"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, so you can enjoy the shade today. The next best time is: now."

- Chinese proverb

This Chinese proverb is about more than trees; it's indicative generally of our species' lack of foresight and of our sloth and it's indicative specifically of the environmental fix that we now find ourselves in.

I like the proverb for the realism of its first half, and for the hope of its second half. If humankind is to continue to flourish on this green Earth, and if this green Earth is to remain green, we will need equal measures of realism and hope.

In fact, we especially need now the hope that is expressed in planting a tree. In May, under the auspices of the interfaith environmental group EarthKeepers and the Superior Watershed Partnership, and with the help of donations from Holli Forest Products, Forestland Group, Plum Creek Timber Company and Meister's Greenhouses, 12,000 white spruce and red pine seedlings will be planted across the Upper Peninsula by approximately 100 congregations from 10 faith traditions.

These will be blessed trees, blessed not only with water but also with our good words. Our plantings will, we hope, be 12,000 acts of faith, acts informed by the reality of our present and buoyed by our hope for the future. These trees will not be for ourselves, except insofar as they will confirm to ourselves our faith in ourselves and the future. Mostly, the trees will be for our heirs, known and unknown.

We will offer them in ceremony, the prayer or consecration to vary by religious tradition. In my tradition, Zen Buddhist, we will offer the trees "to benefit all beings." Not all of these beings are human and our ceremony will include a call and response, during which the assembly repeats: "Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine."

Across the U.P., the trees will be planted in yards and at camps and on woodlots, and along city streets and property lines. They will be planted with deliberate intention, in hope for the future, and as gifts to our descendants, blood or not: "One generation plants the trees under which another takes its ease" (another Chinese proverb).

I live on a street in Marquette that is arched with mature maples. We moved to this street 18 years ago largely because of the lake, just down the hill, and because of the maples, which in autumn blaze forth and are simply beyond glorious, beyond any words I can think of to describe them.

I like to think that many of these 12,000 trees about to be planted will blaze forth in some similarly enlivening way. Perhaps one of the red pines will have grown to great size centuries from now. Perhaps a young man or an old woman somewhere down the centuries will marvel at this leviathan's height or be stirred by its girth or its longevity or its life force.

Maybe a child, hearing a spring wind soughing high in its branches, will hear the music of the spheres or discover aural evidence of the great chain of being. With a tree, and the future, so much is possible. And yet, planting a tree is such a modest, even humble, act:

"Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one needs only a shovel."

- Aldo Leopold

Editor's note: Tesshin Paul Lehmberg, head priest at Lake Superior Zendo (Zen Buddhist) and a faculty member at NMU, is EarthKeeper Implementation Team co-chairman.