In her 2008 book, Between Earth and Sky; Our Intimate Connections to Trees, Nalini M. Nadkarni wrote on page 43,
I calculated that the world supports sixty-one trees for each person on Earth [in 2005]. … When I told my husband […] he reflected for a moment and then voiced wonder that the ratio was so small. “Each person gets sixty-one trees in a lifetime? That seems hardly enough to supply just the firewood we’ll use in our woodstove for the next few winter seasons, let alone the lumber that’s in our house and the paper I put through my printer.” His reflections […] reinforced the sense that I need to think about ways to look after my sixty-one trees, wherever they might be growing in the world.
To see how she arrived at 61 trees for each of us, see the two scanned images of her text below. But first, this brief interstitial for democracy …
.
Every vote not cast is a vote for Trumpism.You know this. Trouble is, not enough other people know it, or realize its importance, or act on it. That’s why we got what we got in 2016. Do something about it. Double, triple or quadruple your voting power. Get non-voters to vote. It’s too late to debate anything politically. You won’t change their minds. It’s just numbers for now. More voting means more freedom for democracy to thrive, because this country is still more than half non-Trumpist people. We just need more of them to vote, and that’s it. Bernie Sanders said it, “More voter turnout, and we win.” He didn’t say it enough. Seems nobody did. We can change that. I will not stop saying it for the rest of my life, but especially emphatically until November 2020. Join me? You’ve got nothing to lose except democracy and no doubt some of your 61 trees.
Click to open Nadkarni’s text in these JPG image files, and see the abstract about her below them, then take a look at her 5-minute video about how she found out that trees are extremely mobile artists, and got inspired by them to help change our prisons.
Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees. World-renowned canopy biologist Nalini Nadkarni has climbed trees on four continents with scientists, students, artists, clergymen, musicians, activists, loggers, legislators, and Inuits, gathering diverse perspectives. In Between Earth and Sky, a rich tapestry of personal stories, information, art, and photography, she becomes our captivating guide to the leafy wilderness above our heads. Through her luminous narrative, we embark on a multifaceted exploration of trees that illuminates the profound connections we have with them, the dazzling array of goods and services they provide, and the powerful lessons they hold for us. Nadkarni describes trees’ intricate root systems, their highly evolved and still not completely understood canopies, their role in commerce and medicine, their existence in city centers and in extreme habitats of mountaintops and deserts, and their important place in folklore and the arts. She explains tree fundamentals and considers the symbolic role they have assumed in culture and religion. In a book that reawakens our sense of wonder at the fascinating world of trees, we ultimately find entry to the entire natural world and rediscover our own place in it. — from abstract at ResearchGate.net
