Ask not what your Earth can do for you, ask what you can do...

Yes, we paraphrased President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address in today's blog title. It seems only too fitting these days. It's a rainy Earth Day where we are. This year the oak leaf buds haven't yet swollen, let alone burst, unlike a few years ago when, by this time of month, some leaves were bigger than a mouse's ears. Today, we're curled up under a throw blanket, in a soft arm chair, becoming more and more deeply enthralled by Richard Powers' The Overstory.

oak leaf out, April 21, 2016

Photo by J. Harrington

Last year was, and this year is becoming, a year of rediscovering trees for us. Our skeptical, cynical, shell of incredulity is gradually cracking and splitting under more and more piles of evidence found in books such as the Hidden Life of Trees and About Trees, the latter of which is printed, in part, in a tree font. In fact, we're embarrassed at how cavalier we've been thinking about the ability of plants to photosynthesize. The last time we checked, we were hard pressed to make something like a life out of little more than thin air and sunshine. In fact, forest conservation and regeneration, growing more trees plus growing trees more, in both the temperate and the tropical zones ranks among the top 40 solutions to climate disruption, according to DrawDown: 100 Solutions to Reverse Global Warming.

We aren't yet fully convinced that the GAIA hypothesis is valid, but we keep finding ourselves leaning more and more in that direction. For this Earth Day, until the next one, we'd settle for being happy that we've managed to do more learning about our home planet, rather than exploiting,  destroying or crippling it.

In April

James Hearst

This I saw on an April day:
Warm rain spilt from a sun-lined cloud,
A sky-flung wave of gold at evening,
And a cock pheasant treading a dusty path
Shy and proud.


And this I found in an April field:
A new white calf in the sun at noon,
A flash of blue in a cool moss bank,
And tips of tulips promising flowers
To a blue-winged loon.


And this I tried to understand
As I scrubbed the rust from my brightening plow:
The movement of seed in furrowed earth,
And a blackbird whistling sweet and clear
From a green-sprayed bough.

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