Why: A Sense of the Future II

[holyoutlaw]

The forest is a place of many cycles. Some are much less than a year, such as the annual cycle of plants like Pacific Waterleaf (which grows in late February, and starts dying back in late July). A Western redcedar can be alive for more than a millennium, and spend just as much time as a nurse log before it returns to soil. An alder tree can spend 80 years on a stream bank and fall in a matter of seconds.

The short term scale for forest stewardship is on the order of 50 years. That’s how you should try to visualize the forest as you’re working in it now. This is longer than any plan I’ve made for my own life, and I think it’s longer than any plans people generally make.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.