It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before.

I don’t want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story.

MONEY IS A STORY

It’s a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It’s a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don’t need cloth. So I give you a  tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need.

Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don’t even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each other we have it. What a story!

ANOTHER STORY: MONEY IS POWER

Another metaphor for money is power, which according to a basic dictionary, is the ability to either get things done or to make other people get things done. For most of human history, the guarantee on both kinds of power was violence and coercion. Do what I tell you because I have a big sword. Do what I tell you because I have all the little pieces of metal you need to stay alive. Do what I tell you because your eternal soul is in jeopardy if you don’t.

Do what I tell you, or bad things happen.

After a hard, millennia-long fight to declare that human beings are inherently valuable and threats and coercion are not the best way of organizing ourselves, we’ve gotten to the point where now people collect both kinds of power by promising it’s going to benefit everyone. At least a little bit.

Nowadays, they even occasionally work to make that happen when we do give them power. So instead of the point of a sword, we have stump speeches and ads about how great your life will be if you do what they say. Instead of serfs and subjects, we have customers and voters.

To sum up: in thousands of years of evolution, we’ve gone from doing what I say because I will hurt you if I don’t, to doing what I say because you’ll get something out of it too. Progress, I guess!?!

WE’RE MISSING PART OF THE STORY

The story of money changed, and culturally we have not caught up.

For the majority of our history, often called pre-history, which is hilarious, it seems like no one human was able to accumulate a huge amount of money or power. There were rich and poor stone age folks, and we do have the archeological records to prove that, but in general, keeping everyone alive was a group project. Most of life was communal and real close to the edge of subsistence.

Then we got agriculture, started settling down, and started valuing land and resources. And ever since, power has started to accumulate into ever fewer hands.

TO THE KINGS

Let’s skip ahead a little to the Kings. I think it’s a mistake to try and homogenize the politics of the ancient world. I know that there were actually a lot of ways that we organized ourselves, and there were quite a few egalitarian, matriarchal,  democratic, and pretty much every other way to politic in the world. The book, the Dawn of Everything (affiliate) brilliantly walks through the diversity of human politics. But the world powers that eventually dominated learned to concentrate political and economic power in one man/institution.

NO MORE KINGS

And then began the largely thankless work of clawing back and limiting the power of those men.  It took us several millennia in fits and starts and backtracks and success. We had an explosion of democracy, briefly, in southern Europe. We had the meritocracy of the Chinese government system but under the emperor. We had the Magna Carta declaring the rights of men in England that the pope immediately declared completely invalid and King John basically ignored. And many, many more examples of greater and lesser success.

But we got better and better at it. Most countries came up with a system of government where political power is split between many different people who are supposed to keep an eye on one another.

ALL BAD ROADS LEAD TO HITLER

Alongside the official changes, we changed our story.

We instinctively believe that no one man should be able to make decisions for an entire population and that when that happens it is almost entirely bad. Just witness the change from the word king to fascist. Practically, there’s no difference between them, just the story we tell about their actions.

I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this fight. Especially these days, there are constantly men arguing that it would be better if we all just did what one guy said again. But there is also always an instinctive counter-reaction that that’s a really bad idea. We can play out that story really easily in our minds and end up at Hitler.

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED AND OUR STORIES HAVE NOT KEPT UP

Since the industrial revolution, economic power, and political power have been split, and the people who run the government are not the people with all the money. Yes, they’re usually rich. There is great overlap, and they help each other out a whole lot, but the king used to be the richest man in the country. That is no longer the case by a long shot.

So on the political side, we have several millennial-long fights to balance political power and make sure the people who are telling us what to do are at least pretending it’s for our own good and have a bunch of other people with the power to stop them watching them.

WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE SAME INSTINCTS WHEN ECONOMIC POWER CONCENTRATES

We have had private citizen billionaires for 200 years, and we’ve already suffered the devastation of extreme economic concentration once as a world in the 1920s and many times in much smaller amounts since. And we came up with some really cool ways to fight that concentration, mostly with regulation and unions. And some really not cool like early systems of communism that just ended up with a different hierarchy. And we promptly forget all of those lessons again and again, because it’s just not in the story yet.

Culturally, they’re mostly still good guys.

Yes, their reputation has tarnished a little, but mostly due to personal weirdness, not the number in their bank account. We think of how convenient their products are. What geniuses they are. How amazing they are compared to the great towering intellectuals of previous times. They have big conferences in Switzerland where they try to solve the world’s problems.

It’s just generally thought of as a good thing to have a ridiculous amount of money. At the very least, we believe it’s fair that the labor of an entire society is going to very few people.

WE NEED A NEW MAGNA CARTA

Hopefully, it will work better than the original one. We are at the very beginning of this fight for the story of economic power. Who has it; who should have it and how we limit it.

It’s probably going to take a few more wobbles before we grow the same instincts around economic power that we have around political power. We need an allergy to extreme riches the same way we are now allergic to kings. Because it really is no different.

It should be just as ludicrous to concentrate economic power the way it’s ludicrous to concentrate political power.

HOW DARE THE POOR?

Right now we have a lot of the opposite – the laziness of welfare recipients, the unfairness of redistribution of wealth, and the insane policy that as you go up in the income brackets, you go down in taxes. The whole global economy is invested in enriching a few people.  That’s a story.

Another story could be that one man is completely incapable of creating that much value for the world by starting a company. That people with loads of success are should be responsible for funding loads of the structure that undergirds society that enabled their success. That helping struggling people actually enriches and uplifts everyone. That a strong social safety net actually leads to more wealth because more people can take more risks. That keeping everyone in the game is more important than ensuring one dude wins the game.

None of this is TRUE. None of this SHOULD HAPPEN. It’s all just a story too. Maybe none of these things will end up in our final story about money.

We left reality the second some dude in Turkey handed another dude a Lydian Stater, a misshapen lump of gold and silver in 600 BCE with a couple of animals stamped into the metal and exchanged it from actual flesh and blood real animals, and everyone went away happy from that transaction.

Since it’s all imagined anyway, why not imagine a story that goes a little better for a few more people?

The post Why Money is Just a Rollicking Good Story first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?

I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.

How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning. 

DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM

Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.

He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.

It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC² Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.

So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.

THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.

And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.

THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION

The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.

Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide.  (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)

But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)

Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!

WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?

Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.

He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.

The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.

And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)

How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)

Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.

The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.

The post How to Make Music & Babies with Sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Like so many things that crossed cultures, the real story was far less doomsday and far more cultural ignorance, at best. Most of the images of the circled stone were actually from the Aztec, not the Maya, who didn’t really traffic in apocalypses.

In reality, the Maya used two calendars: one with 365 days and one with 260 days. Every day had two names and reset every fifty-two years. In addition, they had a long count of years like the Roman calendar we use today.  2012 was a reset year for their two differing calendars.

That’s it.

IN 5000 AD, WHAT WILL THEY THINK?

Imagine a civilization in 5000 AD digging up one of our paper calendars with cute cats or hot firefighters on it, seeing December 31st, calculating what day it would be for them, and panicking because December 31st was in two of their months!  And then announcing to everyone the world was ending.

Which, let’s face it, if civilization hasn’t ended by 5000 AD, humanity should really hold a worldwide party, because that would be incredible.

I digress. 

I was thinking about that “prophesy” this week and the 10 years since 2012 where the calendars keep advancing no matter what happens. What will future civilizations say about this time?

Knowing humans, they will probably misinterpret everything, but I don’t think they will be very impressed.

In 3000 years, if we should last so long, we will probably be past the ravages of climate change. Future humans will read accounts of people who knew what was coming and did not act with the gobsmacking incredulity we view the doctors who prescribed bloodletting for bullet wounds.

The internet will be woven into perhaps our very bodies and the massive campaigns of misinformation and disinformation and the amount of theft and crime and horror we permit online will hopefully seem like unfathomable levels of ignorance.

And the callousness with which we treat human life in everything from healthcare costs, to policing, to labor laws will hopefully make us seem like complete barbarians.

HEADING OFF FUTURE PANIC

At the very least, I hope, our calendar won’t cause too much panic or confusion, with its 10 lovely months. (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec = Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten) Oh wait, and the two shoehorned months (January and February) at the beginning because the Romans made a calendar that didn’t actually sync with the celestial year and nobody could plan planting and harvesting because they kept moving around.

Oh, and the two newer months in the middle of the year named for emperors (July and August) instead of the original Quintilis and Sextilis (Six & Seven), because if you can get a unit of time named after you, why not?

If any archeologists are reading this in the year 5000, good luck guys! No, we can’t explain it…

WILL THINGS BE BETTER?

I hope that in 3000 years we will learn how to work with our weaknesses as a species: our hubris, violence, tribalism, short-sightedness, reactivity, and credulousness.

Or if not, perhaps we will at least grow some humility if those weaknesses continue to plague us and make peace with our endless capacity for really, really stupid calls about something as simple as counting days? We can hope!

At any rate, I look forward to the world continuing on January 1st, even though my Star Wars calendar has run out.

My aspirations for the world each year get smaller and smaller. In this upcoming year, may we be patient with our foibles, mindful of the past, respectful of other cultures’ ability to count, and refrain from doing anything too crazy that will prompt 120 generations from now to panic.

The post It’s Been 10 Years Since the End of the World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” ― Herman Hesse, Wandering

What is the function of a tree?

At least, what is the function for one ice age primate that has managed to take over the globe? For almost half of our history, they have been bed, shade, safety, and food. And then that changed.

I talked about how we can solve problems by seeing the function of things apart from what they’re meant to do.

Of course, trees don’t need to have a function or be useful to humans to have perfectly worthy lives. In fact, the farther away a tree is from a human, the safer it is.

THE OLD STORY: HUMANS TAMED FIRE

Even now in our air-conditioned lives, we make sure to tell our children the story: humans tamed fire and dominated the earth. I think this may be one of the oldest stories in our oral tradition, sometimes called an ur-myth, because it’s in every single culture. It has reached the level of quixotic instinct because even now, we know we’d be screwed without fire.

Evidence today points to the fact that it wasn’t even us; it was a cousin Homo Erectus way before us. Or at least one band in a cave in South Africa, lighting cooking fires between 1.5 and 2 million years ago. Homo sapiens got in on the fun about 125,000 years ago.

That’s one way to look at it: humans tamed fire.  Here’s another:

HUMANS DISCOVERED A NEW USE FOR TREES: BATTERIES

Why is fire always the star of the show? We got fire and then we got cooked food, and then we invented steam engines, and then we went to the moon. And it’s always about fire.

It wasn’t burning energy that changed everything; it was access to stored energy that changed everything. It was the wood that was the important part.

Until that point, all plants and animals had very limited energy storage options. The sun shone down on plants which used it to build themselves by creating bonds between carbon atoms in CO2, hydrogen in water, and minerals in dirt. Then they breathed out the oxygen left over.

Humans ate those plants (or ate the animals that ate those plants) and broke down those bonds between carbon atoms to use the sunlight (and breath out the carbon hooked back up to the oxygen, which plants would take back and the whole thing started again.)

There was a small amount of redundancy built into that system. Plants stored enough water and enough sunshine to get through a dry day or a rainy day.  Animals stored similar amounts of water and fat to get through a bad season.

Outside of our own bodies, options are few. Squirrels hoard nuts. Bees hoard vomit. There are small examples all over the animal kingdom of stored energy. But for the most part, the energy shining down on them today or the very recent past is all the energy they have access to.

Enter trees: years and years and years of sunlight, trapped between those carbon molecules, just waiting to be released.

Suddenly we could predigest our food (known by the more palatable name of cooking) and have access to far more calories for far less work. Suddenly we could keep warm without having to even ingest a bunch of energy and burn it ourselves. We didn’t have to eat anything at all. We could just sit there and all that stored sunlight would burst to life again with all that light and heat whenever we wanted it. 

It no longer mattered whether it was day or not or where in the world we lived; we could summon daylight whenever we wanted it.  Trees are still the main source of heat and light in most rural areas of the world.

THEN WE DISCOVERED ANCIENT TREES

The discovery of oil (coal, natural gas, etc) was a similarly momentous occasion for our species – suddenly, we weren’t limited by the sunlight of the immediate past, stored in recently dead trees.

We had access to millions and millions of days of sunlight, available whenever we wanted them, and we weren’t limited to predigesting food and keeping ourselves warm. We could use it to augment our muscles and go faster and faster, even fast enough to escape gravity. We didn’t have to use our voices to shout at each other – we could take that energy and throw our voices across the world.

We didn’t have to store all the information we learned in our huge brains; we could put it on paper (ANOTHER use for trees: storage!) Or etch it into a chip so we didn’t even have to be there when our voice traversed the world.

And we could do totally “useless” things with that energy like sing and dance and write stories and run nowhere. Can you imagine? Expend a huge amount of energy to run as fast as humanly possible…in circles.

Just burning up sunshine.

I know it’s not just trees, or even mostly trees. There were significant amounts of ferns and algae – but nobody has ever stared at ferns contemplating infinity or written poems to algae. It’s the metaphor of the thing.

HERE IS ANOTHER FUNCTION OF TREES: FILTER

Trees split CO₂ into carbon and oxygen, use the carbon to build themselves with sunlight, and spit out the oxygen. We take that, bind it with carbon, and spit out ourselves. It’s a beautiful system.

This process doesn’t end when trees die; they sink into the ground and shelter any leftover carbon from mucking up the system, sometimes for eons on end. But what happens when you burn your filter for fuel? Not only do you get the sunlight, but you also get the waste that was happily sequestered and pretty to look at. And what happens when you burn ridiculous amounts of ancient and current trees every day? You cook the world.

HOW PRIVILIGING ONE FUNCTION LED TO US COOKING THE WORLD

One might call climate change a tree problem. It’s one of the reasons we haven’t solved it yet: we haven’t made the shift in our minds about the function of plants: from fuel to filter.

And we don’t have nearly a good enough battery ready to replace the energy we can no longer touch. I get it; we don’t want to go back to the days of razor-thin margins when the only time we have heat and light is when the sky is clear.

We talk a lot about whether this problem is real or what the solution is. Looking at function helps surface one explanation: We need vastly more trees (ancient and current) as filters (or we need to invent our own stat) and vastly fewer trees as batteries – which means we definitely need to invent those even more stat.

I can’t overstate how huge this species-wide mindset change is. The story of fire still looms large in our imagination. It’s a part of our identity. We are the ones, the only ones, who tamed fire. And now we have to be the ones to Put. It. Back.

OTHER FUNCTIONS OF TREES

Shelter (wood), information storage/communication medium (paper), fuel (wood stoves), literal food (bananas), decoration.

Humidifier:  Did you know trees sweat?  And that they are significantly involved in cloud production?

Erosion prevention: A recent lowlander moved to the woods where I lived. I should specify the woods are on large hills. They brought their cherry-picked builder from their old, flat, home and had to spend a significant amount of money shoring up the hillside so their house didn’t fall down it because they cut down all the trees to have a better view. Let’s just say their functional fixedness did not let them consider the implications of roots. That’s a tiny example, but it happens all over the world on a huge scale. If you want dirt to stay where it is, don’t rip up the trees.

Fertilizer: once they die, they provide food for insects, and other animals, and nutrients for soil for the next generation to use.

Sanity perseveres: we like trees. I don’t know if that’s a genetic thing passed down from the days when we slept in trees and we automatically associate them with safety, but they feature in our art and popular imaginations at astonishing volume.

Plus, we’re not the only ones using them! For other animals, they are also homes, food, temperature regulators, safety from predators, ladders, shade, and playground.

What have I missed?  My mother makes baskets out of pine needles.  (Needles are long and flexible)  My father carves furniture out of it. (Pine is stiff and strong enough to sit on.) A local artist uses bark as a painting canvas (bark is smooth and flat.) 

The post Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.