I believe in the cosmos.  All of us are linked to the cosmos.  Look at the sun: If there is no sun, then we cannot exist.  So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred;  trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

When theists look at a forest, or at a cell, or at a galaxy, they feel that they are contemplating the reflected glory of an invisible creator, or they are staring at God's impenetrable veil.  When pantheists do so, they are directly witnessing the glory of divine being.  They are gazing on the unveiled face of God.

There was a handsome male mockingbird that sang his heart out every morning during the nesting season from the top of a tall Norfolk Pine tree.  Last week the tree was cut down. The mockingbird and his song are gone.  I can't put a dollar value on the tree nor on the mockingbird nor on his song.   But I know that I - and our whole neighborhood - have suffered a loss.  I wouldn't know how to count it in dollars.

In sleep of helpless infancy
Trees were the arms that cradled me;
On Tree my daily food is spread,
Tree is my chair and Tree my bed.

Teresa Hooley

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet

Gerald Manley Hopkins

***

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land…”

A.B. Housman

***

 

Indeed the whole plain was diversified with groves ... of forest trees which gave it the appearance of a fine park. Such as grew on the public grounds ought to have been preserved ... the poorer inhabitants cut down these noble and beautiful trees for fuel. In one single night seventy tulip-poplars were girdled, by which process life is destroyed, and afterwards cut up at their leisure ... Nothing affected Mr. Jefferson like this wanton destruction of the fine trees scattered over the city-grounds. I remember ... his exclaiming ‘I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor.’ ‘And have you not authority to save those on the public grounds?' asked one of the company. ‘No!’ answered Mr. J., ‘Only an armed guard could save them. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, it pains me to an unspeakable degree.”

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'

It seemed a strange thing to him, when earth was earth and rain was rain, that scrawny pines should grow in the scrub, while by every branch and lake and river there grew magnolias.  Dogs were the same everywhere, and oxen and mules and horses.  But trees were different in different places.