Friday, December 11, 2009

The Giving Tree

Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree was one of my favorite books as a child (yes, I believe we can have more than one favorite). As a child, I had a sense the human character wrongly took more than he received, but I still marveled at the tree's generosity. My environmental reading is that humans have for too long ignored the greater consequences of exploiting resources beyond natural sustainability. We are part of an intricate web of organisms, and trees are but one greatly overused resource 'at our disposal.' The lesson from this book, I suppose, is to see the tree and not the man as the protagonist, for it is the tree who has the inner wisdom of knowing there is no "I" and "thou"--there is only "we."


1 comment:

  1. I loved that book as a child. Thank you for reminding me of it.

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