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Sep 9, 2024 · Every culture has stories of wise people, ranging from monks and spiritual leaders to philosophers and mountain hermits whom travelers would consult for advice. But what traits do the wisest people on Earth all have in common?
- Finn Robinson
Sep 9, 2021 · Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who has proven, beyond doubt, that trees communicate with each other — that a forest is a single organism wired for wisdom and care. Simard found that the processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror the maps of the human brain that we’re also just now drawing.
Forest management is important for maintaining the health of forests, supporting biodiversity, providing timber and non-timber products, and contributing to climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration.
- Overview
- Pear ‘Survivor Tree’ | 9/11 Memorial, New York, New York
They inspire us, comfort us, and remind us how life moves on.
Every tree tells a story, but some are beyond eloquent, holding memories, embodying belief, marking sorrow. We hold trees in our imagination, where they grow in strange, wonderful ways in forests inhabited by fantasy and also by our fears. In fable and legend, a forest shelters spirits, witches, and once upon a time, a big bad wolf.
Also white harts that leap just ahead of the hunter’s arrow, and a hermit who may emerge just in time to nudge along a tale that ends happily ever after, but sometimes not.
We incorporate the rich metaphors that trees provide: We turn over a new leaf and branch out; ideas blossom and bear fruit. Though our momentum is sapped, our resolve remains deep-rooted, and yet there are times when we can’t see the forest for the trees.
Trees inspire, not just through language, but through ideas. Surely the most notable coordinates in the atlas of inspiration converge in front of a tree—an apple tree, surrounded by a wicket fence, in an orchard in Lincolnshire, England. There, reputedly, in 1666, an apple fell and prompted a young man named Isaac Newton to wonder: Why would that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?
The spidery script of an 18th-century account in the archives of the Royal Society in London relates that Newton was home from Cambridge (plague had closed the university) when he stepped into the garden and into a reverie. Wrote his friend and biographer William Stukeley: “The notion of gravitation came into his mind … occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.”
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After the conflagration of 9/11 reduced the 110-story World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan to metal carcasses, after a day of black smoke and ghostly ash, after the horror of 2,753 dead, the last living thing pulled from the wreckage was a Callery pear tree. It became an exemplar of the botany of grief, but also of resiliency. The tree was scarred on one side (at left, above)—the side chosen to face the main walkway used by visitors. “So they could see the moment when the world changed,” said Ronaldo Vega, the memorial’s former senior director of design.
After the conflagration of 9/11 reduced the 110-story World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan to metal carcasses, after a day of black smoke and ghostly ash, after the horror of 2,753 dead, the last living thing pulled from the wreckage was a Callery pear tree. It became an exemplar of the botany of grief, but also of resiliency. The tree was scarred on one side (at left, above)—the side chosen to face the main walkway used by visitors. “So they could see the moment when the world changed,” said Ronaldo Vega, the memorial’s former senior director of design.
Trees are nature’s memory stick, even at the molecular level. “Each growth layer that they put on every year contains a bit of the air from that year, transformed into carbon, and so the tree physically holds the years and years of the life of the city,” Benjamin Swett, author of New York City of Trees, said in a radio interview.
Some memories sicken the heart, like those summoned by the chestnut that stood outside the house at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, where young Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. From an attic window, the only one not blacked out, Anne could watch a tree mark the seasons before the Gestapo dragged her and her family away on August 4, 1944.
Jul 25, 2018 · This paper addresses one source of ambiguity by examining forest values at two levels of abstraction: core values of people (principles that guide in life), and valued attributes of forests (qualities of forests important to people).
- Nerida Anderson, Rebecca M Ford, Lauren T Bennett, Craig Nitschke, Kathryn J H Williams
- 2018
Aug 1, 2023 · This article sets out 1) to establish and develop the concept of the human-forest relationship (HFR) in order to elaborate on people's forest-related meanings, and 2) to discuss the potentials of the HFR concept for forest policy and research with a focus on forest conflicts and potential futures.
People also ask
What are the key points we have learned about forest management?
Do core values explain valued attributes of forests?
What is community forestry?
Is the forest wired for wisdom?
Are present-day forests shaped by historical and present institutions?
Who are the caregivers of the forest?
Oct 9, 2012 · Giving a historical overview about the cultural bonds between people and forests, the first part of the paper puts focus on non-productive aspects in human–forest relationships. Through history, forest values have changed and new functions have emerged.
