MENDOCINO COAST REAL ESTATE MAGAZINE May 27, 20ll (excerpted and revised)
Who Cares Questioning the status quo: good works from those who give from the heart
Story by Zida Borcich and Belvie Rooks
Planting a Million Trees Growing a Global Heart:
"Planting trees in this time of cataclysmic climate change is like stacking sandbags along the shore of a flooding river sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but sometimes that is all you have to fight with. But what we do know when we all labor together in the face of a common peril it transcends division and builds community". Dedan Gills
Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills Live from the Question,
“What Would Healing Look Like?”
Most African wisdom traditions hold the view that death comes in two forms. The first is the natural physical death that is a normal part of the life process. The second, and most dreaded, is the death and erasure that occurs when you are no longer remembered…
What Belvie Rooks and Dedan Gills call “Our African Journey” began in September, 2007, when they decided to leave friends and families to travel to Ghana to get married, a fitting tribute to their African American heritage as they began their lives as a couple. A few days after their
ceremony in Accra, they headed to the Elmina Slave Dungeon on Ghana’s Cape Coast, as a way of honoring and remembering the millions of unnamed and unknown ancestors who had passed through one of the more than one hundred slave dungeons along West Africa’s “Slave Coast.”
Belvie remembered, “As we stood staring out through ‘the-door-of-no-return,’ the last point of physical contact kidnapped Africans had with the African continent prior to being forced into waiting slave ships, we tried to imagine what reaching this spot must have felt like for some long-ago, unremembered African ancestor as she trembled on the precipice of a terrifying and uncertain fate.”
Belvie and Dedan at Door Of No Return
Belvie remembered, “As we stood staring out through ‘the-door-of-no-return,’ the last point of physical contact kidnapped Africans had with the African continent prior to being forced into waiting slave ships, we tried to imagine what reaching this spot must have felt like for some long-ago, unremembered African ancestor as she trembled on the precipice of a terrifying and uncertain fate.”
Uncontainable tears flowed as they recalled that for over three hundred years, without interruption, millions of innocent: men, women, children, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, potters, weavers, farmers, midwives, and healers had begun the long passage into slavery from places like this.
Belvie recalls that “As we moved through the devastating depths of grief and despair, Alice Walker’s poem ‘Torture’ ran through my mind:
When they torture your mother / Plant a tree
When they torture your father / Plant a tree
When they torture your brother / and your sister
When they assassinate your leaders / and lovers / Plant a tree
When they torture you / too bad / to talk / Plant a tree
When they begin to torture / The trees / And cut down the forest / they have made
Plant another”
They understandably felt tremendous sorrow and rage for so much loss. But when Dedan asked, “What would healing look like?” they recognized the question that would drive their dedication to find a way to honor and remember the forgotten ones. Their plan seemed almost to form itself as they thought about the state of the world: the
degrading environment, the desertification of Africa caused by global warming, and they realized that one powerful action they could take would be to inspire a movement to plant trees along the Trans-Atlantic Slave Route — a million trees along each route. Every tree would serve to respect and honor the forgotten ones, while helping to heal the increasingly devastated environment.
They didn’t know how to do this, of course, but simply making the declaration that this is what they would do had power in it that has opened doors to unimagined possibilities of healing the wounds of the past in the present while creating a sustainable future.
In March, as part of the annual commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” and Dr. King’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Growing A Global Heart was invited to plant the first of the memorial trees along the Underground Railroad. The inaugural tree planting ceremony
included participation from a cross-section of civil rights and environmental organizations, including the National Voting Rights Museum, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Alabama Forestry Commission, the U.S. Forestry Service and the National Wildlife Federation. Belvie and Dedan are excited about inviting their West African partners to join them in Alabama, later this year, in order to continue the tree planting initiative along the Underground Railroad, while leveraging the resources needed to launch the West African phase of the project.
The culminating event at this year’s march re-enactment was that Growing A Global Heart was invited to plant its first memorial trees at the foot of the historicEdmund Pettus Bridge. Belvie and Dedan planted the Longleaf Pine, which is extremely efficient at carbon sequestration. At the beginning of the Civil War,there were 90 million acres of Longleaf Pine throughout the Southeastern UnitedStates, currently there are less than 3 million acres.Belvie and Dedan recently went to the 46th commemoration and re-enactmentof Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic Selma-to-Montgomery March, first attemptedon March 7, 1965. It was the images of bloodshed and brutality by lawenforcement officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that shocked the nationand world alike, and what became known as “Bloody Sunday” eventually ledPresident Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act.
Belvie Rooks has lived in Mendocino County off and on for decades. She is a writer, educator and producer whose work weaves the worlds of ecology, feminism, spirituality and social justice.
Dedan Gills’s social work in the inner city incorporates the principles of sustainability, permaculture design, environmental awareness and “the greening of the inner spirit” as critical aspects of the recovery and healing process.” You can learn more about their work on their website:
Civil activist, comedian Dick Gregory with Tree Planting crew in Selma
Photos below left to right: First row 1. Pettus Bridge March Re-enactment; 2. Legendary Civil Rights Activists Annie Pearl with Mary, daughter of slain Civil Rights martyr Viola Liuzzo; 3. Coumba Toure, Director Ashoka West Africa and son Hank; Longleaf Pine start, Selma, Alabama. Second Row 1. Amadou Diop, Southern Regional Manager, Wild Life Federation with students; 2. Belvie Rooks and Divine for Council 3. Belvie Rooks and Hip-Hop Artist & Climate Change Educator, Ashel AKA Seasunz; 4. Douglas Fulgham National Forestry Service Officer and student preparing the ground to plant Longleaf Pine Third Row 1. Dedan Gills, Growing A Global Heart Co-Founder with Civil Rights Legend, Frederick Douglas Reese; 2. Tree Planting. Many Hands Make Light Work; 3. Drew Dellinger, Spoken Word Artist, Environmental Justice Activist and Educator, 4. Malika Sanders Fortier, Program Director, Voting Rights Museum and Institute Fourth Row 1. Veteran Civil Rights Activist/Comedian Dick Gregory with Selma Memorial Tree Planting Team; Freedom 2 & 3. Flame Recipient, Rev. Osagyefo Sekou at the at the Wall commemorating Civil Rights Heroes and Heroine, Selma, Alabama; Growing A Global Heart Logo
Our Deepest Gratitude to: Rob Kenner, Olimata Taal, John Zippert, Art Phalo, Joelette Crawl, Senator Hank Sanders, Rose Sanders, Divine for Council, Rev. Franklin Fortier of The Beloved Community Church and all the other wonderful souls who helped to make this memorable event happen.