Rooted Democracy: Trees, Memory, and Belonging

Aoife Rialtas

Welcome to the show. [warmly] So picture a lunch table in Cyprus: plates half-finished, glasses sweating in the heat, the ordinary conference murmur of policy people doing what policy people do -- which is often a very elegant version of circling the point. [chuckles] And then, somehow, trees came up.

Aoife Rialtas

Not in the decorative sense. Not as greenery. As memory. As law. As warning. As home. One person mentioned a tree from childhood, then another reached for a story from their own place, and suddenly the whole table had shifted. It was as if we’d found a language older than our talking points. People who had been careful became specific. You could feel it -- [pauses] the room got more honest when it had roots in it.

Aoife Rialtas

That stayed with me because in Europe, trees have never really been just scenery. They’ve been civic markers and spiritual coordinates and, frankly, a way of organizing belonging. In Ireland you can hear it in place names. Doire: oak grove. Cill Dara: church of the oak. A whole map carrying arboreal memory in plain sight, which I love, because institutions also do this when they’re working well -- they hide history in the everyday until somebody points and says, no, look again.

Aoife Rialtas

And before the modern state, before the bureaucratic file and the planning map and the zoning row, there was the bile -- the sacred tree at the heart of an early settlement. Not off to the side. Not a park feature. The center. A living axis where protection, assembly, continuity, and identity could gather. I mean, imagine that as a founding image for public life: not a wall, not a fortress, but a tree. Something rooted and growing and vulnerable at the same time.

Aoife Rialtas

[reflective] I keep coming back to the oak in particular. There’s something about the oak in story and symbol that feels less like an object and more like a threshold. A portal, almost. And once you say threshold, you start noticing how many of our important words and practices are about crossings. A door is not just wood on hinges; it’s the line between one condition and another. Education, at its best, is also a crossing -- the movement from not-knowing to knowing, or maybe, more honestly, from one kind of ignorance to a better, more generous kind of understanding.

Aoife Rialtas

If that sounds a touch mystical, well... [laughs softly] maybe it is. But I don’t think that makes it unserious. Liminal spaces matter precisely because they are where change becomes possible. A doorway. A shoreline. A classroom. A grove. Places where you are no longer entirely what you were, and not yet fully what you’ll be next. Democracies, too, spend a lot of time in that in-between state, which is why they can feel both sturdy and strangely fragile.

Aoife Rialtas

And that lunch in Cyprus -- I didn’t expect this, actually -- altered the emotional weather of the conference for me. [softly] Up to that point, it had felt like many conferences do: bright, well-meaning, slightly over-insured against vulnerability. Then people started talking about trees from home, and all at once the conversation stopped performing expertise and started revealing attachment. Not sentimentality -- attachment. The kind that tells you what people are really trying to protect when they talk about society.

Aoife Rialtas

That’s where the rowan came in. Across Ireland, Scotland, and the Nordics, the rowan is not merely a species on a list. It is the protected tree, the fairy tree, the tree of the druids in some tellings -- a tree that sits right on the border between legal consequence and supernatural consequence, which, honestly, is one of the great human inventions. [deadpan] “Please don’t cut this down” is one thing. “Please don’t cut this down unless you fancy bad luck, communal disapproval, and possibly the Otherworld taking an administrative interest in you” -- that’s a robust compliance regime.

Aoife Rialtas

But jokes aside, that doubleness matters. The rowan was protected because communities understood that some living things hold more than timber value. They hold social meaning. They hold a boundary. You don’t preserve them only because they are useful in the narrow sense; you preserve them because they help maintain the world as a world people can inhabit together. Law and lore, in that sense, were not opposites. They were partners.

Aoife Rialtas

And then there was Eglė. Her name means fir tree. I love that -- not because it’s quaint, but because names tell you what a culture keeps near the center of itself. To be named for a tree is to carry a species into the room with you, as identity, as inheritance, as a little piece of landscape made human. In a continent shaped by forests, that’s not trivial. It’s civilizational texture.

Aoife Rialtas

Europe’s forests vary wildly, of course. Finland has vast tree cover; Ireland has 11.6 percent. That contrast is more than ecological trivia. It changes what a forest feels like in the imagination. In one place, trees may register as continuity, abundance, the background condition of life. In another, they can feel precious, fragmentary, almost like a memory of what once organized the land more fully. And if you’re from Ireland, I think that scarcity sharpens the symbolic charge. A tree can start carrying more than itself because there are fewer chances to forget it.

Aoife Rialtas

Now, the obvious pushback is: aren’t we in danger of forcing a metaphor here? Trees are trees. Democracy is institutions, elections, procedures, opposition parties, courts. Fair. Those visible structures matter. They are the canopy. They are what we point to when we want proof that public life exists. But forests do not survive on canopy alone, and democracies don’t either.

Aoife Rialtas

[curious] Because forest science gives us this extraordinary image -- the so-called wood wide web. Trees linked through fungal networks. Parent trees, or mother trees as they’re often described, supporting saplings through underground exchange. Nutrients, signals, forms of assistance moving below the surface where you cannot see the work being done. I was gonna say it’s like infrastructure, but actually it’s more intimate than that. It’s closer to trust. To culture. To habits of mutual recognition. To all the quiet exchanges that make a society capable of withstanding stress.

Aoife Rialtas

A democracy looks, from the outside, as though it is held up by ballots and buildings and constitutions. And yes, yes -- those are real. But the life of it depends on deeper systems: local memory, civic norms, the stories people inherit about obligation, the little acts of protection that never make the news, the sense that your fate is entangled with people you may never meet. Underground stuff. Root stuff.

Aoife Rialtas

If the roots are damaged, the canopy can remain green for a while. That’s the unnerving bit. A forest can still look like a forest right up until it doesn’t. A democracy can still display its visible forms even as the nutrient exchange underneath has been thinned out by cynicism, isolation, contempt, or neglect. You can keep the procedures and lose the living system. And then everyone acts surprised when the leaves start to go.

Aoife Rialtas

[reflective] Maybe that’s why the tree stories in Cyprus landed so hard for me. They made the conference feel less like a collection of institutions comparing notes and more like people noticing the underground network between them. Not agreement -- something better, actually. Recognition. A sense that what we each called protection, or belonging, or inheritance, might be differently named but similarly rooted.

Aoife Rialtas

So I’ve been thinking about oak doors and rowan warnings and a woman named for a fir tree, and about forests that survive by sharing what the eye cannot verify. [softly] Maybe the real test of a democratic culture is whether it still knows how to care for what lies beneath the visible crown. Because once the roots are treated as expendable, the canopy is only borrowing time. And a society, like a forest, is most alive when what holds it up is hidden, communal, and still growing.