13th

“Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.” -Henry Melvill, “Partaking in Other Men’s Sins”

There is a young cherry tree behind Taylor Hall that is currently blooming, although it is mid-December. On the last day of classes of my first semester of college, my hallmate told me during the walk back to our dorm that there was a tree that had blooms, despite the untimeliness of the season. We broke out into a run towards the tree, half out of urgency and half out of the shimmery jubilance that accompanies any happy ending. Brushing the pale pink petals with our fingertips in an attempt to persuade the flowers back into dormancy, we whispered to the tree, “Don’t bloom yet, go back to sleep!” It felt nymphic and dreamlike to be frolicking under its branches, mumbling blessings into its offshoots and folding prayers of sleep into its buds. We danced back to the castle we call home and let go of the unease we felt about the premature flowering so that we could embrace the anxiety for the finals that loomed ahead.

In a previous version of this essay, I described the ginkgos that live in front of the turrets of Pembroke Arch, which have become quite the mainstays in my life since my inauguration as a Mawrtyr. I know the trees for their fan-shaped, chartreuse leaves that carpet the ground beneath my feet. Two of the unmistakable features of my dorm, they are signs that I am in the right place at the end of the day. A girl in my anthropology class has their shape permanently etched on her arm in monochromatic realism. I felt momentary relief from the interminable stress of classes when I made angels in a pile of ginkgo leaves on a walk back from lunch.

But this immensity of stories is completely overlooked by the nametags that these trees have, which bear their common names, their Latinate names, the college crest, and a QZ code that requires the viewer to use a smartphone to access supplementary information (what is probably a brief description of their genealogies and environmental preferences) on the internet. I am particularly interested in the function of the QZ code, as an analogy for the trees’ depth of character that cannot possibly fit within the borders of the panels affixed to their trunks. The codes invite the viewer to engage with the tree to another level, which is where ecological intelligence can begin, and where problems related to it arise.

If I had the opportunity to reframe the Bryn Mawr Tree Tour from an ecologically-minded standpoint, “the problem...becomes: how do we tell such a story” that encompasses all of the bonds that connect the tree to the other actors in the “common geostory” (Latour, 3)? The importance of telling this story is that it enables us to explore the ways we are able to “[take] into account the interacting patterns, ranging from how behaviours ripple through the field of social relationships...to how an individual’s actions introduce changes in the energy flows and alter the patterns of interdependence within natural systems” (Bowers, 46). The practice of this form of intelligence compels us to acknowledge the complex of complexes that all life consists of. When we realize that “all agents share the same shape-changing destiny, a destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity,” we can begin to grasp the extent of our implication in the greater scheme of the Earth (Latour, 15). Ecological thought allows us to be cognizant of the network of relationships between agents.

How can we give context to the trees that live on campus? If we are to tell the story of the tree to the extent of ecological intelligence, we are faced with the Sisyphean task of conveying all dimensions of its existence. This problem is that, with a view to this universal sensibility, the story of one actor becomes the shared story of all actors. Put more simply, no one has the time to tell or listen to such an expansive and differentiated story.  

However, I believe that we do not have to be intimidated by the ineffable fullness of our common geostory. Maybe we need only to articulate its most local, most pertinent chapters. It would be impossible to create a pamphlet that admits to the entirety of this story, but we can offer an inlet into the realm of ecological thought with a smaller, more digestible portion of it.

By choosing to tell those specific experiences that are relevant to the issues that affect our lives in the most comprehensive ways, we can condense the geostory into comprehensible, compact narratives. The cherry tree behind Taylor is a “compendium of ancestral patterns, a thousand subsequent overlays" whose complete story cannot be related in any understandable form, but a retelling of a precise moment-the time it bloomed in December-furnishes the listener with a more dimensional context to view the tree with and gestures towards the pressing issue of climate change, represented in the unseasonable flowering of its limbs (Angier, 256). We must use "a holistic, integrated set of solutions” to move towards ecological intelligence, and though “it may be difficult to address climate change” and supply the listener with a deeper awareness for the tree’s implication in the larger picture “at the same time...it's even harder to do so separately” (Kolbert, 13).  To reduce the vastness of the geostory into a singular, emblematic portion of the whole equips a listener with the rhetoric to make sense of life within the scope of one of its trembling, sensitive, local iterations.

Works Cited

Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. N. pag. Print.

Bowers, C.A. "Steps to the Recovery of Ecological Intelligence." OMETECA. 14-15. 43.Bowers, C.A.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for both Global Warming and Poverty?" The New Yorker(January 12, 2009).

Latour, Bruno.  "Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene." New Literary History 45, 1 (Winter 2014): 1-18.

Melvill, Henry. "Partaking in Other Men's Sins." St. Margaret's Church, Lothbury, England. 12 June 1855. Golden Lectures. London: n.p., n.d. Print.