Tree, Fire, Human: Representing Allyship

This article is dedicated to the eastern red cedar. The red cedar has become an invasive species in Oklahoma, my current home, but it cannot be held entirely responsible for its colonizing frenzy. Rather, human colonial settlers are to blame: we suppressed fire in the Great Plains, disrupting a long-maintained balance that had kept in check the cedar’s migration.

Poet and farmer Scott Chaskey’s 2023 book Soil and Spirit opens with an uncanny link between Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree. He writes, “In the Forest of Arden, Shakespeare’s Orlando hangs pages of odes on trees, a poetic variation on the signals that trees exchange underground through fungal hyphae and mycorrhizal social networks” (1). The double figuration of trees as bearers of love letters and as participants in extended chemical exchanges opens a productive meditation on our participation in “circles of connectivity”—but what strikes me about the idea of draping dried sheets of highly processed linen-pulp on tree branches is the increased potential for the whole thing to go up in flames. This is emphatically not where Scott Chaskey is going with his book, and yet fire does belong to the network of connections that links us to trees and to all of nature.