Your Role and Mine

                                                Your and My Roles 

                                                          In Our

                                                  (Forests’) Future

A lot about the future of America’s forests will be determined by political stuff, by economic and financial dictations and by things natural science research learns.   But there are at least four things we common people can do and, if enough of us do them, they will be more important than what the politicians, the economists and scientists do.  

Those four things are:

• Plant a tree wherever you can. — It’ll make you feel big.

• Put up a solar panel to produce some of your electricity. — It’ll make you feel “green.”

• Eat more vegies and less meat and use vegetables that are grown as close to home as possible. — It’ll make you feel healthy.

• Take children to the woods, even if it’s just Peter Pan Park, USA; talk to them about respect for nature and show them natural beauty. — People will think you’re smart.

We can’t all do all of these, but everyone can do one or two and it will make a difference, a good one.

Concerning the children, poet Mary Oliver says it well, “Teach the children.  We don’t matter so much, but the children do.  Show them daisies and the pale hepatica.  Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen.  The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers.  And the frisky ones — inkberry, lambs-quarters, blueberries.  And the aromatic ones — rosemary, oregano.  Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school.  Give them the fields and woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.  Stand them in the green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent beautiful blossoms.”  (Mary Oliver, Blue Iris, page 55)

William Wordsworth, “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”      

It’s time.

This is the end of my blog, thanks for paying attention.      Jerry

A survivor on Pole Mountain