In Tree

 

“In tree: Nancy Fresco”.

And so I am, right there at the back of the 1999 class photo. 

I wasn’t being original or attention-grabbing when I climbed into the spreading branches of the photo’s backdrop. In fact, I was surprised that none of my classmates joined me. We were, after all, Master’s students in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Our picture was destined to become part of the time-series that winds its way up the stairway in Sage Hall. Aldo Leopold, famed environmentalist and nature writer, graces the front row in the Class of 1909, one of the earliest students at what was then called the “Yale School of Forestry”.  I used to pass this gallery on my way to class; I was amused by the socio-historical gradient between the white men with full suits, oiled-flat hair, and high starched collars who were Leopold’s contemporaries, and the diverse, informal, smiling faces of the 1990s pictures – several of which included people “in tree”.

I hadn’t thought of these photos in years, but I went searching for them online a few weeks ago.  I had twin reasons to do so.  My daughter Molly, a freshman at Amherst College, was reading Leopold’s classic, A Sand County Almanac, for her first-year writing seminar. She called me to discuss some of the complex questions Leopold broached, particularly how to define “nature”. Are we, as humans, separate from nature?  Does conservation necessarily include removing ourselves? Or does it sometimes require the opposite? Meanwhile, my other kid, Lizzy, a freshman at MIT, called me regularly, too. The conversational topics varied – but she was often clambering in a tree as we chatted.

I was unsurprised by Molly’s rumination and by Lizzy’s brachiation, having done plenty of both myself, over the years. But I found myself newly considering how my kids and I fit into a complicated story that includes Aldo Leopold; over a hundred years of social and ecological change; and the full range of “nature” – from vast expanses of untrammeled forest to a particular specimen of Fagus sylvatica.

Leopold grew up on the1890s in rural farmland and small towns. He wrote about wilderness, but he also described in rich detail birds, wildlife, and environments that surrounded and included people. Molly and Lizzy grew up in the 2010s, happily exploring the vast expanse of Alaska’s boreal forest, but also the sprawling little city of Fairbanks. I grew up in the 1980s in the decidedly non-wild suburbs of Long Island, but I dug holes in mud and sand, gathered wild raspberries and crabapples, and spent an inordinate amount of time in trees.

When Molly and Lizzy set out for college, they both knew they’d miss home – in particular, the wild expansiveness of Alaska. Amherst College is set amidst rural farmland and small New England towns. Molly, on day one, set out to explore nearby wooded trails. MIT is on the north bank of the Charles River that separates Boston from Cambridge, one of the most densely populated places in the US. Lizzy, on day one, climbed trees.

Throughout my childhood in the suburbs and my college years in that same city, climbing trees offered me at least four flavors of solace: physical challenge, solitude, iconoclastic revolt, and immersion in nature. At different moments, I reveled in the strength of my limbs; my peculiar, invisibility in a world of downward-looking adults; the discomfiture of those adults when then finally spotted a feral arboreal girl-child; and the reassurance of my back pressed against rough bark, the xylem and phloem surging beneath.

Perhaps herein lies the answer to the core question about the definition of nature. Is an urban beech “nature”? Not in the sense of fully functioning ecosystems or untrammeled wilderness. But in other important ways -- yes. Even when surrounded by concrete, a single tree is a world apart: a microcosm of beetles, squirrels, birds, fungus, cool green shade, and ten billion stomata gently gifting oxygen to the tired air.

What does this imply about conservation? Leopold himself didn’t claim to have all the answers, but he was ready to rattle the status quo: “We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.”  Perhaps striving sometimes starts with appreciating – and climbing -- a single tree.

In his class photo, Leopold was just another suit-clad historical white guy. Ideas about conservation – like the photos in Sage Hall – have marched onward from Leopold’s time, wending past my own era and into a new millennium and a new name: the more enlightened albeit less explicitly arboreal “Yale School of the Environment”.  But the photographic and semantic limitations of 1909 don’t adequately capture who Leopold really was. Revisiting his writings, I am reminded that he knew that how we define “nature” is inextricably bound up with how we define ourselves. Clearly, he chafed in starched collars, both metaphorical and literal: “Nonconformity”, he wrote, “is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals”.

I’d like to think that had he been given the chance, Aldo Leopold would have been “in tree”.