Posts tagged trees

Things don’t mean anything. Birds don’t mean anything. Trees don’t mean anything. Words mean something, yes. Because they point…

alan watts, signs, signifiers, trees, meaning, climbing signposts, fingers pointing at the moon, words

“Things don’t mean anything. Birds don’t mean anything. Trees don’t mean anything. Words mean something, yes. Because they point to something beyond themselves. They’re signs. But if you take words too seriously, you’re like a person who climbs a signpost instead of going where it points.”

–Alan Watts (viainthenoosphere)

Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers

literature, review, interview, LARB, Richard-Powers, overstory, trees, HPI, nature, 2018

One of our great errors in thinking — another aspect of that unfortunate idea of human exceptionalism that makes it so hard for us to be at home in this world — is that the natural and the man-made are distinct entities. Like all other parts of the branching experiment, we make and are made by the living environment, and we have done so since before we were us. Without the forests of the Santa Cruz mountains, there would be no Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley will make or unmake the forests of the future. No nature story, no account of environmental struggle would be complete without bringing on-stage all the human technologies that are to us what the invention of flowers and nuts and chlorophyll and mycorrhizal networks are to the forest superorganism. Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants.

via https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/

Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers

richard-powers, ecology, trees, culture, nature, books, overstory, 2018

One of our great errors in thinking — another aspect of that unfortunate idea of human exceptionalism that makes it so hard for us to be at home in this world — is that the natural and the man-made are distinct entities. Like all other parts of the branching experiment, we make and are made by the living environment, and we have done so since before we were us. Without the forests of the Santa Cruz mountains, there would be no Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley will make or unmake the forests of the future. No nature story, no account of environmental struggle would be complete without bringing on-stage all the human technologies that are to us what the invention of flowers and nuts and chlorophyll and mycorrhizal networks are to the forest superorganism. Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants.

via https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/#!

How Britain’s oldest tree became ‘sexually ambiguous’

trees, groworld, growth, ageing, longevity

Ancient trees can also create separate entities within their structure to protect themselves from disease. “It’s a strategy for longevity,” says Brian Muelaner, chair of the Ancient Tree Forum. “The Fortingall yew is fragmented and it may be so compartmentalised that part of it has become sexually ambiguous. We are all continuously learning about ancient trees – the ageing process of trees is a new science.”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2015/nov/02/britain-oldest-tree-fortingall-yew-change-sex?CMP=share_btn_tw