The pages of Scripture are rife with roots and branches. From the fruit trees in the Garden of Eden to the Tree of Life to the wood of the Cross itself, trees appear constantly. National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop Chris Harper calls the tree an image of growth, renewal and interconnectedness. Like trees, he says, humans are rooted in their communities and grow from small seeds into beings that can branch outward to benefit not just themselves, but future generations.
Scripture, he says, uses the image of the tree to show us our calling to bear fruit. “We go forward from something so small, so insignificant [and] can do amazing things and be so productive if we but have faith,” he says. But the benefits of planting a tree don’t show themselves overnight, says Harper—it’s an investment in future generations.
Perhaps their scriptural significance is why trees also loom so large in the imaginations of Anglicans working on creation care work, he says. Initiatives like the international Communion Forest, the Lungs of the Earth campaign and even local tree-planting projects draw on the Anglican association between caring for creation and planting a tree. So will the Anglican delegation to COP30, the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held November 10-21 in Brazil, says Harper. He’s one of the Anglicans Archbishop Marinez Bassotto, primate of Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil, has invited to bring spiritual and Indigenous perspectives to the gathering. And while there are many urgent aspects of climate change that need addressing, Harper and other Anglican activists say there are good reasons why reforestation takes such a prominent place among them.
Food and flame: damage and projects in Canada
According to data from Natural Resources Canada, wildfires across Canada had burned a total of about 8.8 million hectares of land in 2025 as of Sept. 17. That’s about three million more than in 2024, but still just over half as much as the 15 million hectares burned in 2023. That year, Canada’s wildfires were responsible for a 24 per cent increase in global tree cover loss outside the tropics, according to the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Review. In the rest of the world, tree cover loss decreased overall by four per cent that year.
Harper, who travels frequently as part of his ministry to the Indigenous church, says he has seen the costs of that environmental damage in the lives of the people he ministers to. Some have had to move from homes in the paths of wildfires—often from reservations in remote areas where response crews are not always on hand—and are now living in cities instead. Others have seen damage and changes in land they rely on for hunting, fishing and other needs, due both to the fires and to climate change.
As these fires—and the usual logging—continue to chew through forests across Canada, some Anglicans are taking on projects designed to restore and improve tree cover and health.
One such project is a food forest at St. Mary’s Church in Fredericton. Andrew Mathis, a warden at the church and its food forest lead, says the idea is for the forest to be a “living food bank,” growing edible fruit and nuts for locals to come harvest as needed. Volunteers gather any leftover produce and donate it to the brick-and-mortar foodbanks in the area. The forest is limited by growing season and the amount of land it has to work with, Matthis says, but adds, “Ideally, this is just a demonstration project for what could be a future network of community food forests throughout a city.”
There are about 30 other food forest projects in New Brunswick, he says, many at schools and thus unstaffed in the summer. But with collaboration and knowledge sharing, there’s strong potential for expansion, he says. St. Mary’s has recently succeeded in convincing the city of Fredericton to incorporate food forests into its urban forestry program, adding some welcome civic support to the hope for a city-wide network..
Meanwhile, in the diocese of Ottawa, Valerie Maier and Patrick Stephens, heads of the diocese’s Alongside Hope working group, created Branches of Hope, a campaign to plant trees in the Ottawa area, raising funds to plant even more in Uganda. Maier and Stephens said they were inspired by and worked with another Alongside Hope partner agency, St. Jude Family Projects, a Ugandan NGO which trains farmers there in sustainable and organic farming practices. Through the NGO, they heard of the increased rate of tree loss in Uganda, where the COVID-19 pandemic caused many people to move out of cities to rural properties where they relied on wood for cooking fires.
Leaders of the Ottawa project announced in spring 2024 they had given out 410 trees to be planted in the diocese of Ottawa and sponsored the planting of 23,062 trees in Uganda. These trees will be counted as part of the Communion Forest initiative, a program launched at 2022’s Lambeth Conference which encourages Anglicans and church organizations around the world to plant trees to be counted as part of one “virtual forest” as a way to honour creation and promote afforestation.
Deforestation has already had serious and far-reaching effects, especially in the Global South, says the Rev. Ken Gray, retired dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Kamloops, B.C. and current secretary of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network. He says many countries in Africa have lost trees rapidly due to exploitation by industry and growing populations. In some countries—Burundi, for example—most people depend on wood to cook. But cutting down trees for firewood leads to soil degradation, erosion, floods and droughts—effects which can destroy whole communities, he says.
The good news, he says, is that youth get involved in places like Burundi and Uganda, planting trees in the millions in projects like the ones Branches of Hope funded. “The scale at which they do reforestation there is huge, almost beyond our comprehension,” he says.
Canada has much to learn from their enthusiasm, he says.
What Anglicans are bringing to COP30
Encouraging global leaders to learn from the experiences of those most impacted by environmental damage is one of the stated goals of the Anglican Church’s participation in COP30. Martha Jarvis, the Anglican Communion’s permanent representative at the UN, says the church is working to bring forward the voices of people indigenous to the environments affected by climate change and environmental destruction.
The guests invited by Bassotto will join prayer services, marches, vigils and press conferences as part of the People’s Summit, which happens in parallel with the gathering of world leaders. Jarvis says her job will include tying the issues those events raise in with the government negotiations through meetings with political leaders, coordination with COP30’s Indigenous caucus and connections with other ecumenical and interfaith coalitions.
Both she and Harper note that much of the discussion at COP meetings is about the business and financial interests impacted by action on climate change. That being the case, says Harper, Anglicans at the conference would do well to focus on communicating how the impacts they’ve seen affect economic concerns. Rising insurance rates, property damage from wildfires and job losses all mean less money circulating in the economy, he says.
“It ultimately affects the money itself,” he adds, “Everyone needs to be reminded that nothing on this earth belongs to us in this present moment, but we are borrowing it from our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. And they inherit the mess … we’ve created all because of our present greed.”
Much of the church’s power here, Jarvis says, comes from the fact that it represents ways of thinking and mobilizing action that stand apart from political and financial systems. The church points to ancient truths founded on a longing for restoration for all things and reveals the roots of the financial considerations in human selfishness, she says.
“That isn’t necessarily going to immediately change a negotiating position, but longer term it shapes national ideas and policies,” she says. “Jesus doesn’t really shy away from those kind of realities, so neither should we.”
What’s so great about planting a tree?
Not every Anglican believes reforestation is the most urgent issue Anglicans could be tackling, though. The Rev. Michael Van Dusen is a vocational deacon at the Church of St. Aidan in the Beach, Toronto, and a climate activist. In April 2024, he and eight other interfaith activists were arrested in a Royal Bank of Canada branch during a sit-in protest confronting the bank about its fossil fuel investments. In an email to the Journal, he said planting trees was awareness-raising; a good, even sacramental thing to do. However, he adds, “It is a gesture, not a solution. We have to do more to stop treating the atmosphere as a garbage dump for CO2.”
Harper and Jarvis largely agree. Still, Jarvis adds, though progress on fossil fuels may be frustratingly slow, populations become disillusioned and countries even pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, preservation and restoration of forests has a role to play. The Lungs of the Earth campaign, which the Anglican Communion launched this fall, calls Anglicans to take seriously the urgent need to preserve earth’s oceans, ice caps and forests as key elements of the planet’s ability to support life. If Anglicans really take the need to protect those ecosystems seriously, she says, they’ll push harder on emissions, plastic pollution and other damaging practises. Planting a tree isn’t the end of Anglicans’ responsibility, she says. But it is a visible, restorative, nature-first way to invest in the future.
