Tuesday
As part of our church’s Sunday Forum, my friend and Sewanee colleague John Gatta recently talked about the importance accorded to trees in C.S. Lewis’s vision of God’s creation. John was drawing from his just published book, The Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm.
I thought about the talk as I read Rebecca Solnit’s recent Guardian article about Donald Trump’s assault on our national parks, including “crown jewel” Yosemite. In the Yosemite case, Trump is considering granting a real estate developer road access through a part of the park.
It’s even worse for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, national monuments in southern Utah that have ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, and scenic canyons. These are being reduced by 90% to open their coal and uranium deposits to mining interests. And then there are the massive staff layoffs, the drastic funding cuts, and the attempts to censor interpretation. Some of the funds designated for necessary park maintenance are being funneled to Trump’s Washington, D.C. vanity projects.
Also, according to NPR, in early August the Trump administration “moved to roll back an environmental rule that currently blocks road construction, and by extension most logging and mining activity, on tens of millions of acres of public forest land.”
One of the most painful scenes in the Narnia chronicles involves logging. In The Last Battle. King Tirian and the unicorn Jewel are meeting with a centaur about worrisome portents when their meeting is interrupted:
[A]ll three of them turned their heads to listen to a wailing sound that was quickly drawing nearer. The wood was so thick to the west of them that they could not see the newcomer yet. But they could soon hear the words.
“Woe, woe, woe!” called the voice. “Woe for my brothers and sisters! Woe for the holy trees! The woods are laid waste. The axe is loosed against us. We are being felled. Great trees are falling, falling, falling.”
We quickly meet the speaker:
With the last “falling,” the speaker came in sight. She was like a woman but so tall that her head was on a level with the Centaur’s: yet she was like a tree too. It is hard to explain if you have never seen a Dryad but quite unmistakable once you have—something different in the colour, the voice, and the hair. King Tirian and the two Beasts knew at once that she was the nymph of a beech-tree.
“Justice, Lord King!” she cried. “Come to our aid. Protect your people. They are felling us in Lantern Waste. Forty great trunks of my brothers and sisters are already on the ground.”
“What, Lady! Felling Lantern Waste? Murdering the talking trees?” cried the King leaping to his feet and drawing his sword. “How dare they? And who dares it? Now by the Mane of Aslan——”
“A-a-a-h,” gasped the Dryad shuddering as if in pain—shuddering time after time as if under repeated blows Then all at once she fell sideways as suddenly as if both her feet had been cut from under her. For a second they saw her lying dead on the grass and then she vanished. They knew what had happened. Her tree, miles away, had been cut down.
We have been introduced to the wonderful Dryads in Prince Caspian, in which there are also instances of deforestation. This time, however, the trees fight back. In a scene similar to Tolkien’s Ents ending the Battle at Helm’s Deep, the Dryads show up as the Narnians begin their battle with the Telmarines:
But almost before the old Narnians were really warmed to their work they found the enemy giving way. Tough-looking warriors turned white, gazed in terror not on the Old Narnians but on something behind them, and then flung down their weapons, shrieking, “The Wood! The Wood! The end of the world!”
But soon neither their cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the ocean-like roar of the Awakened Trees as they plunged through the ranks of Peter’s army, and then on, in pursuit of the Telmarines. Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild south-wester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers. It was like that for the Telmarines. It was a little alarming even for the Narnians.
It’s a wonderful scene, perhaps inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s “Letting in the Jungle” in The Jungle Books.
The situation is far grimmer in Last Battle. There the talking animals have been bamboozled by a false prophet into thinking that cutting the trees is Aslan’s will. (One thinks of Trump’s Christian pastors egging him on.) Thus we see talking horses pulling logs to the river and talking water rats guiding them to market:
Before long they could hear the hack-hack-hack of axes falling on timber, though they could see nothing yet because there was a rise of the ground in front of them. When they had reached the top of it they could see right into Lantern Waste itself. And the King’s face turned white when he saw it.
Right through the middle of that ancient forest—that forest where the trees of gold and of silver had once grown and where a child from our world had once planted the Tree of Protection—a broad lane had already been opened. It was a hideous lane like a raw gash in the land, full of muddy ruts where felled trees had been dragged down to the river. There was a great crowd of people at work, and a cracking of whips, and horses tugging and straining as they dragged at the logs….
“Work, lazy brute,” shouted one of the Calormenes: and as he spoke he struck the horse savagely with his whip.
The scene is so ugly that Last Battle was the only Narnia book I disliked. Among other things, I was appalled at how Tirian and Jewel, after killing the Calormenes mistreating the horse, unilaterally surrender. I felt a revulsion not unlike what many Americans are feeling about those entities (including certain Democrats) who fail to stand up to Trump.
Furthermore, even though I was a child, it was clear to me that anyone who associated wholesale deforestation with Aslan’s will (read, God’s will) was stupid. And I didn’t like to think of Tirian and Jewel as stupid.
The question is whether Trump’s National Park giveaways will do permanent damage or whether they can be undone. In the Last Battle, Lewis all but gives up on this world. As he sees it, the only hope is for everyone good getting raptured off to a permanently green Narnia.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, however, we’re given an alternative. As John Gatta pointed out in his lecture, when the four Pevensie children are designated kings and queen of Narnia, “they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down.”
When we return to being a nation of laws, maybe we can pass such legislation as well.
