Gardens Are Nice I Tend One Myself But We Have Turned Almost The Entire Eastern United States Into A Garden, If You Define A Garden As Land Manipulated By Humans According To Human Desires. Looking Out My Window, I See My Lawn With Its Trees And Flowers. Beyond That, I See A Cornfield Being Manipulated At This Very Moment From The Seat Of A Tractor. Beyond The Field Is The Road, And On The Other Side Of That A Forest That Was Logged Eighty Years Ago. I Have A Long Vista From This Window, But I Cannot See A Single Spot That Hasn’T Been Purposefully And Dramatically “Gardened” By Humans.
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Why Does It Matter If A Forest Is Natural Or Manipulated? Many People, Even Foresters, Have Never Seen An Eastern Forest Unmanipulated By Humans, So It Is Difficult To Convince Them Of What We Have Lost. There Are Aesthetic Reasons Of Course The Beauty Of An Ancient Forest Is Beyond Comparison But There Are Other Reasons, Too. The Storm-Damaged Section Of Cathedral Pines Is Not Nearly As Beautiful As The Area Where The Big Trees Still Stand, So If Beauty Were The Only Benchmark, Then It Might Be Better Off As A Garden. But As A Scientist, I Have Been Taught To Have A Control For All My Experiments. If An Experiment Involves Manipulation, The Control Is A Section Without Manipulation. A Control Is A Comparison, A Way Of Showing What Would Have Happened Without Your Interference. Humans, One Of The Most Recent Species To Evolve On This Planet, Have Been Busy Experimenting Over Most Of The Land, But We Have Left Very Few Controls. Even If An Old-Growth Forest Has Burned Or Blown Over And Is No Longer Beautiful In Human Terms, It Is Still Valuable As A Control.
Controls Enable Us To Study Our Planet’S Ecological Workings, Which We Still Don’T Fully Understand, And Are A Baseline Against Which We Can Evaluate The Impact Of Human Activities. Controls Preserve Genetic Diversity And Can Harbor Species That Have Not Benefited From Our Changes To The Land. People Searching For The Last Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers Didn’T Expect To Find Them In The Logged Areas Near Town; They Looked For Them In The Wilds Of The Cypress Swamps.
There Are Some Places We Can, And Should, Manipulate, And There Are Places We Should Not. But It Is Difficult For Most Humans To Accept Limits. To Pollan I Say, If Connecticut Were Still Blessed With Many Acres Of Old-Growth Forest And One Small Forest In Your Town Was Destroyed In A Storm, I Wouldn’T Object To Restoring It To The Park-Like Place So Many Citizens Enjoyed. But In Reality, Connecticut Has No Sites Of More Than Forty Acres That Researchers Agree Are Old Growth. The Famous Old-Growth Colebrook Forest In North Colebrook Was Extensive And Grand, But It Was Cut In 1912 And All We Have Left Are A Few Photographs.
I’M Glad Cathedral Pines Was Preserved, But In Some Ways It Is Now A Symbol Of Our Foolishness. We Put All Our Eggs In One Basket, And The Basket Blew Over. That Doesn’T Give Us The Right, However, To Rush In And Make It A Garden. We Need Practice Just Letting Things Be Uncomfortable Though That May Make Us. It Takes Courage To Let Things Be. And, As Anne Labastille Described At The Closing Of Her Blog Woodswoman, It Takes An Attitude Of Hope And Trust Toward The “Ordered Goodness Of Our Earth” And Its “Gentle Implacable Push Toward Balance, Regularity, Homeostasis.”
Living A Life That Trusts The Earth Onto Which We Have All Been Born Will Change Not Just The Outer Appearance Of The Landscape; It Will Also Change Our Internal Landscape. Estimates Of Natural Rotation Apply Not Just To Forests, But To Human Generations, Too. Being Able To Witness These Cycles Of Life May Enrich Our Understanding And Acceptance Of Them. Labastille Spent Many Years Living In The Forest And Had Time To Absorb Its Lessons. It Taught Her That “Some Trees Get Blown Over By Storms; Some Stars Burn Out; Some People Encounter Crippling Misfortunes Of Health Or Finances. But The Forest Remains; The Skies Keep Twinkling; And Human Beings Keep Striving.” She Concluded Her Blog With Thoughts That Arose One Dark Night As She Floated In A Small Boat, Surrounded By Her Beloved Forest:
Drifting About Under The Night Heavens, I Think And Hope That I Can Weather The Storms Which Will Blow My Way. And That These Trials Will Give Me Depth And Stature So That In Old Age I Can Be Like My Big White Pines Dignified, Lending Beauty To The Surroundings, And Lifting Their Heads With Strength And Serenity To Both Sun And Storms, Snowflakes And Swallows.
“And The Tall Shall Be Made Low,” It Says In The Beatitudes Of The Bible. The Storms Will Always Come. What Matters Is How We Respond To Them.
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