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“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’
“Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.”
The Ape Inside Us, by Rubin M. Rabinowski.
Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
“Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.”
Only one conclusion makes any sense: The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.
Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.
Humans are so frail. How have they survived long enough to wreak all the shit they have?
Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer. . . .
She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.
“Homo sapiens, man. Always up to something!”
It’s a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you’ve already made.
The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.
