Jeff Hedin, Piercy Fire Protection District Board & Institute for Sustainable Forestry Board
Guest Contributor
I want to see a healthy forest with a healthy human community around and within it. These communities are so entwined in our biosphere that their health cannot be achieved sequentially.
I want to hear “forest” conjuring images akin to those it conjured when it emerged in the Latin of the early Roman Empire: the out of doors, our planetary surface not used for human shelter, enterprise, or entertainment.
I want to see our photosynthesizers recognized as the source of most of the energy driving our biosphere. Where they have evolved to thrive, humans and other composters can possibly exist.
As they have for millennia, from ice age to no ice age to ice age, our photosynthesizers are evolving to adjust to climate change. If enough survive, so may we. They do not need a massive infusion of mechanized management. I want to see them receiving well exercised intimate husbandry and wifery, using appropriate gear, to ease them out of disruption from exuberant industrial extraction and back into a mixed-aged, multi-species, chaotically arrayed distribution that fits our chaotic geosphere.
Like their pollinators and composters and all other earthlings, these photosynthesizers are our distant cousins.We share with them our earliest genetic history. Otherwise, eating them would not give us the wherewithal to build our bodies and satisfy our urges. We are a family. We survive together.
Humanity creates habitat. I want to see us create it for our photosynthesizers and all our other earthlings. Then perhaps we would see indoors and outdoors as a planetary continuum.
