Not so very long ago, when the lands where I live were encased in ice and the branches of all the deciduous trees were bare, I spotted three bright green leaves atop a pile of snow. I was amazed. I don’t believe in signs or miracles, but I want to believe in magic, and it felt as though some Faerie Realm—overlaid on our world and often obscured—was shimmering through.

Trees always possess some magic, even when they are unadorned. When they burst into a riot of innumerable greens, the spirit, dampened by snow mould, starts to flutter and unfurl. Nowhere is this more true than in wintry climates where the days grow long well before the temperatures climb above freezing.

Growing up in British Columbia, I know more about coniferous trees than deciduous ones. The forests of my childhood were made up of Douglas-Firs, Red Cedars, and Western Hemlocks. When I first moved to Ontario as a university student, I was captivated by the colours of the region’s sugar maples and red oaks, but I longed for the silvery blue shades, prehistoric ferns, and immense trunks of my home province.

I was many years into adulthood before I understood that the woods of everywhere else weren’t puny. It was rather that the forests of the West Coast boasted some of the largest, tallest trees on the planet.

That these trees are under threat is no secret, but it is something to continue to hammer home—which brings me back to my opening story.

It turns out the mysterious leaves were not, after all, from a Faerie Realm. Indeed, they were not even leaves. At least, not real ones. To my dismay, they were polyester. Instead of nourishing the earth, they were contributing to its decay. Pure rubbish masquerading as organic life.

So much that glistens green carries the seed of ruin. Those polyester leaves are a tiny part of a bigger picture of manufacturing processes that consume stupendous amounts of energy and emit greenhouse gases, producing plastics that can take decades to decompose. We are choking the earth with our waste.

American poet Matthew Olzmann contemplates what we are leaving future generations in his poem, 'Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now':

It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.

Ours isn’t the first global climate disruption, but it is the fastest and the most human-driven—and it could be the last one our species will see. Humans have been bungling the health of the land for some time, of course, but until the Industrial Revolution, most human activity affected local or regional environments.

In the late sixteenth century, for example, England and Scotland were struck with a series of environmental catastrophes directly linked to human activity: natural resources were being extracted intensively as landscapes were increasingly plundered to meet the people's growing demands. As a result, famine devastated the population while disease spread rapidly, driving death rates to alarming levels.

By 1603, as the House of Tudor gave over to the House of Stuart, London was showing signs of what we would now recognize as environmental degradation: polluted air, mismanaged land and waterways, and mounting pressure from rapid urban growth. The capital’s voracious appetite for resources reshaped the country, exploiting forests, fields, and waterways far beyond the city itself.

Shakespeare gives voice to these environmental crises in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In her rebuke of the Fairy King Oberon, the formidable Fairy Queen Titania describes a deep climatological disorder: the air grown thick and unwholesome, floods overtaking the fields, livestock wasting, the seasons wandering off course, and sickness rising among humans as the natural world falls out of tune. Read it out loud, if you can:

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.
The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here.
No night is now with hymn or carol blessed.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world
By their increase now knows not which is which. (Act 2, Sc. 1)

What is more, Titania takes responsibility for the crisis, attributing it to the discord between herself and Oberon:

this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original. (Act 2, Sc. 1)

If only we were all so self-aware.

Of course, so often the least mindful are also the least perturbed. We must remind ourselves as concerned citizens that we can only do so much at the individual and community levels. Massive investments by fossil fuel companies are driving plastic production to alarming heights, creating a persistent environmental threat.

We are David and Goliath is armed to the teeth.

I often feel helpless or hopeless, or both at once. As usual, I turn to literature and other arts to help me process my climate grief and anxiety. They remind me that Mother Earth is a generous and forgiving teacher. They encourage me that I can’t single-handedly save the planet, but I can 'read softly' (to borrow from The Tempest) so as to leave the smallest possible trace—or, as Caliban says in the same play, so that 'the blind mole may not / Hear a foot fall'.

One masterpiece in which I have found comfort and inspiration is The Overstory by American author, Richard Powers. This potent work of activism is also a passionate novel that pays tribute to the grandeur of the natural world.

Powers tells us, for example, that a half-millennium-old Douglas-fir will

send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.

Powers calls these 'ancient benefactors giving trees'.

And this, to me, is what makes a forest enchanted. When compared with human greed, the generosity of our forest kin (I’m told we share some DNA with trees) is nothing short of magical.

Not only do trees give to their own, they also give to us—a fact illustrated in Shel Silverstein's poignant story, The Giving Tree, about a boy whose fickle love for a tree is met with the tree’s unconditional love for the boy. The tree gives without ceasing for decades until all that is visibly left of him is the lowest part of his trunk.

‘I don’t need very much now’, said the boy, ‘just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired’.
‘Well’, said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, ‘well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest’.
And the boy did.
And the tree was happy.

There is so much we can learn from trees. Generosity, for one, as Silverstein's giving tree teaches us. Trees also model good will, though this is not the lesson Richard Powers intended in his passage below, where he frames the interaction between trees and humans as a bribe:

Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. … When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you.

I like to think that the relationship is a little more nuanced than a harshly transactional bribe. Perhaps we can view it as a reciprocal support system—a quid pro quo. When you're good to Mama (when you move respectfully and lovingly through her lands), Mama's good to you.

We can also learn loving stewardship from trees. The German forest scientist, Peter Wohlleben, tells us that

the trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive.

Love and care also pulse through the animated short film, Forevergreen. This Oscar-nominated movie is about an orphaned bear cub who forges a friendship with a loving tree. If it sounds anthropomorphic, it is. Forevergreen is part allegory, I think, and the bear is a stand-in for us.

The film’s soundscape is wordless, yet the final frame seizes our attention with a text, from the bible of all places:

Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friend.

Drop everything and watch this 13-minute film now, and then please tread softly on this blessed earth. Go for a walk in an enchanted wood and listen closely. As Powers reminds us,

Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

References

Olzmann, M. (2017). Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now. Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/poem/letter-someone-living-fifty-years-now

Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, scene 1. Folger Shakespeare Library. Retrieved March 18, 2026, from https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/2/1/

Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). The Tempest. Folger Shakespeare Library. Retrieved March 20, 2026, from https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/

Silverstein, S. (1964). The giving tree. HarperCollins.

Wohlleben, P. (2017). The hidden life of trees: What they feel, how they communicate – discoveries from a secret world (J. Billinghurst, Trans.). David Suzuki Institute.