Questions Sep 27

 PH -61 Forests; Midterm Report Presentations begin. REPORTERS, remember to give us at least a couple of discussion questions about your topic. Questions about the presentations may be included on exams.

1. Questions coming soon
2. COMMENT?: "...especially in the Deep South..." 37
3. COMMENT? "'Using' land is what people have been doing for centuries... people are connected to place..." 41
   
4. Do you think the public understands the importance of protecting tropical forest ecosystems? 42-3
5. Have you planted any trees lately, or supported tree-planting campaigns? Do you intend to? 44
6. Do you use/consume palm oil, deliberately or not? Will you try harder not to, after reading about Peatlands? 48
7. Though "agroforestry  systems are making a comeback" (53) we still see reports of bad choices regarding forestlands (like cutting down trees for solar farms). Are these random flukes, or might there be a more sinister explanation? 
8. Does the discussion of indigenous fire management/wisdom reinforce Wendell's message about the power and necessity of localism and long-term commitment to communities? 54-5
9. Are you going to look for ways to get more bamboo into your life (as flooring, furniture etc.)? 57
10. Have you read The Overstory? (If not, I highly recommend it.) What are your thoughts on "the profound ties between trees and people"? What would it mean to really see the world "from the standpoint of trees"? 60-1

 

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. g'r

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

“You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .”

...
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

(And then read Bewilderment...)

Richard Powers is the Pulitzer-prize and National Book Award-winning author of twelve novels, including Orfeo, The Echo Maker, and The Time of Our Singing. The Overstory, Powers most recent novel, is a sweeping, impassioned tale of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that explore the essential conflict on our planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans.

Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, activist, and the co-founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world. His 1989 groundbreaking book, The End of Nature – issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic – was the first book to alert us to global warming. He’s gone on to write a dozen more books, most recently Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities.

https://youtu.be/1CVdc_1HaMU