You get 61 trees for life

 

Nalini M. Nadkarni (photo source Univ. of Washington article)

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 …

 

Leaf Melt Rumination and True Americans

About 600 words

“Small things amuse small minds.”

Five inch long American beech tree leaf resting at the bottom of a beech-leaf-shaped hole in ice, Balsamea, March 21, 2019

It’s amusing how much a leaf laying under water in an ice pocket can conjure rumination.  It’s not the kind of rumination that comes with an unquiet mind, that sort of out-of-control thinking that spirals endlessly into itself.  These icy leaf ruminations are just notions that sift through the synapses for no reason except that’s what we’re made to do with observations of Nature.  We’re made to be inspired by Nature to see things that small minds miss because they don’t see small things, or don’t pay attention to them.

Too bad more small minds are not amused by more small things.

Small things in Nature, that is.

I live not in myself …

“I live not in myself, but I become a portion of all around me … Are not the mountains, waves and skies a part of me and of my soul, as I of them?”  -Lord Byron.  See the full poem at the end of this post from which this quote is derived.

Of course that’s what I always say when asked what I am.  Actually, I often take it as far as saying that I am all that is not me.  Yeah, well … never mind.  A line for another time.  But do read on for something that makes sense to normal people.

I stumbled onto this quote at Joseph Cornell’s Sharing Nature website.