An Important Message from the Trees, Dorothy Maclean
Dorothy Maclean recalls an important message for humanity and the Earth that she received from a small cypress tree in the garden at the community in Findhorn. Recorded at the 3rd World Wilderness Conference in 1983. For more information about the work of the Findhorn Foundation visit https://www.findhorn.org/
The message given here is an effort to address a global problem regarding the natural state of portions of the globe that have enough water to support the tree form through all phases of development. The fact that old and large trees are majestic belies how they got to be there in the first place. This process is little different than how large businesses get to be so.
The reality is that each year or at least periodically in these tree favorable locations there are massive amounts of seed put out by the larger trees that may hopefully find an open space where they can lodge, find enough water to sprout and germinate and eventually grow to their capacity.
The reality is that the human (or not so human) power structure that is now being challenged has designed a human survival or support system that is based on the constant mining of value. This value has come to include the structure of big trees or the energy of small trees with little regard for the things that are related in the message above.
There is nothing wrong with setting up wild areas where trees grow and die as they can or must. This is a way to observe the process by which a few hundred trees per hectare can grow to large size from an early population that may have numbered in the millions of seedlings over the first twenty years of life.
There is a misconception that larger trees willingly support nearby smaller trees. This may happen just as large companies may mentor and protect smaller entities. However, this may also happen solely because trees of the same species can and may graft roots and share the resources carried by the root mass. In the end when there is a drought the trees with poorer reserves are those most likely to suffer from opportunistic fungi that are always present. Those fungi are only held at bay by expenditure of internal resources to either kill the fungus or build around them.
Private land holding is subject to many constraints some of which have been well hidden by past political agreements. See annavonreitz (dot) com and Aim4Truth or Americans for Innovation for much detail on how this has developed. Wherever land is taxed annually and has a value that competes in other markets for funding or ownership stability, the only options for being able to hold and or protect land and the trees is the periodic harvest of some value or the generation of sufficient discretionary income from outside sources that can be spent to keep from having the land taken for taxes. An alternative is to take the land out of the jurisdiction that claims the right to do the taxation (see the above sites for more details).
In the end the large trees are not the valiant guardians that they are claimed to be; they are merely the lucky competitors who have survived a life time of aggressive competition for water, light, space, nutrients and stimulation. This does not remove the need for us to hope that some of these “veterans” can survive for the long term or that they may have messages for us to learn from. It may however be more appropriate for us to learn that we must find a way to care for both rural humans who can care for forests and fight for funding sources that are built to safeguard long term systems that need to be protected in a number of ways.
You might be interested in the very well carried out “Adaptive Program for Agriculture” which is on- going through our corporate governance and urban style environmental codes that serve to destabilize small rural communities and which has been so successful that it is now being applied everywhere. The outcome from this program is that most rural youths can no longer find a way to own rural land and raise a family without having a high tech urban style job or massive debt load for equipment and supplies. Of course, the fires now being set through out the west may well be an additional component of the above program that have unsuspected sources and motivations.
The message given here is an effort to address a global problem regarding the natural state of portions of the globe that have enough water to support the tree form through all phases of development. The fact that old and large trees are majestic belies how they got to be there in the first place. This process is little different than how large businesses get to be so.
The reality is that each year or at least periodically in these tree favorable locations there are massive amounts of seed put out by the larger trees that may hopefully find an open space where they can lodge, find enough water to sprout and germinate and eventually grow to their capacity.
The reality is that the human (or not so human) power structure that is now being challenged has designed a human survival or support system that is based on the constant mining of value. This value has come to include the structure of big trees or the energy of small trees with little regard for the things that are related in the message above.
There is nothing wrong with setting up wild areas where trees grow and die as they can or must. This is a way to observe the process by which a few hundred trees per hectare can grow to large size from an early population that may have numbered in the millions of seedlings over the first twenty years of life.
There is a misconception that larger trees willingly support nearby smaller trees. This may happen just as large companies may mentor and protect smaller entities. However, this may also happen solely because trees of the same species can and may graft roots and share the resources carried by the root mass. In the end when there is a drought the trees with poorer reserves are those most likely to suffer from opportunistic fungi that are always present. Those fungi are only held at bay by expenditure of internal resources to either kill the fungus or build around them.
Private land holding is subject to many constraints some of which have been well hidden by past political agreements. See annavonreitz (dot) com and Aim4Truth or Americans for Innovation for much detail on how this has developed. Wherever land is taxed annually and has a value that competes in other markets for funding or ownership stability, the only options for being able to hold and or protect land and the trees is the periodic harvest of some value or the generation of sufficient discretionary income from outside sources that can be spent to keep from having the land taken for taxes. An alternative is to take the land out of the jurisdiction that claims the right to do the taxation (see the above sites for more details).
In the end the large trees are not the valiant guardians that they are claimed to be; they are merely the lucky competitors who have survived a life time of aggressive competition for water, light, space, nutrients and stimulation. This does not remove the need for us to hope that some of these “veterans” can survive for the long term or that they may have messages for us to learn from. It may however be more appropriate for us to learn that we must find a way to care for both rural humans who can care for forests and fight for funding sources that are built to safeguard long term systems that need to be protected in a number of ways.
You might be interested in the very well carried out “Adaptive Program for Agriculture” which is on- going through our corporate governance and urban style environmental codes that serve to destabilize small rural communities and which has been so successful that it is now being applied everywhere. The outcome from this program is that most rural youths can no longer find a way to own rural land and raise a family without having a high tech urban style job or massive debt load for equipment and supplies. Of course, the fires now being set through out the west may well be an additional component of the above program that have unsuspected sources and motivations.
Pray for the trees and the owners of the land.