The Triumph of the Tree

John Stewart Collis, in his lyrical prose in the book of the same name, begins: We were nursed into life by trees. It is to trees that we owe the development of a physiology which made Man possible – that is to say, made conceptual thought possible. JSC was a remarkable writer, more a natural philosopher, a conscript to WW II who requested to spend it on the land, and who served in an agricultural brigade as a result (he’d actually served in the conventional sense in WW I, so one cannot question his motive). Out of this came The Worm Forgives The Plough (1973) among others, the first book of his I read. His writing had far more in common with the blogging style of today than with the writing of the time http://transitionculture.org/book-reviews/the-worm-forgives-the-plough-john-stewart-collis/). Again, in The Triumph of the Tree (1950), in fact it is not unlikely that in the course of the next few decades after we have had some really rude shocks – we will gradually return (this time on the plane of consciousness) into the Order of Nature, as one factor of the whole. If this happens, the turning point will undoubtedly have been this century. It seems that he was probably just a decade out, a remarkable insight into the perils facing us at a time when global warming was unknown. He is able to conjure questions enough to make a tree laugh, but in spite of its lyricism this is very somber reading, because, sixty years on, one can really see how much further out we now actually exist on the edge, and all, if we accept JSC’s arguments, because we lost our wonder (perhaps fear) of trees, and fled the Era of Mythology. I would like to think that the Era of Science could restore some of this wonder (perhaps respect).

(There have been various publishers of The Triumph of the Tree, starting with William Sloane Associates, and House of Stratus. Most are now extinct, but I see that the used book is still available through the Internet).