Planting trees as resistance and empowerment? In Nawbany, we just make stumps.

Wait, am I reading this correctly?

"Trees as an instrument of civil disobedience, empowerment, and emancipation, advancing democracy, human rights, and environmental justice."

In Kenya, maybe. In New Albany, we can rely on our ruling elites to display zero comprehension about trees apart from chopping then down at an unprecedented rate even as the urban heat island effect escalates.

Consequently, we look to Africa. Thanks to W for this link.

Planting Trees as Resistance and Empowerment: The Remarkable Illustrated Story of Wangari Maathai, the First African Woman to Win the Nobel Peace Prize, by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)

“A tree is a little bit of the future.”

Walt Whitman saw in trees the wisest of teachers and Hermann Hesse found in them a joyous antidote to the sorrow of our own ephemerality. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”

Many tree-rings after Blake and Whitman and Hesse, another visionary turned to trees as an instrument of civil disobedience, empowerment, and emancipation, advancing democracy, human rights, and environmental justice.

Born near a holy fig tree in the central highlands of Kenya twenty years after the country became a British colony, Wangari Maathai (April 1, 1940–September 25, 2011) went on to become the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for her triumph of promoting “ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development” by founding the Green Belt Movement responsible for planting 30 million trees and empowering women to partake in social change — an act of courage and resistance for which she was beaten and imprisoned multiple times, but which ultimately helped defeat Kenya’s corrupt, authoritarian president and blazed a new path to ecological resilience ...