July 28, 2009

When they cut the sacred groves, the Mayans doomed their civilization. They were practicing good forestry management. “They were not allowed to cut down what we’re calling the ‘sacred groves. Then that changed," according to paleoethnobotanist David Lentz's new study."With no trees, you lose water retention in the soil or aquifers so the ground dries up and then there is less transpiration, so therefore less rainfall as well." Agriculture failed. Strangely, we seem to be on the same path today... Can no one stop rampant over-development?

Instead of curtailing precious resources in order to build gigantic pyramids, developers today seem bent on building more and greater McMansions upon the wastes of our own sacred groves. Or is nothing sacred anymore?

posted by Dan Folkus 15 years ago
  • Nice idea, homunculus, but the only sacred notion now is this:
  • If a tree falls in the forest and nobody cares, is it still sacred?
  • It's the whole grove that counts for something special. Yet the fallen dead are still beloved by some things: grubs, bears and woodpeckers. Can woodpeckers feel the zombie sacred power? Not sure about that. Their tongues wrap around their brains, you see, to absorb the shock of their hammering. So they might be tongue-tied in an ecclesiastical court of law...
  • Two words: Easter Island.
  • Here. Now. One word: Haiti. Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" discusses multiple situations of societal collapse, including both Easter Island and Haiti. There's a good discussion of the issue here. His five factors specific to the decline and final demise of cultures or societies include "climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society's response to its environmental problems." Under environmental problems, he lists "destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation); reduction of wild foods; loss of biodiversity; erosion of soil; depletion of natural resources; pollution of freshwater; maximizing of natural photosynthetic resources; introduction by humans of toxins and alien species; artificially induced climate change; and, finally, overpopulation and its impact." Every single one of these issues is facing us today, and any one of them has the potential to destroy us. Here is one of his lectures on the subject. His lectures are entirely engrossing and his arguments succinct. I don't think he stresses the impact of water enough. My belief: in ten years there will be at least one war over water, not oil. Another issue that impacts the survival of societies is how they treat their citizens. Revolutions are fought because of oppression. There's more than one divergent culture and destroyed country that can be traced back to this issue. The moral: A strong society takes care of all its members. What makes a strong society? Things like enough clean water and food for all, employment, health care... Wake up call?
  • Homunculus brings up a great idea whose time was and should come now again. I have no problem with the feeling for sacred ground as proposed by homunculus's link. Mere humanism doesn't cut it. The problem with humanistic societies, is that yet again they make Man the measure, put Man first, when really we should put care taking first. For Nature is the ultimate value.
  • Beyond Humanism. The philosophy of Charles Hartshorne may have a bearing on this issue. These Unitarians think so. I used to belong to the American Humanist Association which met at a Unitarian Church near here. Always thought the ultra-liberal church itself was somewhat too religious, but I'm starting to come around...
  • Hippies and loggers find common ground. Anything seems possible now! On a sadder tree note, I just heard the "honking tree" was cut down last year by vandals.
  • OMG <:!) The 170 MB of Boreal Forest is SO worthy to be saved. Good old Canada! Some of my American neighbors are WAY too sap thirsty... That poor honking tree was cut down near the place of my birth. Still going on? In the old days we had too many sharp axes said my own Great Grandfather, referring to the good of his creek, which degenerated from trout, to bullheads in a generation. Too late smart...
  • Too late smart... That could be our epitaph. Pick an industry: logging, mining, drilling...
  • You wouldn't have believed it, how the man, a little touched perhaps, set his hands together and prayed for happiness, yet not his own; he meant his people, by which he meant not people really, but trees and cows, the dirty horses, dogs, the fox who lived at the back of his place with her kits, and the very night who settled down to rock his place to sleep, the place he tried so hard to tend he found he mended fences in his sleep. He said to the you above, who, let's be honest, doesn't say too much, I need you now up there to give my people happiness, you let them smile and know the reason; hear my prayer, Old Yam. The you who's you might laugh at that, and I agree, it's funny to make a prayer like that, the down-home words and yonder reach of what he said; and calling God the Elder Sweet Potato, shucks, that's pretty funny, and kind of sad. --Maurice Manning, "A Blasphemy"
  • One of my fav Manning poems--and it has a tree in it!! The Doctrine Of An Axe Of all times, now is not the time, given the world's old vague condition, to hang in my mind the plumb-bob weight of original sin and watch it twist around like a tire at the end of a rope looped over a tree branch. Once my sister came within a hair of getting bit by a snake asleep in the tire she'd hooped around herself. She was wearing a dress, my friend, just home from church; her patent leather shoes kicked at the air just twice before she shed the tire and screamed. I chopped the copperhead to pieces. What kind of parents allow their child to play with an axe? Well, mine, I suppose. I made them proud that day. The sin was how I let myself be proud, a pride that wore like whitewash from a fence. Now you might think I'm being stern and unforgiving. After all, I was only six and could not have known about sin. But I did; I knew it like a nursery rhyme, or the Now I Lay Me bedtime prayer. I once got drunk on a Sunday morning; I don't know if that was sinful, but it proved that nothingness is absolute, a naked shameful nothing left beneath the shade tree in my heart, the rusted axehead long since stuck and buried in its trunk, a bone caught in its living throat, a wound I made in its side and can't undo. We should both be doing something good; we should be kind to someone now.
  • Water I was born in a drouth year. That summer my mother waited in the house, enclosed in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind, for the men to come back in the evenings, bringing water from a distant spring. veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank. And all my life I have dreaded the return of that year, sure that it still is somewhere, like a dead enemy's soul. Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me, and I am the faithful husband of the rain, I love the water of wells and springs and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns. I am a dry man whose thirst is praise of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup. My sweetness is to wake in the night after days of dry heat, hearing the rain. --Wendell Berry
  • In the dark pine-wood I would we lay, In deep cool shadow At noon of day. How sweet to lie there, Sweet to kiss, Where the great pine-forest Enaisled is! Thy kiss descending Sweeter were With a soft tumult Of thy hair. O, unto the pine-wood At noon of day Come with me now, Sweet love, away. --James Joyce, "In the dark pine wood"
  • Twin Tree Carol Muske-Dukes A tree divided. It grew like that— Its slender trunk suddenly forking, Lifting up from the crux in two Shiva arms— As if it had come to a crossroads and split The way twins unpeel from one another In the womb. Two from one, it reached up And flourished this way—it topped thirty feet As its thick dark glossy leaves, half-folded like Paper boats, kept the nubs of coming pears Hidden then dangling. Avocado, avocado. I held you in my hand as a big wrinkled pit, Propped you (as I'd been taught once by a lover Who was trouble) with four toothpicks over a glass Filled with water—till the tiny white filament inside Your worried seed slowly let itself down into the Clear transparency, while sprouting above into a Green feasible stem. I transplanted those floating roots, The top-heavy shoot after weeks—then waited till it Reached out at last—growing fast in both directions, Down into dirt, up into the sky over the backyard. When It twinned, climbing upward, I stopped my husband, Standing hard by with shears, from pruning it back Into one: The only way it would survive he said. But It doubled skyward into the single tree at the top— A hermaphrodite—as it had to be to make fruit. So Many alligator pears, summer after L.A. summer! We Filled baskets with the abundance of the you And you: the fruit of two separate flowerings From one quick hesitation. Till days after David died, When clumsy workmen, digging a trench, severed your Taproot. I saw the white exposed arteries they'd chopped clean With their spades. I stood beside you weeping, trying to hold Your heart together with my hands at the fork where you'd Leaned apart, then towered. You were my love, conflict tree,— Tough-skinned, the rich light-green flesh beneath. Avocado, They killed you. When we sold the house, you were a cut stump. Twin Tree A tree divided. It grew like that— Its slender trunk suddenly forking, Lifting up from the crux in two Shiva arms— As if it had come to a crossroads and split The way twins unpeel from one another In the womb. Two from one, it reached up And flourished this way—it topped thirty feet As its thick dark glossy leaves, half-folded like Paper boats, kept the nubs of coming pears Hidden then dangling. Avocado, avocado. I held you in my hand as a big wrinkled pit, Propped you (as I'd been taught once by a lover Who was trouble) with four toothpicks over a glass Filled with water—till the tiny white filament inside Your worried seed slowly let itself down into the Clear transparency, while sprouting above into a Green feasible stem. I transplanted those floating roots, The top-heavy shoot after weeks—then waited till it Reached out at last—growing fast in both directions, Down into dirt, up into the sky over the backyard. When It twinned, climbing upward, I stopped my husband, Standing hard by with shears, from pruning it back Into one: The only way it would survive he said. But It doubled skyward into the single tree at the top— A hermaphrodite—as it had to be to make fruit. So Many alligator pears, summer after L.A. summer! We Filled baskets with the abundance of the you And you: the fruit of two separate flowerings From one quick hesitation. Till days after David died, When clumsy workmen, digging a trench, severed your Taproot. I saw the white exposed arteries they'd chopped clean With their spades. I stood beside you weeping, trying to hold Your heart together with my hands at the fork where you'd Leaned apart, then towered. You were my love, conflict tree,— Tough-skinned, the rich light-green flesh beneath. Avocado, They killed you. When we sold the house, you were a cut stump.
  • How is it that the snow amplifies the silence, slathers the black bark on limbs, heaps along the brush rows? Some deer have stood on their hind legs to pull the berries down. Now they are ghosts along the path, snow flecked with red wine stains. This silence in the timbers. A woodpecker on one of the trees taps out its story, stopping now and then in the lapse of one white moment into another. --Robert Haight, "How Is It That The Snow"
  • Beech For a tree, you're the worst kind of friend, remembering everything. Pale-skinned, slightly brailled, blank page of pre-adolescence. The way the smallest knife-slice would darken with time, rise and widen. mark was here. Left his. But these are the digs you're used to, sufferer of mere presence, scratched years, scratched loves we wanted to write on the world and couldn't trust to an eardrum. (I scarred you myself long ago with my own jack-knife, jill-name. You took her as the morning unsteamed around me. Took us as we had to be taken, in.) Old relief, new reminder, I was young, what could I have written? Didn't care then, had to see it scraped out, big letters beneath your erotic nubs and crotches. O beech, it's no big riddle: we fell in the forest, you heard. Quiet, in your own way. In your own way, spreading the word. --Kevin McFadden
  • The Peace of Wild Things When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. --Wendell Berry
  • Oread Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir. --H.D.
  • Binsley Poplars felled 1879 Gerard Manley Hopkins My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew – Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene. (IMO, the opening of this poem is wonderful, but it weakens badly at the end.)
  • O I dunno, BlueHorse, I'm fond of the sweet especial rural scene. The refrain reminds me of Spenser's Epithalamion.
  • The woods no more us answer, and nor our echo ring. Yes! GMH's repetition with All felled, felled, are all felled; is wonderful--with all those f's and l's in the first stanza, it's like trees crashing down all around us, but I can't see why he stuck in that extra repeated Rural scene, a rural scene. Ach, no doubt it's a failure of perception in this reader, rather than in the poet. We had a horrendous howler of a windstorm the other day, and it snowed last night, so all the leaves are completely gone at last. Winter Trees William Carlos Williams All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.
  • Lost in the forest Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips: maybe it was the voice of the rain crying, a cracked bell, or a torn heart. Something from far off it seemed deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth, a shout muffled by huge autumns, by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves. Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood--- and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent. --Pablo Neruda
  • Harmony...trailer
  • Thanks, islander; I hadn't seen that before.
  • The oak tree Matsuo Basho The oak tree: not interested in cherry blossoms.
  • They have drought because the forests are too isolated.
  • Yep, those old Mayans knew way back then: it's turtles all the way down!
  • Color me surprised?
  • I'm not surprised either. Dan always messes up the link the first time.
  • Comment Edit Button. Comment Edit Button. Comment Edit Button.
  • Ah huh.
  • yeah, but that was 6 years ago. you can learn a lot from the internet in 6 years. also be driven mad, which applies too.
  • That's odd. The word Exxon doesn't sound Mayan.
  • When I first saw Roger McGuinn with his band the Byrds one time (at the Electric Factory in Chicago) it gave me one of the great thrills up my spine.... Now I just bought this CD of his, Back from Rio, and kindly recommend it for the full band effect (oh yessss...) But here's one "for the rest of us." Roger Mcguinn - The Trees Are All Gone "... The glaciers near the polar camp Have all begun to melt Temperatures are on the rise Far from the southern belt Water levels shifting tides On every changing land Rain forests in the Amazon Have vanished from our hand And the trees are all gone Yeah you know it's all wrong And the trees are all gone The people want to eat today And so they clear the land Global warming is a concept They can't understand But all the politcians now They have no excuse They just hide behind their power And keep us from the truth Man has tried his suicide With bigotry and hate But in the end he'll kill himself With nothing but his waste What will finally happen when The farm lands turn to dust When only rich receive the food And nothing's left for us But all the politcians now They have no excuse They just hide behind their power And keep us from the truth."
  • Hello?