TREESTORY - THE FULL STORY

Treestory? - Well yeh I'm a treestorian... you know, like historians herstorians theirstorians and ourstorians.

Well trees have been used pretty much exclusively to write all those stories on, so in a way I'm returning the favor.

Tree-story-on...Here goes Chapter 976 in what has been known as 'The Battle of the Trees' since long before AD976 - at least in the lands of the druids. The ancient native european shamans were great treelovers.

One of the more dangerous myths of judaeo-christian culture is  (paraphrased) from the bible ... "and everything on the earth was put here for man's use and dominion".*

In fact that one phrase, despite the fact that I can't remember it and no longer own a bible, may have been responsible for more ecological havoc than all the foraging of all the dinosaurs that ever walked the earth and believe me in those days the trees were quaking in their roots pretty much all the time.

Actually the bible, being the first printed book off the Gutenberg press, has a claim, matched only by all the Sunday newspapers of the last  century combined, for pulling down more of the primeval architecture of nature in order to pass on disinformation, inaccuracies and grossly mistranslated mythology in the name of truth, than maybe any other publication.

Civilised man has had a habit of removing forests for quite some millennia and it is a tribute to the awesome abundance of the planet that there still remains any to cut. There still remains some. Four per cent of the old growth forest is left in the United States - at least that was last millennium's count. It may be down to three and a half... no... three ...oh oh...

Back to Maui treestory..

It is a story of 'The Fragrant Isles' as these islands were once known to the traders that came here in the early nineteenth century. The scent of the sandalwood forests would waft across the oceans to the ships before land was sighted so it is told. Until the  traders brought their fascinating wares to the ali'i (the island aristocracy) wanting riches in return.

Now sandalwood was and remains to this day one of the most highly prized woods on earth.  By around the year1800, the chiefs  (ali'i) were some $250,000 in debt (and that was a lot more then than I'm willing to even guess at on today's market). Quite naturally the Ali'i wanted to become part of the new world. Guns, velvets, ships. Entry into 'civilisation' had a price then as now. There were no credit cards, only natural resources.

Now any developing country in our time could predict the next part of the tale. They who have experienced the benevolence of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. Great sums of money are lent and then the natural wealth is drained like so many pounds of flesh from country after country while the children in those lands get hungrier and hungrier. Where are the forests that once covered Nepal? Was it the Roman empire that desertified Northern Africa? Who buys all that wood from Indonesia and the Amazon? The story gets repeated time and time again. A land gets emptied of its forests, the rains go, the food goes, the fuel goes, the people starve...and gradually, almost imperceptibly the ogygen replenishment for the entire earth is compromised.

Did you know that the forests are the lungs of the earth? Did you know that you breathe some 10 to 20 per cent less oxygen per breath than your grandparents did? Did you ever consider that almost all  diseases are exacerbated by lack of oxygen? One might consider planting trees as an alternative to health insurance...

Back to treestory...

Until consumerism hit the islands, the trees had been cut only for sacred purposes - canoes, temple pillars and the like. With songs and ceremony and great respect. But suddenly, the maka'aina (people of the soil) were sent up the mountains to the cold and wet lands where for thirty years they toiled, until by 1830  virtually every last sandalwood tree had been cut down and fitted into the hulls of ships bound for China. The people stamped out the seedlings as they longed to return to their village lifestyle in the warmer lands by the coast and never again wanted to use their mana (life force) to raze forests.

They used up a lot of mana. Between 1830 and 1890 some three hundred thousand islanders died from introduced diseases. In 1895 the US government overthrew the monarchy and illegally annexed the islands. Numerous factors in those equations, but I am haunted by the words of one kumu (teacher) on the Big Island when the last piece of native rainforest was fenced off for the building of a geothermal plant there: "Death of a forest, death of a culture" he said. a man of wisdom, one who knew the healing plants. One who knew the wisdom of the ancestors.

Bear with me. The story is not all tragedy and gloom though it may well be one huge cautionary tale...

Some 155 years later, one of God's clowns was hijacked (possibly by her druid ancestors) from a more or less respectable life in a small coastal town in Australia, and deposited one midnight at Kahului airport, Maui with about $100 and a few costume changes. Some accident of birth had combined the blood of a line of welsh witches who'd fallen from the wrong side of Merlin's blanket with the Cook family of Northern England (the explorers and travellers) in this naive lass who blissfully dropped her name at the airport and melted into the velvety sweetness of this hospitable and unequivocally magic island.

within a year, she had also dropped all vestige of civilised living and found herself sitting on a beach very quietly for several months. Not eating, not speaking, just watching the stars turn, the bombs fall on Kahoo'lawe (a small island about a mile away)and the waves crash on the shore. after a few months of this, she found herself singing in way that she had never sung before at the shore one evening when suddenly a whole pod of humpback whales leapt out of the water all together in the light of the setting sun and appeared to dance madly for as long as she kept singing. Since no one else was willing to talk with her (she was scrawny by now and more than a lttle eccentric) she kept returning to the shore to sing and sure enough each time, the whales seemed to get really excited and so did she. She spent an entire winter this way, until the whales left for northern climes. The ocean seemed unbearably empty to her. She was drawn up to the mountain heights where, still sleeping outdoors, she walked the dry crackly landscape by day, listening for other companions... humanity was still giving her a wide berth. Gradually a voice emerged out of the parched landscape. "Give me back my forests." She stopped... forests? Surely this was lava and these spindly, prickly bushes were the first things to grow here..."Give me back my forests. Get the children to help. It will heal their spirits".

Now the lass looked wild but she had once been a scholar, so she took herself to the libraries and uncovered the tale told above. A sense began to grow in her that her days in the wilderness were over. Armed with a vision, she returned slowly and with difficulty, to the world of humanity.

Years passed until she was once again by the shore where the whales had danced for her. She shared her tale at a long night fire and by dawn there was an inspired Johnny Appleseed up and ready to replant the sandalwoods that very day. He disappeared up the mountain and returned with the news that the rangers knew of a few old sandalwoods and he could get seeds.

It took some seven years for the 'Sandalwood Man' as he liked to call himself, to grow some thirty thousand baby trees. He grew them and he gave them away on the road sides. He planted them on ranch lands and where possible he had them fenced from the pigs and goats. He rarely sold a few and could barely keep his family fed throughout this time, but he did get a few acres up in Poli Poli state forest fenced and with the help of 'The Earth Guardians', a group of rap singing Maui teens, he planted several hundred trees back on the mountain in a little grove protected by (and from) the introduced redwoods which now dominate the area up near the treeline.  There was little water available for the baby native orphans so a small drip system was attached to a tiny tank run by a solar panel and a minute wind generator to provide sustenance.

That was a while back. Since then, the sandalwood man married a local woman from the Big Island and now he's planting native trees over there. The orphan forest has had to fend for itself. And then through the recent long drought,  the mountain reserve, Poli Poli was closed because of fire danger.

The visionary, no longer a lass, travelled long and far and then returned once again to the place where the whales had danced ten years earlier. Na Kupuna O Maui (the elders) had gathered in the name of Hawaiian sovereignty since America had at last apologised for stealing the islands. One spoke: "Of course," said he, knowing nothing of the woman and her vision, "the whales and the sandalwoods are connected. They came together into the world according to the Kumu Lipo - the Hawaiian chant of creation."

The visionary called the rangers but had to wait some weeks till the forest was reopened. Then she donned her most sacred beads, and a necklace of puka shells to honor the whales. Once on the mountain she searched the grove. Not a single tree. At the top of the fence line, scraping by a bush, her beads dissolved in a cascade to the forest floor. These were the bones of her ancestors - the gift of a beloved sister as she passed from this world. She fell to her knees and began a search that lasted some hour or two in the soft forest debris. As she searched, she prayed - for the ancestors, for the unborn and for the baby trees she could not find. Then suddenly the shells broke from her neck - also falling into the ground. Now almost everybody in Hawaii knows how Pele** feels about stones  so gradually the woman started to take note of the cosmic message service that was screaming in her ear. Scrabbling as she had through the grasses and undergrowth, she had cleared a sizeable space and looking closely it dawned on her that the skinny little stick growing laboriously through right angles and almost crushed by weeds was in fact a sandalwood baby. An infant. Not planted by human hands. Nowhere near the irrigation systems. She watered it with tears and offered it a puka shell as a love note from the whales. After that she found some 10 really healthy happy sandalwood teenagers who had not only survived the drought but had somehow given birth to one wild baby.

That's the maui treestory so far.

It took thirty years to cut down the sandalwood forests. It took ten years for one tree to seed itself naturally on the mountain. The conclusion? It's easier to keep forests on the land than it is to replace them once they are gone. Ditto whales, snow leopards and indigenous tribes. A request: On behalf of the natural world which speaks languages that only a few are willing to understand:  We must establish a legal protective body that makes it really difficult for anyone to cut down a tree no matter who 'owns' the land. Land ownership is after all usually the result of some mishap in history that caused the lands to be stolen from people who never owned them in the first place.  The trees no more 'belong' to us than the whales do. We are all creatures of the same earth, sharing a biosphere, co-creating a future.

 If this story touches a chord in you, please respond with whatever power you have to influence reality. The trees need legal representation. Before we repeat our historic pattern and wipe out our planetary lungs completely.

Hello hello are you out there? This is a planetary and local emergency. Do you read me? We are powerful in unity. write or call. We the trees need your help. Now.

I am not sure if you can replace a forest but You can always plant a tree.

**Madame Pele is the goddess of the vocanoes - every stone is sacred to her as it was birthed by her sacred fire - the laboring Earth.