plant deep roots for the future

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” – Nelson Henderson

 

      “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.” – Vaclav Havel

 

In honor of Earth Day, I would like to share the two quotes above, which I’ve used in writing and speeches about philanthropy but which also suggest the importance of taking steps now in our individual, complicated, too-busy, too-connected, too-fast, overly processed, drive-thru lives.

 

The Arbor Day Foundation offers 10 free, guaranteed-to-grow trees with (including flowering trees, spruces and oaks with free shipping) for a simple $10 membership, as well as lots of low-cost foliage in their store. You can find them at www.arborday.org.

Some municipalities also offer free or discounted trees to help shape the green canopy in neighborhoods.

 

Michael Pollan offers a compelling essay titled “Why Bother?” in The New York Times, which says in part:

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

You can find the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with trees this year. Last May my neighbor’s 200-year-old live oak fell on my house, and just recently the other neighbor’s tree fell on my phone lines. Their insurance companies don’t pay for it, and in Hurricane Central, it would take a pretty big hit to seek out your own insurance because Florida insurers are dropping clients right and left — even those who have had no claims. So I’ve spent several thousand dollars to repair damage and remove them.

 

Despite this, I am going to plant 10 trees at my new house to help reduce my carbon footprint.

 

And while there are those who would say that Al Gore and the so-called “tree hugging” environmentalists are just overzealous nuts, I would refer to a quote I saw once: “Every oak tree started with two nuts who stood their ground.”

 

Isn’t it time we held our ground for the children of the future?