After Wednesday’s Class: On Maples, Nation, and Citizenship

Once again I want to add a few comments and quotations that bear on our class. We didn’t get a chance to discuss what paying taxes means in Kimmerer’s essay, “Maple Nation,” and how we might think about taxes differently. Here’s a passage from Daniel Kemmis’s book, The Good City and the Good Life, that chimes with our discussion of citizenship:

People who customarily refer to themselves as tax- payers are not even remotely related to democratic citizens. Yet this is precisely the word that now regularly holds the place which in a true democracy would be occupied by “citizens.” Taxpayers bear a dual relationship to government, neither half of which has anything at all to do with democracy. Taxpayers pay tribute to the government, and they receive services from it. So does every subject of a totalitarian regime. What taxpayers do not do, and what people who call themselves taxpayers have long since stopped even imagining themselves doing, is governing. In a democracy, by the very meaning of the word, the people govern. (9)

And here’s the quotation from Kimmerer’s Foreword to Braiding Sweetgrass that we discussed but that wasn’t part of the reading:

In our language it [sweetgrass] is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. . . . Will you hold the end of the bundle while I braid? Hands joined by grass, can we bend our heads together and make a braid to honor the earth? And then I’ll hold it for you, while you braid too? (ix-x).

We also didn’t get a chance to discuss the structure of the essay. Did you notice that it began and ended with a gas station? In some ways, fossil fuels frame the essay while an alternative—“ecosystem services” (169, 174)—is woven throughout her piece. Did you notice how attuned Kimmerer is to conversation in the way she shapes her essay? She uses the conversations that arise at the gas station store to inform her reflections on maple nation, she asks questions of the sugar bush workers to further deepen (and network) her thinking, she turns to research on citizenship to give context for her reflections (recall our discussions of how research and reading are like conversations we have with others through their publications), and she reminds her reader of the conversations and actions that follow from public engagement (“Show up at the damn meeting” [167, 174]).

Other ideas of note in the essay: “stewardship” (169) “reciprocity” (171, 174), “democracy of species” (173), and maples as “climate refugees” (173).

In the Foreword to Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Tim Flannery links trees with both time and conversation, two of our topics for this semester (his comments condense points that are elaborated in more detail in the book itself). He writes:

One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 year old. That’s 115 times longer than an average human lifetime. Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one third of an inch per second. But why, you might ask, do trees pass electrical impulses through their tissues at all?

The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees , they ‘smell’ it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. . .

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. . . . A tree’s most important means of staying connected with other trees is a ‘wood wide web’ of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods (vii-viii).

The wood wide web resonates with our discussions of time in a digital age from last semester (the readings by Solnit and Harari) as well as with our discussion of the vitality of things like stones nonhuman temporal pacing in Kimmerer.