Trees at Duke University, slowly taking over the devilish turf baseball field without anyone even noticing.
The enemy of trees is baseball. The end.
It is all I can do to spend the rest of my life making up for it.
I am writing this from the house of the Frog Trouble Times, set in the trees of Chatham County, NC. It is 6:00 am, Sunday morning. My son is sleeping the sleep of a sun-scorched baseball player upstairs.
All I hear and want to hear are birds gathering in the branches above this house, talking with the light. Their leaves will convert today into fine fine oxygen. Do I even need to say what trees do?
And yet we act as if we have no relationship. At a ball field in another county yesterday, I found one shade tree outside the right field fence. We have this endless fascination with “one tree in a field.” We who so love a vision of our own destruction.
Trees live longer and healthier lives in community, like us. I watched families cluster around home plate, popping out their pop-out shade contraptions that work the way placing a piece of tin foil over your head in a broiler does.
I could see the whole field under the shade tree. As the heat rose to 90, a man wandered over. “Oh, it’s so much cooler under here,” he said. Another man brought his chair over. “You’ve got the best seat in the house.” Um, people! Trees!
Later, walking around Campbell University between ball games, I met a very old majestic oak in the quad outside the student center. Set there like a dead relic. Sidewalk poured over its root zone. Someone drove a golf cart around it.
Imagine, Campbell University, ripping up the walkway and planting a little forest in this quad with your students. Is this not a research university? Students could tend and learn about the cooperation of trees. They could learn to grow forests instead of grass lawns. What if students added trees to their radical visionary playbook?
This isn’t a neoliberal agenda. This is common sense.
Near the environmental science building, a glass greenhouse filled with cacti screamed with me.
After the jump, a recipe you might need.
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