Month: March 2022

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

From FBI.gov:

Although the students at Lowell School which he attended were released for lunch earlier than usual, George followed his regular practice of immediately walking to the nearby Annie Wright Seminary to meet his sister Ann. The family’s chauffeur generally met George and Ann at the Seminary to drive them home for lunch at noon. Arriving at the Seminary 10 or 15 minutes early that day, George apparently decided to walk home rather than wait for his sister. But George never reached home that day; somewhere between the Seminary and his house, George Weyerhaeuser was kidnapped.

From Emergence Magazine:

What about our rooted companions? The northeastern spruce-fir forests that the Bicknell’s thrush journeys to every spring, or the stands of jack pine where the eastern bluebird builds its nests? We often admire trees for their steady rootedness, their resiliency in the face of change; for the gift of shade and companionship that a single long-lived tree might offer us and then our children and our grandchildren, even our great-grandchildren. But trees—or, more appropriately, forests—are perhaps not so rooted, so reliably placed, as we might think.

Right now, around the world, trees are on the move.

From The Guardian:

Ranches is a livestock researcher relatively new to living in the area, and the conditions were unlike anything she had experienced before, leading her to ask questions about the animals that spend their summers in the smoke. Eastern Oregon has this year experienced regular wildfires since early July.

According to new preliminary research from the University of Idaho, a sample of dairy cattle exposed to poor air quality and heat stress produced less milk – about 1.3 litres less than normal (just over two UK pints) – a day than average. Some cows had not fully recovered two weeks after the air quality improved.

From The Daily Overview:

Timber is frozen in the Angara River by a pulp mill in Bratsk, Russia. A pulp mill is a manufacturing facility that converts felled trees and wood chips into thick fiber board that is shipped to a paper mill for further processing. The facility in Bratsk handles about 540,000 cubic yards (413,000 cubic meters) of wood per year.

From Gizmodo:

The world’s collective forests have become shorter and younger overall in the past 50 years, according to a study published in the journal Science on Friday. This means that forests have less capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere and are less hospitable to the many species that rely on them for shelter. Oh, and it’s going to get worse.

From tree.fm:

People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, and unwind wherever you are. Take a breath and soak in the forest sounds as they breathe with life and beauty!

Underlying data source is here.

From NASA Earth Observatory:

There are few places in Ethiopia—or the world—quite like the Harenna Forest. Spread across the southern slopes of the Bale Mountains, it is the second-largest stand of moist tropical forest in Ethiopia and the largest cloud forest in the country.

From Futility Closet:

In areas of mountainous terrain and wildnerness, the border between the United States and Canada is kept clear of brush and vegetation to a width of 6 meters, forming a visible line between the nations that’s visible in satellite images.

The deforested segments total more than 2,000 kilometers.

From Wired:

Such webs may be found throughout nature. The natural webs that have lately enjoyed the most frequent comparisons to the internet are those we know from the vegetal world, whether a field of grass with its subterranean creeping rootstalks, or a grove of trees with its mycorhizal filaments connecting a vast underground network of roots, whose exchanges can now be tracked by a technique known as “quantum dot tagging.”