J. Sterling Morton moved to Nebraska from Detroit in 1854. He was a newspaper man, an editor, and he quickly began to write about the fact that there were very few trees in Nebraska.

He became well known throughout Nebraska, and eventually became secretary of the Nebraska Territory. All the while he continued writing about the importance of trees, for soil conservation, fuel, and timber.

In 1872, he proposed the first Arbor Day celebration, and on April 10 of that year it was observed. At the time, it was estimated that more than a million trees were planted on that date by school children, civic organizations, churches and individuals across the state.



While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Arbor Day is an ancient tradition, it certainly is a venerable one in this country. On the one hand, I think its remarkable that as far back as the 1850s, ’60s and ’70s there were people with the kind of ecological consciousness that could give rise to something as “green” as Arbor Day, a full century — and more — before “green” became popular, before the Internet was around to organize the planting of one million trees, before scientific data that we now have which proves the deeply woven worth of trees.

On the other hand, despite our short memories and history texts that tend to highlight the ragged glory of war and the impressiveness of technological progress, I recall that Frederick Law Olmsted was designing incredible greenspaces — like New York’s Central Park — in the middle part of the 19th century, the first national parks were appearing in the 1860s and ’70s, and John Muir — the great godfather of the modern conservation movement — was beginning to make his cause known.

In other words, Arbor Day didn’t just come out of nowhere.



Arbor Day belongs to Americans — in our psyches and our mythologies — in a very unique way.

I think we can trace its earth-awareness sentiment at least as far back as Thoreau, who was trying to articulate something about our culture’s relationship to nature.

Arbor Day is this really interesting moment in our national calendar where we don’t celebrate oppositional patriotism or religious holidays, but rather pay attention to the subtle power that rises when people are in good relationship with the land they live on.

Healthy young trees being planted by a community of people symbolize this deep economic, social and ecological power. This kind of power, which comes from right relationship with the living things around us, is the only earthly kind that is sustainable, and which can sustain us. To me, that is a really profound reality. And well worth a celebration.



Here in Goshen, we have been quietly harnessing this power for a long time, whether we’ve known it or not. Trees on some of our streets date back a century, planted by people who understood what J. Sterling Morton was writing about, what John Muir was emphasizing, what Thoreau was trying to name.

By luck and by foresight, we’ve preserved a massive green heart — the Elkhart River floodplain — in the middle of our small city. We are a city of people who every year — going all the way back — seem to improve a little more on the lesson that we are also a city of rivers and streams, rich soil, micro-organisms, deer, rabbits, coyotes, snapping turtles, trees.

We are a city whose school corporation wrote and received a grant last year to plant trees around all the schools to reduce energy consumption and to beautify the campuses. We’ll honor our school corporation at the Arbor Day event.

We are a city where a farmer planted his fields to a forest decades ago, and then gave the forest to all of us. We will honor Dr. Larry Beachy for his gift at the Arbor Day event. Goshen is a city filled with this kind of earthy, generous power.



Everyone in the city is welcome to come celebrate Arbor Day this Friday from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Rieth Interpretive Center. We’ll have the Model Elementary third-grade choir, we’ll have awards, trees to plant and give away, a band, tree climbing, food, and lots of information about the good, living power that is available to us all right here, in this good place.