Welcome to Issue 3, where we’re exploring the changing landscape of the Ethiopian Highlands. When Kylee travelled to Ethiopia last year to complete research for her Masters thesis, she could not have imagined that a beguiling tree would become the center of a story that blends ecology, culture, history, and the impacts of climate change. Drawing on the theology of religious relics, a key part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church tradition, she explores the spread of the eucalyptus tree across the country and whether or not it can consecrate something sacred, something lost. You might have noticed today’s email is going out a bit later than usual - we’re experimenting with delivery times and open rates. Anyways, thanks for reading. We hope you’re staying safe and healthy wherever you are. Remember to send us any passing thoughts at placeletter@protonmail.com - The Place editorial team.
Living Relics
Bones are littered across the landscape of Ethiopia, inside the churches and beside the footpaths that crisscross the dry earth. Even in the national museum the most prized skeleton in the world lays under thick plexiglass scratched and cloudy from years of adoration. When Lucy walked across the fertile Afar Depression 3 million years ago, choosing her final resting place there in the dirt, she could not have known that her fossilized pelvis and rib bones would evangelize evolution from the cradle of the human species.
In the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest orthodox traditions in the world, the remnants of the dead are known as relics. A cup they sipped from, pieces of the cross upon which they died, the soil that covers their gravesites, and even their bones. All these become items to be venerated. Devoted believers, whose contributions to the church are deemed invaluable, are honored and remembered through these items. In many orthodox cathedrals, relic bones are sealed into the altar, consecrating holy ground.
John, a veterinarian from Oklahoma, was the first to tell me about the centrality of relics to the orthodox church over coffee on the street outside our guest house in Addis Ababa. Stirring a sprig of rue into the dark brew in his cup, John told me that relics are a part of the reason he converted to the faith. In his knee length khaki shorts and neatly trimmed beard, he looks more the part of a dog lover than a devotee of one of the most ornate worship denominations in the world. But in between sips his reformation spilled forth. He recalled kissing a relic of the Virgin Mary in Chicago, leaning towards her gold surface.
“It was the beauty of it all that kept me coming back,” he said. “I am the type of person that errs on the side of skepticism - I can’t say I understand everything about the church perfectly, but I just can’t resist the beauty.”
I had gone to Ethiopia not for the inlaid cathedral domes, but to speak to farmers about climate change. Out in the Highlands, I found relics of a different kind. A graveyard of an ecosystem - a crypt not gilded.
Some of the bones were quite easy to find. On my first evening in Harbu Chulule, on the semi-arid Highlands located around 100 kilometers south west Addis Ababa, I picked up a horned cow skull on my way back from the village well. The porous curve of its jaw bone was cool to the touch, a reminder of the prolonged droughts of 2017 and 2018, when livestock starved.
The ghost of a landscape past is discussed by villagers over morning walks to the fields and between generations over a meal. Many of the people in the village who I speak to can’t remember what went first. Was it the multitudes of songbirds gone quiet? Was that before or after the rains became less frequent? Or was the soil the first to go, as it washed away down ravines and into muddy creek beds prone to flash floods? Most conversations go back to the trees-- what no longer grows, and what remains.
One morning I left my guest house and walked to a nearby gorge. I descended down a red dirt hill avoiding the deep cuts of erosion lacerating the ground. I come to the foot of a large valley, and begin climbing up the other side. It was hot. The vast bare hillsides cradled me, an open air cathedral scorched on either side by the sun. Below me, a young boy and girl drove a small herd of cows and horses down the gorge. I knelt down to feel the clay below and looked up. The only remarkable form that rose from the landscape were eucalyptus trees, which stood alone and in small groves, trembling in the soft wind.
The villagers can’t remember when the first eucalyptus tree was planted here, or when it definitively replaced the native juniper, acacia and sycamore. Stories about the eucalyptus’ origins in the country are peddled like old wives’ tales. In one account the first eucalyptus seed hitched its way into Ethiopia on the shoe of the last emperor, Haile Selassie, on a trip back from Australia. The more official version however, is that the eucalyptus was introduced to the country in the mid-1890s under the rule of Emperor Menelik II, by either his French or British advisors, to provide a solid timber supply for the expanding capital city of Addis Ababa.
However it came to the country, it spread. Quickly and, thus far, irreversibly.
The eucalyptus grows fast and is able to thrive in poor soil and hot conditions. However these are the rapacious characteristics of a foreign environment, best suited to the biome of its native Australia. Eucalyptus trees require more water to grow than Ethiopia’s native species, leading to soil erosion. During the colonial era, eucalyptus trees were planted to drain swampy areas and prepare them for construction. As eucalyptus trees are primarily used in the Highlands for charcoal production, they do not deposit nutrients back to the ecosystem once they are exported out of it, meaning that soil is not replenished. The leaves of eucalyptus trees are also toxic in large quantities - falling to the ground they effectively kill other plants in the vicinity. Halos of isolation repel from their feet.
However, some scientists claim that the eucalyptus is no harder on the environment than other tree species, so long as it isn’t planted en masse or in a monoculture. There have been no long term studies on the effects of eucalyptus trees in the Highlands, so there is no precedent. In other words, there is no proof of their deterministic malevolence.
Meanwhile, climate change has shortened the rainy seasons, and made periods of drought more intense. As soil becomes less fertile and growing conditions become more unstable, farmers need more land to grow their crops, which has led to deforestation in some parts of the country. Government officials and environmentalists have now discouraged the use of eucalyptus saying that it exacerbates the vulnerabilities of a landscape already in flux.
The farmers are torn. They know better than anyone the declining quality of the soil, the absence of rain, and the corrosion of the ecosystem’s links of dependency. But they can’t bring themselves to decry the eucalyptus. They are able to sell the charcoal made from its wood at the local market for a consistent price - for many, it is the only thing that gets them through seasons of drought. The foreigner grows well in the boneyard of the past.
“Besides,” a farmer said to me one day, standing in the patchy shade of a tall and slender specimen. “They can be beautiful too, in their own way.” A convert.
Back in Addis Ababa, John told me a story about visiting the Grand Canyon, around the time that he was considering joining the Orthodox Church. “When I laid eyes on it, it wasn’t one of those moments where I thought that something this beautiful has to have a creator,” he said. “It was more that I asked the question, how can a pile of rocks make me feel awe? There’s something inherently mysterious about that.”
The beauty of the eucalyptus is mysterious too. The conversion of the Ethiopian Highlands has happened over centuries, and yet there is no singular authority on what happened here and how. Like parables told again and again, it is the storytelling of the faithful that maintains an agreed upon truth, no matter historical accuracy.
The interconnectedness of climate change and ecological degradation are complex and hard to understand, as is the conversation about how to move forward. A return to nativism - bringing back the ecosystem that once was - is a romantic ideal. But when looking at the hardships that farmers face on the Highlands, and seeing the lack of action on climate change initiatives around the world, I fall into the camp of the doubters.
John explained to me that in the Orthodox Church relics, through their crystallized material presence, have the ability to link the past to the present in a palpable way. Grown in the soil of martyrs before it, has the eucalyptus tree converted some here to believe that it is now a rightful part of the ecosystem, despite its detrimental effects? Or is it simply a messenger bearing gifts, marking holy ground?
Bumping along the dirt road that leads away from the Harbu Chulule and back towards Addis Ababa in a beat up Toyota truck one evening, I looked out at the trees that dot the horizon. Their green have developed a richness in the half-light, they seem as though they are calmly watching the lands or standing at vigil. I roll down the window of the truck and lean out, a cloud of dust blows through the open window. In the waning light the eucalyptus’ curved limbs stretch towards the sky like smooth femurs - living relics of saints before them; juniper, acacia, and sycamore.
Kylee Pedersen is a writer and journalist usually based in London, UK.
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