Tree Talk and Tales
By Daniel H Henning
Published by 1st Books Library, 2002
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

Up a tree with a dharma bum

The sap rises like kundalini in a book about listening to the woods, but all efforts at illumination are stumped

The Nation
Published sometime in 2005
Perennial Bangkok visitor Daniel Henning, PhD, recently invited us to review his 2002 book “Tree Talk and Tales”. Short version: it’s too sappy. But its intent deserves more considered thought.
Taking tree-hugging to a leaf-rattling extreme, Henning offers a slim discourse on environmentalism, ethics and Deep Ecology, which is a quasi-philosophy that, in a better rooted format than this book, can be taken more seriously.
The American professor of political science and forestry, who winters in Thai national parks and was ordained a Buddhist monk in Burma, has attempted to relieve himself of years of pent-up frustration – resulting from trying to save the planet from sneaky loggers and adept lawyers – through a good old chat with the trees, and here relates what the woods have to say for themselves.
It has to be acknowledged that Henning’s heart is in the right place, and all power to him if his books and lectures can convince more people that trees must only be felled when it’s absolutely essential to human need.
And he’s at pains to explain that trees don’t “talk”, per se, and that their messages to him are very personal, so it’s okay if readers sometimes wonder what they’re on about. (He is loath to “project” interpretations.)
But still, few beyond adolescence will find any bite in his bark, boles or branches when he quotes the trees’ aphorisms (“Be aware, be patient, be a tree like me, poised and straight to meet fate vulnerable and dignified, for life is to be risked and tries”); when he incessantly asks whether trees weren’t central to Lord Buddha’s enlightenment; and when he ends up with a spruce’s eyewitness account of its salvation that reads like Nancy Drew meets Smokey the Bear.
An old hippie reborn through New Age navel-gazing, Henning cannot communicate without words like “oneness”, “sacred”, “healing” and, of course, “love”. Alas, he butted his head against those bulldozers for so long that even 12-step programmes and “countless hours of psychotherapy” couldn’t save him from the brutal realisation that he and his fellow environmentalists were getting nowhere against big business.
Buddhism and trees got him back on track, he says, but one still worries whether his children, whom he christened Forest and Tundra, stay in touch.
Dr Henning can be an interesting voice. At a World Buddhist University seminar last year, he explained articulately how Deep Ecology stands apart from ecology in that it’s not human-centred.
“Sustainability is a popular concept, but it is still measured by human needs … Other creatures need to be considered on an equal basis and should be given equal status as human beings. They should be allowed their space.”
Yet somehow, in his book two years earlier, he was being chainsawed by a tree at Wat Dhammakala: “How dare you try to define, dictate or manipulate relationships with other people … Stop being so silly – let your light shine through … Sit up straight. Be a friend to yourself.”
“There’s too much clutter in your world!” barked an “old stump” in Queensland, Australia. “Too much holistic/spiritual stuff.”
What would the Buddha have thought if he’d been told that? But the contradiction goes unexplained, as do the occasional lapses into tree species identification when he’s promised himself he wouldn’t because “species are more real when we simply experience them without trying to label them”. Personally I like a little science in my spiritualism, but Henning, shunning a decent editor, lumbers on.
In another Thailand anecdote, Henning is comforted by “Tropical Tree” outside his Bangkok apartment and its popularity with the neighbourhood birds and bugs, only to find it gone when he returns the next year to resume his work saving Asia’s forests. The “tense and hurried” (and rich) Thai man who’d bought the next-door property had, in his lust for modernity, added it to Nature’s casualty list.
Grist for the mai pen rai mill, it’s a loss Henning mourns in passing while citing “demonstrated experiments” that a plant’s outline can be photographed even after it’s snatched away. Thus Tropical Tree still waves outside his window and “offers me the help and support of its presence”.
In the telling of his tree tales, Dr Henning beavers away at the need to see trees as a bridge between Mother Earth and Father Sky, by which humans can recognise their shortcomings, master their egos and connect with the infinite. Buddha was born, meditated, found nirvana and died beneath trees, so “maybe the trees were a channel from the cosmos”.
This is good stuff for young people, who might even get a kick out of the saga of “Spruce” the spruce that takes up a third of the book with mountain meadow golly-gees and side lessons in civics, politics and, naturally, the balance of nature.
But there, around about puberty, the book’s value as recommended reading is surpassed by more interesting things.
Older teens might prefer Jack Kerouac’s 1958 forest-ranger novel “The Dharma Bums”, in which our drunken hero finds satori with the help of the poet Gary Snyder.
Adults genuinely interested in watching the woodchips fly can explore Deep Ecology, in which good folks like Snyder and especially the amazing Arne Naess (a Norwegian mountaineer who was still free-climbing the Rockies at age 80) suggest that biodiversity can only be protected by reducing the human population and inducing economic and technological upheaval.
And for people who pine for spirituality, well, there are always the teachings of the Buddha. I’d count on his translations of the trees any day.