We should be related to a tree at birth. Even better, with a forest because, just as in love, during the years we walk the Earth, we may not have only one love of life but several. If there is luck, one in particular (human and arboreal) will rise above the others, will bear fruit, its trunk will grow strong and will resist the battering of storms or droughts. And if there is even more luck, the arboreal will shelter with its shade our last breath.

I once heard that returning to the soil is what remains for us, helping the life that follows to grow… in the meantime we should at least carry a tree/forest in our minds and hearts. Spending time with them, making them part of who we are, as well as the wildlife they harbor and make possible.

I would like to bet that most people identify and feel appreciation for a particular tree, despite living in urban environments where trees on sidewalks and street dividers are cut down by chainsaws to transform roads and make way for new public and private transportation routes. Trees that municipal administrations promise to “replace” by I don’t know how many in Neverland.

Is there any tree, dear reader, that you remember with special affection? The first tree of our life for many was the one that made a cradle, but in the absence of memory the first one turns out to be another one.

Mine was a huge tree in Valle del Cauca, from which hung a swing on which I spent long hours rocking, listening to the sound of the birds and admiring the colors of their plumage, feeling the soft, cool breeze blowing through the vegetation, spotting mysterious shapes in the trunks and leaves. Today I feel that after so many hours swinging on that swing, nature left its mark on me.

Probably that tree no longer exists, just as another tree of my life no longer exists; an enormous Amazonian ceiba to which I left a piece of my soul, years later I returned for it and it turned out that it had given me the gift of the human love of life.

I like that for the Mayas the ceiba represented the tree of life, because even though that ceiba was struck by lightning in one of those powerful storms that fall in the tropical rainforest, I feel that it still does not die completely. A piece of it lives on in me, and surely in its children/plantlets that thrive somewhere in the forest.

Richard Powers, in his 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, wrote: “The trees fall with spectacular clangs. But the planting is silent and the growth invisible”. If only they only fell in the cycle of life like my ceiba; unfortunately we humans fell them with axes and saws, if not with fire, to make way for meadows where we can speculate on land, plant monocultures, excavate space for mining or oil extraction, or leave cattle in the canicular sun.

Planting does not generate so much noise, but it means an opportunity for life on Earth, and growth, although slow and invisible to the anxious eyes of people, is the hope of mitigation for many of the problems we face today.

Today I make you a proposal dear reader: discover or name even one tree in your life. Embrace it, don’t be afraid to look like a hippie. Better yet: plant it, sow it, let your hand give it a push to life, not to the blow of an axe. Choose well the place and the social reason that will help those trees to survive it and give shade to their descendants. Rabindranath Tagore said that he who plants trees knowing that he will never sit under their shade has at last begun to understand the meaning of life.

Remember that restoring an ecosystem comes before reforestation, that a tree does not grow without water or a guarantee of nutrients, that planting must be done with native trees from the region and that savannahs or natural grasslands are not the place to establish forests of foreign trees, because they are already habitats that, as carbon sinks, are more effective than any trees planted there, besides being places where a magnificent and unique biodiversity thrives.

Planting is a powerful action that, multiplied by millions of human beings, will have a positive impact on biodiversity and climate by greening cities and mitigating increasingly frequent heat waves.

Knowing that in our hands lies such a powerful action is an incentive to those moments when we remember that our switch to shampoo bars or the bicycle commute to work is worth little if large multinationals do not switch to green energy, stop throwing the responsibility for the fate of their business waste to the consumer or if the world continues to move and turn on the energy grid and fossil fuel industries.

Evidently it sounds romantic to be related to a tree. Okay, maybe rather naïve, although I’d like to think it’s ingenious. Being the re-generation, being the reforestation generation would suit us quite well at a time when the point of no return in the loss of forest mass in the Amazon River basin is so close.

A couple of weeks ago, in the Brazilian city of Belém do Pará (whose state leads in deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions courtesy of its 27 million head of cattle), representatives of the 8 Amazonian countries met to see how to avoid reaching this point that is just around the corner. The meeting ended with a long list of proposals, as expected, with many headlines, but without a “how” in clear goals or monitoring and progress indicators for what should have been the main objective: zero deforestation by 2030, promoted by Colombia and Brazil.

The countries turned a blind eye to the Colombian government’s courageous proposal to halt the oil exploitation frontier in the Amazon, on the grounds that the activity is a precursor of deforestation by opening roads and accesses (not to mention that it is at the root of the climate crisis). This was to be expected.

Let us remember the declaration of the Ecuadorian president Guillermo Lasso to “extract every last drop of profit from our oil” (which fortunately and by referendum of the Ecuadorian people, at least in Yasuni will not be possible) and the position of Lula da Silva in Brazil of preferring a “calmer transition”.

I say… relax, we will feel the effects of continuing to burn these fuels in droughts, floods, fires and heat waves; relax, because extracting these deposits will degrade the richest areas of forests and biodiversity on Earth.

What is left for us then? Push the wheels of powerful action, do our part to stop the era of global boiling and enter the era of global greening. This will be the first in a series closely related to trees.

For the next one, I hope to take you into the universe that lives in each one of them and pass on some regal cocktail facts about some specimens that are related to science fiction. Later, we will talk about the park with the most pristine forests in Colombia and the planet, the ones protected by the Serranía de Chiribiquete National Natural Park.

For now, the message of this column is to plant, care for and pamper a few trees in your life. Plus a congratulations to the Omacha Foundation, which to celebrate its 30th anniversary is planting trees in the territories where it works to conserve our species and ecosystems hand in hand with the communities. Another for the Robert Farah Foundation that is starting its path to restore and plant. I know that, like her, others are trying to move forward and push this era of global greening.

Robert Mcfarlane says that one of the great contemporary challenges is to discover how to recover and popularize an almost animistic ontology in which the miraculous existence of species other than our own is recognized and respected. For our own sake, we would do well to restore the sacredness of trees. We can start by planting some that we can consider life companions, surely only good things will come out of that… there is a reason why magic wands are made of wood.

It was a plastic girl