There’s much to learn from the “monument trees” of the temperate Alaska rainforest. (Photo by REX SMITH)

If you look skyward from the soft earth at the base of a giant red cedar to its canopy of branches, perhaps 200 feet overhead, you are apt to be struck by your own insignificance. In the temperate rainforest of southeastern Alaska, the greatest of these trees — those known to the region’s indigenous tribes as “monument trees” — are centuries old. A scar on the trunk several stories up may mark a place where, before America was a nation, a member of the Tlingit tribe, or a Haida or a Tsimshian, harvested bark to be woven into a basket, or perhaps a hat.

A couple of weeks ago, standing alongside one of these living monuments after following a bear trail deep into the forest, I placed my hand inside a foot-deep blackened gap two feet over my head — likely caused by a lightning strike generations back. I wondered about the last person who might have touched this tree, maybe before my Puritan ancestors arrived on the other side of the continent. What worried those people, or comforted them? How did they measure progress, and cope with the uncertainty that marks human existence, then as now? Did they ever wonder who would follow them here?

Thinking all of that in the company of those trees, and in the context of our fleeting time on this earth, it’s hard not to be humbled. In fact, that’s got to be good for us. “Humility,” after all, like “human,” derives from the Latin humus, which comes from the ancient words for earth. We dare not be prideful; our DNA molecules are the same as you find in the soil that supports these great organisms. We’re quite literally one with the trees above us and the soil below.

Unlike the forest and its inhabitants, though, we’re blessed with the intelligence to sustain the life cycle of this planet. It ought to humble us, then, to consider our poor record in the face of that opportunity.

A visitor to such a wilderness — even one trying to leave little footprint, and in the company of trained naturalists — feels like an intruder, or a voyeur. Yet there’s a value to this kind of tourism: While we’re traipsing through deep forests that belong more to brown bears and eagles than to us, we’re gaining some understanding of the magnitude of the choices that are in our hands. If we think hard, we might figure out why we’re falling short.

We might start by recalling that old question that probably struck us as profound when we were kids: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound? Of course it does, you say. Yet the egocentrism of that silly question reveals a deep human bias: We tend to value mostly what we personally see and hear. As a species, we’re pretty closed-minded, and today’s media ecosystem reinforces that ugly reality.

Truths revealed in the forest

The Tongass National Forest is a 16.7 million acre expanse protected by the United States government since 1907 — though that protection isn’t absolute, since it has allowed loggers to clearcut a million acres, including perhaps half of the forest’s old-growth trees.

Logging, even restricted, isn’t the only threat facing biodiverse forests of America’s Pacific Northwest, of course. For example, yellow cedar is dying off because climate change has reduced the early snowpack that it needs to insulate its shallow roots from hard winter freeze that follows. Federal authorities are weighing whether to declare yellow cedar an endangered species, but even that would be a stopgap: There’s little chance that we can affect the inexorable march of human-caused global warming enough to restore the seasonal snowpack that might save the yellow cedar.

There are countless examples of similar effects of climate change. But you don’t need to travel to a wilderness to develop some hearty anger about the political choices, both in this country and around the world, that have failed to protect our planet. More broadly, though, we know that it’s not only in relation to our changing climate that we’re victims of a devastating sort of cultural cockiness.

In fact, a lot of our contemporary problems arise from a narrow-mindedness that gives more weight to our presuppositions than to what science and experience may teach. The late Israeli social psychologist Ziva Kunda wrote about what she called “motivated reasoning,” concluding, “There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at.”  

Unsurprisingly, after four decades in journalism, I’d say that an antidote to this mental myopia is honest storytelling, which may be found in great novels and in powerful journalism alike. Ancient humans had only personal experience and the myths and legends of their ancestors to draw from; we have the benefit of channels of communication unimaginable in prior generations, and science that explains much of the natural world, altogether offering a view far beyond our own experience. This provides us the ability not only to grasp the reality of how things work on earth, but also a chance to grow our range of empathy, which is a vital human trait. We become more fully human as we read about, say, the grief of a family torn apart by war or urban violence, or as we watch a video segment about the joy of athletic accomplishment, or listen to a family describing its frustration amid financial difficulties. That’s a key value of journalism.

Reinforcing our biases

But a lot of political discourse nowadays, and plenty of the propaganda that purports to be journalism, doesn’t expand our view, but rather plays to our preference for what’s known. The viability and authority of traditional journalism is being challenged worldwide by the market forces arising from the digital revolution. In its place is a lot of “content” posing as honest analysis but which is in fact perfidious proselytism by partisans. Lies, that is. They can be quite alluring.

One of the realities underlying those changes is revealed in research that neuroscientists have reported in recent years: the differences in brain activity between political conservatives and liberals.

That research may not be something that producers at Fox News have in mind as they shape their reality-resistant programming, but they do know that their viewers are eager to remain comfortable with the status quo. Even if the right-wing media were to suddenly change course and tell its audience some hard truths about the key choices of our time — on economic justice, climate change, the threat to our democracy and racial inequity — it might not matter, since so many of us are willing to believe that something is true only if we already believe it, or if we’ve seen or heard it. In a group that is dominant in any society, comfort with the status quo may be a reflection of simple cultural arrogance.

Like the notion of a falling tree making noise only if humans hear it, then, we’re often can't imagine the reality of anything that conflicts with our own way, or what we’ve always known. That reaction applies beyond issues in the political realm; recognizing it and contending with it, in fact, it is a key teaching of the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, who wrote, “The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

Which is why we may take heart in the quiet of a deep rainforest, with the damp earth underfoot, the redolent scent of plant life inspiring our imagination and strong cedars reaching far into the sky. In such an ancient place, there is a great deal to learn. If we pay attention — if we look and listen and breathe deeply — we may be rewarded with wonder, humility and gratitude.

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