Mourning and re-making "the village"

Learning from old-growth forests and cultures about community

Jan 27, 2023

This gorgeous oak tree looms large above our home, and her roots anchor the soil underneath. We call her Grandma Tree.

This week, my to-do list included texting local mom friends with teens old enough to babysit, signing my kid up online for swim class, and requesting an occupational therapy evaluation to help him navigate school, where he now has a dozen-plus delightful new playmates, but is struggling with post-pandemic sensory overwhelm.

After all of this, I felt … mostly sensory overwhelm myself.

At night, to decompress, I’ve been reading The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It’s a beautiful fiction novel, but also an elegy for the real Dakhóta lifeways of the plains. Their “village” meant the stars and the sky, the oak hanging over the river and the rabbit darting under its roots, and a people who had their own small but important part to play in that.

Our modern way of “doing community,” in comparison, feels both bloated and impoverished. It takes many layers of privilege to access occupational therapy and swim classes. And yet, would we need such things if our door opened onto a village green where those same dozen-plus playmates tumbled at their mamas’ feet, ready and waiting to play and negotiate with him, while we parents modeled collective problem-solving around the challenges of the day?

This conversation about the “missing village” seems to be in the water these days. (The #ittakesavillage hashtag on Instagram alone has 1.3m posts as of today.) A panacea for every modern parenting problem. Unfortunately, my conversations with friends on this topic, or myself, can slip into this fruitless loop:

I have a roof over my head, enough food to eat, career opportunities, resources to support my family. I should be grateful for that, one voice begins.
Then the other chimes in: So why does it still feel like something is missing?

We leave the frenzied phone conversation over the kitchen sink with the same sense of despair that we did before.

Last week, I wrote about how plants and the people who study them can teach us about how to grieve and heal on an individual level. This week, I want to expand on this by noting where the study of old-growth forests and cultures can help us to figure out a way out of this loop, what we really long for when we say “a real village,” and how we can begin to re-build it.

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Old-growth plant “villages” vs. clear-cuts

In Finding the Mother Tree, forestry researcher Suzanne Simard makes frequent comparisons between two ecosystems: old-growth forests and clear-cuts.

In old-growth forests, a wild collection of trees, plants and fungi live together, roots entwined in what some scientists have dubbed the “wood wide web.” By contrast, in the first clear-cuts Simard studied in the 1980s, places created where old-growth forests were destroyed by logging, the practice among foresters was to pop young Douglas fir saplings into the ground in long lines, and to “weed out” non-fir species they saw as competition. These tree farms were meant to “replace” the forests that came before.

Simard proved the two were nothing alike.

The difference between the old plant community and the new was especially stark for saplings – the equivalent of young adults. Us. (I’m 37, so please allow me to define young adults broadly for our purposes here.)

Saplings in old-growth forests are nurtured by the neighbors around them, who share their nutrients through a thick web of mycelia (fungi) and nurse them into adulthood. Then, the former saplings return the favor and nurse sick neighbors through their own difficult seasons of cold, disease or drought. They are characterized by reciprocity between species and generations.

Meanwhile, saplings in the weeded clear-cuts Simard studied were far more prone to sickening and even death. They were failing to fully thrive, despite more ample sun and unfettered access to water, because their roots were bare, disconnected from everything around them. These young adult trees were essentially starving in a world of plenty, for one missing ingredient: relationships. A real village. Sound familiar?

“We are all related”

“Wait,” people said at the time. “You mean cooperation is more important than competition and exploitation?”

People in power pushed back on this inconvenient truth, but others had been singing in harmony with Simard for years, i.e.

Activists protesting “urban renewal” strategies that razed thriving Black and brown communities to the ground to build highways
Writers and educators arguing for new “post-colonial” ways of being in community, not built on hierarchies and exploitation
Environmentalists and Indigenous leaders pleading with land users to stop destroying local ecosystems

Simard herself credits Indigenous cultures — the old growth forests of humanity — with already knowing what she went on to “prove.”

“We can compare the condition of the land where it has been torn apart, each resource treated in isolation from the rest, to where it has been cared for according to the Secwepemc principle of k̓wseltktnews (translated as “we are all related”) or the Salish concept of nə́c̓aʔmat ct (“we are one”),” she wrote. “We must heed the answers we’re being given.”

A new embrace of old-growth thinking

Back then, Simard and her contemporaries faced an uphill battle. As an activist, environmentalist, writer and educator in the 2020s, I see more of a willingness now to look to “old-growth” ecosystems and cultures for guidance on rebuilding healthy communities than I did in my early career. More white scholars see that we stand as mere saplings beneath the spreading redwood branches of the Indigenous cultures that came before. More white activists now know that the Black, brown and Indigenous bearers of these old-growth traditions have been fighting to “bring back the village” for decades, and our role is to follow their lead.

Historians now know — and Indigenous people have never forgotten — that old-growth ecosystems of reciprocity and care once stretched across the land known as Turtle Island, and beyond. For example, the culture of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), on whose ancestral lands I live, enshrined extensive rights and leadership roles for women in their Constitution (one that influenced the creation of our own, as well as women’s suffrage movements in the 1800s). The culture of the Diné (Navajo), on whose ancestral lands I grew up, was one in which four, not two, gender roles were respected, and all were seen as integral to the whole. West African old-growth cultures, transplanted here against their citizens’ consent in the era of enslavement, are also receiving more recognition now for the ways in which they have deeply influenced our most cherished cuisines.

Their societies, logged and plundered along with the old-growth ecosystems around them, were the “real villages” we are missing now. In their historical DNA, scholars worldwide are already searching for clues to future solutions. But these ancient trees cannot possibly be regrown in our lifetime.

Our collective grief in the face of this fact – something is missing – is a form of wisdom. As we awaken to the historical reasons for the sapling-sickening we feel inside, here in the clear-cut left behind, we are right to mourn.

Attempts to deny, bargain, or fight against the truth of this history, are also grief responses. I have compassion, in a strange way, for that. And the feeling of wanting to be grateful for the little boxes made of ticky-tacky we’ve been given is understandable, even if these empty boxes are nothing in comparison to the treasures some of our ancestors traded in for them.

But these thought-loops run the risk of leading us nowhere. Better to lean into the momentum of activist movements designed to bring our $#% villages back. To accept nothing less than what our Indigenous relatives once had. Reciprocity between species and generations.

We have already been spirit-starved for this for too long.

Bringing our villages back

All paths to this “real village,” I think, begin with one important first step: acceptance. Something is missing.

Then, like a binge drinker getting sober, we who inherited the ways of the clear-cut instead of the old-growth forest begin to give up our addictions to them — no longer hoarding goods and feeling #grateful for them, but sharing equitably with our neighbors, plant and animal.

After that come the next steps: We acknowledge harm. We make amends. We stop using.

Which is to say: We stop over-harvesting Indigenous people’s sacred plants while letting them starve in food deserts, and start respecting their descendants and the natural world, giving back to their communities and buying their books. We fight against the further marginalization of Black and brown folks, and start following their lead. We reclaim gender expressions that were erased and recenter all as sacred. When we eat, we “consume with honor,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer calls us to do, and we feed all who are hungry.

This is shadow work, but it’s joyful work too. Reading Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), Diane Wilson (Dakhóta), or Joy Harjo (Muskogee (Creek), I am enthralled by their wisdom and generosity. We must heed the answers we are being given.

This is how we build closer connections with each other, with our true histories, and with the land to which we belong. A real village.

More complicated than calling a sitter, for sure. But it’s not a to-do list we have to work through alone.

Every day, I see more and more people who are ready for this rebuilding work. Who are looking to the “wood wide web” and the pre-colonial past for medicine to salve our modern wounds. From mental illness to racism to climate change, we’re facing our clear-cut problems with more communal, old-growth responses. Like Simard, we’re digging more deeply for root causes, rather than blaming individuals or even whole marginalized groups for failing to thrive.

We’re already slowly re-seeding the kind of culture where we are able to feel an ongoing reciprocity between species and generations. Where we make less money, eat less meat, see more of our children, care more for our elders. Where we can finally feel on a deeper level what Mary Oliver calls “our place in the family of things.”

That, I think, is the healing I seek now, beyond the sealing of my own personal wounds from this past year. I think it’s what many of us are seeking.

I don’t know if I’ll experience life in the “real village” this year, or even in this lifetime. I know how long it takes forests to recover from logging, and the cultural logging here in America has been going on for centuries. But I hope, for our children’s sake, that we keep seeking that place – the one under the soil that our bodies don’t just imagine, don’t just miss, but remember.

What do you think? Were you raised in a “clear-cut”culture, an “old-growth” culture, or something in between? What has it taught you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

In Tending