Status Updates From Second Nature - A Gardener'...

“All or nothing,” says the wilderness ethic, and in fact we’ve ended up with a landscape in America that conforms to that injunction remarkably well. Thanks to exactly this kind of either/or thinking, Americans have done an admirable job of drawing lines around certain sacred areas [of wilderness] and a terrible job of managing the rest of our land.

Using instruments of gas analysis… mankind has now actually observed the breathing of the earth, which follows an annual rhythm: every summer, the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere falls as the forests inhale; every winter, after photosynthesis subsides and civilization steps up its combustion of fossil fuel, the carbon dioxide levels rise again, a little higher each year.

“To plant trees,” Russell Page wrote in his memoir, “is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.”