My favourite tree, Jonathan Drori

One of my earliest memories is of a spectacular cedar of Lebanon, near my childhood home in southwest London. One winter morning, we found it dead, struck by lightning. Its huge trunk and limbs were strewn haphazardly and being sawn up. That was the first time I saw my father cry. I thought about the huge, heavy tree that was hundreds of years old and that I had imagined to be invincible, and wasn't; and my father whom I had thought would always be in benign control of all that was important. I remember my mother saying that there had been a whole world in that tree.

As a child, I couldn’t decode my mother’s subtle metaphor of there being a whole world in that cedar. I thought she just meant animals and birds, fungi and insects. But I can now see that my father cried not only for that one tree but for other losses that it represented. He had fled to Britain in the late 1930s and for the rest of his life, struggled to cope with the loss of his entire family in Central Europe during the Holocaust; the obliteration of his community and everything he knew. Like a fragile ecosystem, that too had been a thriving and intricate world of delicate interdependencies; an exuberant web of life that seemed robust, and yet succumbed to the horror of man’s inhumanity to man.

There is a saying that, for evil to triumph, all that is required is for good people to do nothing. I feel strongly that this applies equally to our treatment of nature and to our human part of it. Empathy for people and the empathy for the natural systems on which our society depends, go hand in hand. That is why I love the International Tree Foundation, which supports communities living harmoniously with nature and causes both to thrive. We know, because we see it from our work, that when communities are treated well, holistically considering humanity alongside the rest of nature, the speed with which both flourish is a breathtaking, joyful and optimistic. And that is for me, the very personal message in the cedar of Lebanon.

Jonathan Drori, ITF trustee and bestselling author of Around the World in 80 Trees. This article first appeared in the 82nd Issue of ITF’s journal, Trees.