Our Fall colors are now firing and, given the wet summer, they are grander than we were expecting. Here’s a glimpse from horseback of a golden grove in Bradley Palmer State Park this week.
Review
The World We Once Lived In
Wangari Maathai
Penguin, Green Ideas, 2021
£4.99
71 pages
Of her childhood in Kenya’s Central Highlands in the 1940s and 50s, Wangari Maathai recalled the following for a documentary film about her life,
I grew up in the countryside and as a small young girl there was a huge tree that was near our homestead, and next to our tree was a stream. My mother told me, “Do not collect firewood from the fig tree by the stream.” I said, “Why?” And she said. “Because that tree is a tree of God.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I would run there and collect water for my mother. The stream actually came out of the ground gushing up from the belly of the earth. Now sometimes there would be thousands upon thousands of frog eggs. They are black, they are brown, they are white, they are beautiful. I didn’t know they were frog eggs. I would just see these beads and I would put my little hands underneath and try to lift them in the belief that I could put them around my neck and decorate myself. And I would spend hours trying to lift them up. Here I am, and I am so small, and I am playing with frog eggs and tadpoles. Between the fig tree and the stream it was beautiful. I guess it was a tree of God.
That fig tree took root in Maathai’s consciousness and surely informed her life’s work: The Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977 to empower rural women in Kenya to address hardships they were experiencing due to environmental degradation by reforesting their local landscapes. The land use policies of the Kenyan government came into question as citizens started to understand what was happening to their forests, watersheds and other public lands.
Maathai’s work at the intersection of land protection and democratic reform increasingly came into conflict with the regime of Daniel arap Moi, and she and other activists were repeatedly arrested. In 2002, she founded Kenya’s Mazingira Green Party and won a seat in parliament. In 2004, Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She died of cancer in 2011. The Green Belt Movement continues and has partnered with local communities to plant over 50 million trees since inception.
Maathai wrote The World We Once Lived In in 2010 after she won the Nobel. Penguin Classics in the UK have reissued it this year as part of their exciting Green Ideas series. These are slim statements from twenty great environmentalists of the last century, including Rachel Carson, Greta Thunberg, Amitav Ghosh, and Bill McKibben. Tom Etherington has beautifully designed this set to create an earthy rainbow on the shelf. They may not yet be available from independent booksellers in the US, but you can order them from Blackwell’s in Oxford, UK, who ship free to the U.S.
The essence of this slim volume, which can be appreciated in just an hour or two, is Maathai’s generative linking of the world’s great spiritual traditions to the needs of this crisis moment. She draws on her Kikuyu cultural heritage, as well as a wide range of religions, to show that trees have been “spiritual centers” for humans for millennia, and to call for a new perspective on their potential role in our lives.
Conceiving of a fig tree as muti wa Ngai [a tree of God] had a kind of protoecological reasoning behind it. The tree’s deep root system prevented landslides and allowed root systems to travel underground reservoirs to the surface in the streams and rivulets that burst through the soil. . . . This logic was clearly how many peoples, who may have also used their trees as sources of medicine and food, survived in environments that were sometimes harsh.
Maathai describes how trees are the sites of sacred rites, destinations for spiritual pilgrimage, and revered as cosmological links between earth and sky. She also reminds us that “the battle for control over the meaning of the spiritual landscape is an ancient one,” and that conquering powers have often destroyed sacred groves in an effort to subdue and convert local communities. British colonial forces engaged in just such acts of “sacred vandalism” in Kikuyu villages a century ago, and so did Charlemagne. She links these moments to our present day, to the Chipko resistance movement in India and to the tree-sits of the Pacific North West by activists like Julia Butterfly Hill, who camped in a giant redwood for two years in the late 1990s. It seems likely Maathai would be cheering on the student climate strikes of our present day.
About climate change she writes,
No weapons will counteract this threat. Only a change of consciousness that includes rediscovering that love of nature that animated the minds and souls of our ancestors can. This is when sacred groves become sacred again.
This book was my first exposure to Wangari Maathai’s writings. My thanks go to the editors of the Green Ideas series. I can’t help seeing this group of books as a sacred grove in its own right: the great wisdom keepers of our time searching deep into the earth and stretching up for the light.
Other Voices, Other Forms
During lockdown I fell in love with the work of the Russian painter Isaac Levitan thanks to a Twitter account that shares images of his work. Levitan painted the forests of Russia with profound delicacy and intensity. His groves always seem sacred to me.
Here he is at work in his studio.
Poem of the Week
Jane Kenyon celebrated a grove of her youth in this beautiful poem.
For Your Reading Radar
The first winner of the Graywolf Press Africa Prize has just been published. House of Rust is the debut novel by Kenyan writer Khadija Abdalla Bajaber. The publisher calls it “a fabulist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadhrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya.” The heroine is befriended by a talking cat and has to deal with sea monsters. Sign me up.
For Your Calendar
The essential, irrepressible books podcast Backlisted is throwing a launch party for Alan Garner’s new novel, Treacle Walker. The event will be webcast from the Bodleian Library in Oxford on October 28th at 17:00 BST. Register here.
Bookshop of the Week
Speaking of Oxford, let’s give a shoutout to Blackwell’s in Oxford who have been my lifeline for titles not available in the US. Their free shipping policy is just . . . <chef’s kiss>, and the site is a great source of holiday gift ideas . . . as well as, apparently, life partners!
That’s it for this week. See you next week for Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment.
xo Nicie