Trees and their People
A thousand-year-old olive tree in Jerusalem.
During the English land enclosures of the Middle Ages, peasants were pushed off land that had always been tended collectively. English peasants had complex and localized social rules about how to share the commons which made it possible for communities to live on subsistence farming. The feudal lords enclosed the land to control the efficiency of farms and create pastures for grazing, depriving peasants of their livelihoods.
The peasants didn’t peacefully surrender to the new paradigm. Resistance groups like the Diggers uprooted the enclosures that severed them from the land and many were murdered for their acts of protest. The peasants would have rather been homeless than submit to wage labor. They would rather die.
In losing access to the land, they lost their source of food, their medicines, their relationships with the more-than-human beings, and the stories that erupted from their landscape. Their dead were buried on land they could no longer walk on.
It took centuries of bloodshed to establish our current conception of private land ownership.
Ireland, once covered with trees, has a similar story. The land was deforested for agriculture and building materials, culminating in the English using Irish wood to build the ships that colonized the so-called United States. Over centuries, the farming practices that led to the Great Hunger replaced the forest ecosystem.
Europeans carried this story to every land they colonized. For instance, European colonization dismantled Indigenous Americans’ human-made foodscapes and methods of preventing forest fires. The settlers marveled at the carefully tended land and called it “wilderness,” not realizing the abundant landscape was a result of a relationship developed over centuries.
I’ve been thinking about this tired pattern of annihilation while following the war in Gaza. It’s hard to think of anything else.
Since 1967, Israeli authorities and settlers have uprooted over eight hundred thousand olive trees. In destroying olive trees, they destroy Palestinian livelihoods. They destroy a staple of the Palestinian diet that keeps their families healthy. They destroy a powerful plant medicine. They destroy a generational knowledge of olive trees and stories passed down through generations.
In Jerusalem, there is a walled garden protecting thousand-year-old olive trees. Humans and trees become bent and gnarled if they are allowed to age, and yet both are routinely uprooted.
The English words tree and truth grew out of the Indo-European root words deru- and dreu-. These roots evolved into words that mean “lasting over time,” such as durable and endurance, as well as in the word druid - literally a person who knows the trees, or a person who knows the truth.
Severing people from the land, through building walls or ethnic cleansing, is violence against the people and the land. Humans are entangled in their ecosystems.
Love Notes
“Before Capitalism (from a European Perspective) with Sophie Macklin” on Numinous Network
In the podcast, Sophie refers to Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. This book rewired my brain. I recommend it to anyone who is earnestly inquiring into the origins of capitalism, white supremacy, racism, and sexism.
Writer Gabriela Gutierrez has useful resources for allies on her Substack.
In Atmos, Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s writes about the recent genocide of Armenians in Artsakh and their relationship with lichen: “I think of colonized and violently displaced people the world over, how not only do we miss the land (even when we have been born into exile), but the land misses us in return.”
Linked above, Lyla June speaks about humans as a keystone species.
This blog post was originally published in the entangled herbs newsletter.
