The world of climate activism is filled with grim and scary statistics. There’s no avoiding the bad news, especially if you’re paying even the least bit of attention. And if you’re not paying attention, you’re not reading this diary, are you?
Yet the world is full of heroes, of people doing deeply meaningful work with the potential to transform lives, institutions, relationships, and ecosystems.
I would like you to meet two people who are doing Holy Work.
A century ago, almost half of Northern Ethiopia was covered in forest. Thanks to subsistence agriculture and a demand for firewood to meed the needs of a steadily increasing population, that fraction has steadily shrunk. Now less than three percent of the land is forested.
This is a heartrending loss; many of the vanished trees are species unique to Ethiopia, embedded in equally unique ecosystems. Indigenous medicine and cultural practices which depend on the forests are threatened.
The remaining forests are concentrated in strange oases; little circular islands of green in the midst of an arid, barren terrain.
Meet the Orthodox Tewahedo Churches.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (Amharic: የኢትዮጵያ ኦርቶዶክስ ተዋሕዶ ቤተ ክርስቲያን,[1] Yäityop'ya ortodoks täwahedo bétäkrestyan) is the largest Oriental Orthodox Church. One of the few Christian churches in sub-Saharan Africa originating before European colonization of the continent,[6] the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church dates back centuries, and has a current membership of about 36 million people,[2][3][4][5] the majority of whom live in Ethiopia.[7]
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This religious order is quite unlike the evangelical MAGAchurches of our country, not least in its attitude toward the natural environment. The Tewahedo believe that their responsibility lies to “the whole of God’s creation,” and their churches are centers of biodiversity.
In the words of Dr. Alemayehu Wassie, an Ethiopian forest ecologist, the Tewhedo believe that, “A church without a forest is like a naked person. A disgraced person.”
Alemayehu Wassie works in northern Ethiopia where most of the area’s forests now cover less than 5% of the territory that they did in the early 20th century.
The remaining forests are green island sanctuaries, which surround 3,500 orthodox churches. Ranging in size from five acres to more than 1,000 acres, these church woodlands are the last remnants of the dry afromontane forest of the area. They serve as stepping stones to restore the surrounding degraded landscape, and are the last refuge for both native plants and wildlife. Thanks to Wassie, these sacred places are now recognised for their value as conservation sites worth studying and protecting.
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When Dr. Wassie first began studying Ethiopia’s forests, he realized: almost all of the remaining forested land was under the protection of the churches. Research into forest ecology would be inextricably connected with the Tewhedo churches, their priests, and the communities they served.
Enter Dr. Meg Lowman.
I just finished reading her memoir, “The Arbornaut.” In a steadily-bleaker and more depressing informational environment, this book delighted and excited me so much that I immediately wrote her a note to tell her so, along with a donation to her non-profit, treefoundation.org.
“As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn’t monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees.
Forty years later, Lowman (is) known as the “real-life Lorax.” She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world.”
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As hard as it seems to believe, until Lowman (rhymes with “plow-man,” thereby helping avoid crippling levels of irony when writing about a woman who’s spent her entire professional life at least 25 meters off the ground) climbed to the canopies of the rain forests she was investigating, forest research was almost entirely focused on trunks & roots. As she said, “that’s like going to the doctor and having them just look at your feet.” Small wonder that she began discovering new species and micro-ecologies by the score; small wonder that she’s spoken of as discovering an “eighth continent” in the world above our heads.
At an annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Morelia, Mexico, Lowman and Wassie met. A graduate student at the time, he’d written a prize-winning paper on the perilous condition of Ethiopia’s forests. She writes:
“After handing him a check, I offered congratulations and politely asked, ‘What’s next?’ He nearly burst into tears, explaining that he was the only person working on this urgent issue. How could I walk away saying ‘Good luck’ and not offer mentoring or collaboration? After all, I had almost thirty years of canopy research under my belt and had devoted the last two decades to forest conservation in three other continents. Why not apply these years of experience to Ethiopia?”
—The Arbornaut, p. 274
(Note her utter and absolute lack of hesitation when it came to doing the right thing. I love this woman.)
She introduced him to Google Earth, which for the first time allowed him to see the geographical separation and distribution of the church forests.
“...there were nearly twenty thousand tiny church forests in the Ethiopian highlands, scattered like emerald pearls across the brown sea of farm fields, and most of these were no more than eight or ten hectares.
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These two equally-driven individuals had complementary skill- and resource-sets.
“In Ethiopia, Alemayehu had little access to technology, fundraising, or sustainable solutions. That made it tough for him to convince local communities how important native forests are to human health. But he had earned the trust of local priests. For my part, I had access to technology, fundraising, and the latest scientific findings about ecology.
...Drinking a final cup of coffee, we pledged to work together to reverse the losses of native forest in Ethiopia using the very disparate assets of religion and science. Forests are spiritually critical to several billion people worldwide; this may prove a key driver in the future of global conservation.”
— The Arbornaut, p. 275 —
After a couple of years’ preparation and research, they got to work in 2009, with a workshop for Tewhedo clergy. When the priests saw the Google Earth images, they were shocked and alarmed at the devastated landscapes surrounding their beautiful forest “islands,” and vowed to work together to halt and reverse the terrible trend of deforestation.
(How different from the anti-Earth/anti-Science bias of MAGAgelicals!)
The priests came up with the idea themselves: time to build a wall.
“Churches in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition inherited many of their ideas of sacred space from Judaism. The center of their church, like the metaphorical center of the Jewish temple, is called the qidduse qiddusan, the Holy of Holies. (snip) Only priests can enter the Holy of Holies. Enclosing this sacred center is a larger circle—the meqdes, where people receive communion—and outside that lies a still larger circle called the qine mehelet, the chanting place. All three spheres are contained under the round church roof, but those circles ripple outside the church itself.
Beyond the church building lies the inner wall, which forms a circular courtyard around every church. According to tradition, the proper distance this wall should stand from the church is the armspan of forty angels. During my visits to different churches, I watched many people enter these inner courtyards. Before crossing the threshold, they performed various gestures of piety—crossing themselves three times, dipping a knee, perhaps kissing the wooden doorframe. It was clear to everyone that when you crossed the inner wall, you were entering holy ground.
The brilliant move the priests made was to take the idea of the inner wall and replicate it. Using the same design, they built a second wall of dry-stacked stone just outside the forest boundary, thereby extending the invisible web of sanctity to include the entire forest. Suddenly the holy ground surrounding the church expanded from the size of a backyard to a vast tract of ten, fifty, or even several hundred hectares. Once Zajor’s outer wall was complete, people could no longer cut trees along the perimeter, nor could cattle trample or browse young seedlings. Every tree, animal, and hermit was now sheltered under the church’s protection.”
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Using her fundraising expertise and connections, Meg Lowman raised the money to pay for gates, for trucking stones to the site, and to compensate the masons directing the work. The work itself is carried out by the villagers themselves — young, old, men, women — who have themselves been learning about the remarkable biological treasures that form their priceless legacy.
A legacy which includes far more than trees, but entire arboreal ecosystems. After watching entomological research initiatives (think dozens of meticulous bug-hunters looking carefully at everything and taking notes), the local kids were really fascinated by their own local ecosystems. But without technology, textbooks, field guides, or teacher training, what could they do?
CanopyMeg explains:
“I thought long and hard about this global inequity of school resources and the concurrent challenge to educate the next generation...So I piloted two ideas. The first was to make T-shirts depicting important native pollinators, labeled in the local language, Amharic, to give children an insect field guide on their backs. This had the added benefit of providing school clothing; many boys did not own a T-shirt, wearing blankets to school as ponchos instead. The T-shirts were also practical for lasting fieldwork; paper checklists would simply get wet or end up in mom’s fireplace. The T-shirts were a huge hit, and even the priests wanted to wear them under their flowing white robes. (snip) As a second innovation for educating the local schoolchildren, we created a kids’ book to illustrate why trees are such a valuable local resource. With an Ethiopian colleague, I coauthored Beza — Who Saved The Forests Of Ethiopia, One Church at a Time, the story of a girl who helps conserve her local trees. Whenever someone buys an English copy of Beza on Amazon.com, my small foundation (www.treefoundation.org) donates an Amharic copy to a child or school in rural Ethiopia. It has been a humbling experience to give a girl (or boy) her first book, printed in her own tongue.”
— The Arbornaut, p. 288 —
She keeps referring to it as “my small foundation.”
In our email exchange (after I’d donated $100) she told me, “...your gift to TREE is over the top, so much appreciated and will be very much used to good end. We have no real estate and no salaries, so we spend all our dollars to save trees, big trees where possible.”
“At the time of this book’s writing, Alemayehu and I passed the halfway point to fund conservation walls around the forty highest-biodiversity church forests; we need less than $200,000 to complete our Noah’s ark vision. (snip) Stone walls are very inexpensive in comparison to saving tropical forests in other countries, and perhaps most important, the priests are trusted stakeholders and local communities seem happy to build gorgeous walls to safeguard their forests.
“Our story is a win-win-win-win for conservation. The farmers win by removing stones from the fields to increase crop yield, the priests win by saving all of God’s creatures, the people win because forests provide many services to enhance their lives, and the trees win because the walls ensure protection of both adults and seedlings. There is a strong belief that hermits, called ‘menagn’ in Amharic, live silently under the canopy, invisible to most people but their presence is strongly felt. The chief priest, Abune Abraham, who himself lived for many years as a hermit, is now restoring an entire forest for his Orthodox diocese outside the city of Bahir Dar, to create a religious compound. He offered to build me a small stone hut so I can visit more often, a genuine gesture of good faith. By observing the priests who value silence, I realize my own childhood tendency toward shyness may not have been such a bad thing. I often think of my grandfather, who built our stone cottage, safely conserving a lone elm tree in the living room. I imagine he’s smiling up in heaven, proud that I am building stone walls to save trees in Ethiopia.”
— The Arbornaut, p. 291 —
Please help support reforestation in Ethiopia.
Buy a copy of Beza — Who Saved The Forests Of Ethiopia, One Church at a Time.
Learn more about the Church forests of Ethiopia here, here, here, and here.
I’m not a religious man. Never have been, never will be. But you don’t need to believe in God to recognize the sacred.
I bow my head to this Holy Work.
Peace,
WarrenS