Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux
Warrior Chief and Spiritual Leader

Vice-president Al Gore
Academy Award Winner and Nobel Peace Prize Winner
for An Inconvenient Truth

To the reader from the author:

Dr. Jim Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, advised Congress that the planet was warming to dangerous levels due to burning fossil fuels. That was in 1988. Despite years of research, his warning got a cool reception by those who didn’t want change. While Jim Hansen was discounted, he quietly became the father of global warming. Changes in the weather convinced people to go green on their own and not wait for governments and industries to help heal the planet.

In Los Angeles, a thick curtain of brown smog once obscured the Valley’s towering mountains. Smog caused permanent lung damage, affected the heart, and damaged plants. Clearly human choices adversely affected the environment and public health. Although unleaded gas and catalytic converters improved air quality, at present high ground level ozone proves just as damaging as smog. Pollution is not confined to L.A. It exists throughout the world. Before Dr. Hansen warned Congress, for our children’s health, our family moved to Thousand Oaks, CA, which sits midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. That is how I came to live in a city famous for its magnificent oak trees.

While walking among the centuries-old oaks, an unusual tree drew my attention and I often stopped by it. In the simple act of leaning against the tree with my arms resting on its lowest branches—as if it was a fence and I was talking to a neighbor—life began to take on new meaning. Fresh insights into nature came at a time when I had to stop and see everything around me with new eyes, including the structure upon which I’d built my life. Nature became my teacher, guiding my thoughts toward a more spiritual place to dwell. I found in nature what philosopher Goethe called, “the living, visible garment of God.” I don’t believe my experience is unique. Sometime in every life, nature draws us near and we develop a fondness for a garden, an animal, the forest, sea, or stars in the night sky.

Then nature takes our hand and if we ask, nature shares her secrets with us. I suspect that everything God thought would be helpful for us to know to live fully and find happiness is written in nature.

The word God sometimes appears in this book. I think God is too vast to have only one name and I don’t know which name pleases God most. I respectfully ask readers to substitute their word for the Almighty that represents the term closest to their heart.
 
As the years passed, I kept a journal of the insights that came walking among the oaks and those entries became this book. The stories are true, only the names of people were changed. The book reflects two issues I wanted to understand. First, where did the idea originate that we had a right to harm
the earth? Secondly, in the circle of life, where everything is interconnected and interdependent, I wondered how humans and nature are interwoven. In the silence of the oak grove, I found answers.

Chapters relating to forests symbolize society in the sense trees of diverse origins, ages, sizes and varieties live, grow and spread out across the earth the same as people do the continents. The wind that circles the planet broadcasts seeds far and wide the same as word of mouth. Some seeds hit fertile ground and sprout, resembling ideas that grow strong, becoming deeply rooted in a culture. The differing ideas behind two phrases, earth’s caretaker and man’s dominion over the earth, have prevailed for centuries depending on the culture. The attitudes these words spawned affect society’s judgment about how to care for the land and those that live upon it. Narratives about individual trees are a metaphor for each of us. These stories contain insights into nature’s hidden wisdom for a rewarding life through our innate connection to nature. We are connected to trees in far more ways than our need for their oxygen and their use of the carbon dioxide we exhale. When I began the journal, I did not grasp the subliminal reasons people love trees. It is my hope that as you read this book you will find the splendor and strength in nature also resides in you.

Lastly, the words of Senegalese poet, Baba Dioum provided further inspiration–