XPost: alt.religion.christianity, soc.culture.african, alt.relig   
   on.christianity.east-orthodox   
   XPost: alt.christnet.ethics   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small   
   pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches,   
   living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. In this   
   film and essay, Jeremy Seifert and Fred Bahnson travel to Ethiopia to   
   gain a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of   
   trees.   
      
   THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN   
   IN THE FORESTS of northern Ethiopia, there are said to dwell large   
   numbers of invisible hermits who intercede on behalf of all humanity.   
   Menagn, they are called in Amharic. According to Ethiopian Orthodox   
   cosmology, hermits rank just below angels in importance, making theirs   
   the most efficacious of all human prayers. To have one of these holy   
   men living and praying in your forest is considered a special   
   blessing, even if you never see him.   
      
   About the hermits’ lives, little is known. They appear rarely, and   
   only then to those with the eyes of faith, yet their presence in these   
   forests is undisputed. They might accept an offering of dried   
   chickpeas or a handful of roasted barley left in a clearing, but   
   mostly they subsist on leaves, bitter roots, and prayer. They wear   
   shabby clothes, unkempt beards, dreadlocks. Only the holiest of them   
   achieve a state of invisibility. When someone manages to see them and   
   attempts to take their picture, it is said, their image will not   
   appear in the photograph. A hermit might live in a particular forest   
   for years, going about his hidden work of intercession, and then one   
   day someone walks by a juniper tree and discovers a pile of his bones.   
      
   I live in a temperate rainforest in western North Carolina. I visit   
   the woods often, sometimes with my wife and sons, sometimes alone;   
   whenever I enter a forest, I can’t help but fall into reverie.   
   Increasingly the woods for me have become a place to ponder, to pray   
   and contemplate, so much so that the woods have come to be inseparable   
   from my spiritual life. Several years ago when I first read about   
   Ethiopia’s church forests, it seemed that I’d stumbled on my own   
   symbiotic relationship, albeit one that had already been thriving for   
   sixteen hundred years. I made plans to visit, bringing with me many   
   questions about the geography of faith, but also about different ways   
   of knowing that often seem in conflict and which our age seems unable   
   to resolve: our desire for certainty and our hunger for mystery.   
      
   My search led me to a man who embodied that tension, and who has   
   dedicated his life to studying and preserving Ethiopia’s last primary   
   forests. This is a story about trees and hermits, but it is also the   
   story of this man, of his love for both.   
      
      
   Photo by Fred Bahnson   
      
   THE HINTERLANDS   
   ON A HOT morning in late February, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie crossed a   
   dusty field toward a forest surrounded by a stone wall.   
      
   As he approached the wall, dozens of worshippers emerged through a   
   gate. They were clad in white shawls, returning home from a wedding,   
   and on their necks they wore small wooden crosses. Some of the women   
   wore crosses tattooed on their foreheads. They left the forest slowly,   
   in silence.   
      
   Alemayehu motioned me toward the wall so that I could see the forest   
   beyond. This was a quick stop. Soon a busload of fifty local priests   
   from across the South Gondar province would arrive for the start of a   
   two-day tour, but first Alemayehu wanted me to see Zhara, the place   
   where it all began. Alemayehu had convened the gathering along with   
   his friend and colleague Dr. Margaret “Meg” Lowman, an American   
   ecologist and canopy biologist, with whom he had worked for the past   
   ten years to conserve Ethiopia’s church forests. Each year they taught   
   a workshop for priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedu Church,   
   which traces its roots back to the fifth century. Normally they hosted   
   the workshops indoors, showing PowerPoint slides and Google Earth   
   images of the church forests. But this year the two ecologists had   
   rented a bus. They wanted to show the priests the newly completed   
   conservation wall at a place called Zajor, in hopes of inspiring them   
   to protect their own church forests, but first we stopped here at   
   Zhara, the first church forest to be conserved.   
      
   When he decided to become a forest ecologist, Alemayehu realized that   
   in order to study Ethiopia’s native forests, he would have to study   
   the forests surrounding churches. Until roughly a hundred years ago,   
   Ethiopia’s northern highlands were one continuous forest, but over   
   time that forest has been continually bisected, eaten up by   
   agriculture and the pressures of a growing population. Now the entire   
   region has become a dry hinterland taken over almost entirely by farm   
   fields. From the air it looks similar to Haiti. Less than three   
   percent of primary forest remains. And nearly all of that three   
   percent, Alemayehu discovered, was only found in forests protected by   
   the church.   
      
   “I was amazed to discover that,” he said.   
      
      
   Photo by Jeremy Seifert   
      
   The pressures on these forests, especially from cattle grazing, were   
   easily identified; the question of why they persisted was a puzzle. To   
   solve this puzzle Alemayehu went to Europe to complete first a   
   master’s degree then a doctorate in forest ecology, returning to   
   Ethiopia each year for his field research. Alemayehu chose   
   twenty-eight forests on which to focus his research, sites   
   representing all of the known endemic tree species, and the more he   
   studied them, the more he understood their significance. “I was   
   hooked,” he said. “Church forests became not only my profession, but   
   my emotional and spiritual connection.” But he also saw how quickly   
   the forests were disappearing, some from deforestation, most from   
   cattle grazing. When Alemayehu met Meg at an ecological conference,   
   she introduced him to Google Earth. They estimated that there were   
   nearly twenty thousand tiny church forests in the Ethiopian highlands,   
   scattered like emerald pearls across the brown sea of farm fields, and   
   most of these were no more than eight or ten hectares. While viewing   
   the Google Earth images, Alemayehu and Meg hatched a plan: they would   
   use these images to educate priests, showing them how much forest had   
   been lost, and also how much was still worth saving.   
      
   With the permission of the local priest, he and Meg chose Zhara as   
   their pilot project. Zhara was rich in biodiversity. During his   
   initial research Alemayehu counted over forty-six tree species in this   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)