about the end of the world and the end of time, this verse in Revelation is a helpful reminder that God’s action to consummate all things in the New Jerusalem does not happen outside of history, but within history – the history we are living right now. True, the leaves we have now are not those of the New Jerusalem, but they are its precursors. We don’t need to wait around for something new to begin to work toward the healing of the nations. We just need to see what God has already given us, and having recognized it, allow that recognition to transform our way of being in the world.