Why You Need More Trees in Your Life

There is a common thread running through both books I’m currently reading — both about trees and, more subtly, about attention. Whether by seeking out the biggest trees in BC, as Amanda Lewis does in Tracking Giants, or by naming and measuring and separating species by scientific (but ultimately arbitrary) classification systems, as John Fowles reflects on in The Tree, both writers explore how our attention to the natural world largely fixates only on how it serves us.

This is not revelatory to me, having spent my adult life agonizing over the fact we are plundering and exploiting our planet to death. What is revelatory is that I am prone to sharing this mindset in my own way, mostly loving nature for its usefulness to me.

Like Lewis tracking her province’s giant trees, I often approach nature as a completionist or conqueror. Like Fowles, I come to nature seeking creative replenishment. The uncomfortable truth is that I often approach nature asking: what can it offer me? I seek running routes in the mountains that offer me an optimal blend of fitness-building and aesthetic pleasure. I undertake morning walks in the forested neighborhood park (ie. forest bathing) to ensure a productive work day. Even my ideas of meditation and mindfulness, often incorporating nature come about, as Fowles notes, “in a narcissistic way: to make ourselves feel more positive, more meaningful, more dynamic… turning [nature] into a therapy, a free clinic for admirers of their own sensitivity.”

Essentially, both books make me realize that my relationship with nature is often concerned with extracting some usefulness from it. I’m less concerned about this necessarily being always wrong or misguided, but more about what I am missing. By focusing on what I produce or accomplish by engaging in the natural world — improving my fitness, winning Strava segments, writing more prolifically — am I missing out on being, on the experience of actually being alive?

Rather than tuning into the process of life, I, like most of us, fixate on goals, on endpoints. Whatever they are, once achieved, the goalposts move again. As long as our attention remains fixed internally — on our accomplishments, our travels, our careers, our money — we remain eternally dissatisfied.

Lewis reflects on this in Tracking Giants as she recounts her project of visiting and identifying BC’s champion trees, the biggest known specimen among every tree species. It started as a completionist task, only a success if she could tick off every tree on the list. By doing so, though, Lewis was quite literally missing the forest for the trees. The quantification distanced her from the real experience. Only by shifting the objective of the project from perfection to attention does it begin to feel worthwhile and creatively fulfilling.

Chapter 6 begins with a quote from activist adriennne marie brown: “What we pay attention to grows.” This is the idea I’ve returned to most often in recent months. When my Twitter doomscroll sessions become too frequent, negativity in the world grows. It becomes, to me, more real — the lens through which I see life. Similarly, if I pay attention to nature only in relation to its usefulness to my goals (peaks bagged, trails completed, Strava trail running segments crushed, or even a career made from attempting to protect it), then ultimately this is just a different form of disconnection from the greater world. It is a self-centered approach that breeds the existential dissatisfaction so many of us are familiar with.

Inherent in this is a paradox similar to the one at the core of Buddhism: pursuing the cessation of desires is in itself a desire. Seeking a relationship with the natural world beyond its usefulness in serving my productivity and accomplishments is just another way of seeking usefulness.

I think just acknowledging this paradox may be enough, as John Fowles does in The Tree, his classic exploration of nature and creativity. Acknowledgment permits us to infuse attention with play, with lightness. By simply tempering the self-seriousness of our pursuits, we can find space to pay attention to the supposed “uselessness” of the natural world and our experiences of it. Attention to how poplar leaves shimmer and dance on a bright breezy day. Attention to patterns in tree trunk bark, and the mosses and lichens that reside there. Attention to the northern flicker hopping through grass glazed in morning dew.

Lewis similarly considers this in Tracking Giants with a quote from Barry Lopez, my literary hero: “Pay attention to small things I tell myself. Look closely at what are clearly not the answers to some of your questions.” Deep, deep attention to what is, with no regard for whether or not it serves us and our productivity, is the way towards engagement, to connection, to truly living.

It is this attitude I am increasingly trying to cultivate. Close to home, that means attention to the river, the sidewalks, the gardens, the people, and the trees. Especially the trees. Like Lewis and Fowles, I gravitate to trees. Wild trees. Biblically old trees. Trees of unkept, ancient forests, where knots and tangles of interspecies connections eclipse scientific understanding and easy definition. Trees, in their oldness and bigness and resilient rootedness, inspire awe. Humility. Connection. Trees get me out of my head and into the world. Trees make me more alive.

Walking in the forest, or at least with trees around, is the easiest mode for me to fall into this indiscriminate mode of attending to the world. Barry, again, provides guidance on this kind of attention. In Syntax of the River, a book documenting sprawling interviews between Barry and Julia Martin, Barry talks about how much time he spent “not doing much of anything except participating in what’s going on around me… When you participate with everything around you, it goes a long way toward undermining what is I guess called existential loneliness. You can’t walk in these landscapes and really be an existentialist. There are too many invitations to be a participant in this world.”

By “these landscapes” I believe Barry simply means home. Where you live and/or where you feel at home. This can be a wild forest. But it can also be the city or the suburbs just beyond your door. The Word for World is Forest, the title of Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece, beautifully captures this mindset. The world is full of connections, invitations, and ineffable complexity — a forest writ large. Attending to trees more often reveals patterns and connections of nature — beyond its perceived usefulness. Attention to the world around you as it is, not only how it serves you, is perhaps the fundamental practice required to build a life well lived.

Further Tree Reading

Yeah, I like tree books. It is not unusual I found myself reading two tree-themed books at once. Along with the books that inspired this essay (Tracking Giants by Amanda Lewis and The Tree by John Fowles), here are a few more tree/tree adjacent titles that will make you love trees as much as I do.

• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• The Language of Trees by Katie Holten
• Fire Season by Philip Connors
• Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill
• The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer