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by jenn | Jan 9, 2020 | 0 comments

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letsbuildanark

Trees for life. Every tree counts. It is estimated

Trees for life.
Every tree counts. It is estimated that 36 football fields of trees are cut down worldwide every, single minute.
Trees are the lungs of the earth and it takes thirty years for the average tree to become a full-blown oxygen machine. They are the habitat for most terrestrial species, they clean our water, protect our soils, shelter us from drying winds and burning sun and they provide us with so many resources and supports in our lives. If you understood that 80% of the documented species in the world can be found in forests, then it’s pretty easy to understand that chopping down native woods puts the main share of the earths biodiversity at risk. Dead and dying trees are consistently tidied up and cut away, when deadwood is actually a vital resource for a multitude of species, and therefore a vital resource for the whole system.
Trees are the drivers of the health of the whole planetary ecosystem, but we treat them with no respect and little understanding.
The current commonplace, destructive treatment of hedgerows and our precious few remaining trees in agricultural and urban landscapes is shocking to say the least. There is an attack on nature stemming from a lack of understanding and a scarcity of positive leadership.

EVERY SINGLE TREE COUNTS!

Our destructive Systems and patterns are not set i

Our destructive Systems and patterns are not set in stone. Everything must change. Start with your patch of earth. Set it free.

A king in its kingdom. The mighty oak which suppor

A king in its kingdom. The mighty oak which supports such a strong web of life, seen and unseen, dead or alive.

Every generation has less and less awareness of wh

Every generation has less and less awareness of what truly healthy living landscapes actually look like. People don’t realise, for example, that the bare grassy hillsides are not supposed to be bare, that they are over grazed and support almost no life other than sheep. That Ireland used to be covered in a diverse rainforest, heaving with life. They don’t know what a diverse native woodland looks like, or the huge variety of life that depends on them. They are accustomed to seeing stands of monoculture non-native, much poisoned, conifer plantations, which are dark and dead underneath for the most part.
They don’t remember what it was like to have shoals of fish in the rivers, to have crystal clear seas cleaned by the massive beds of oysters, to have oodles of birds, insects, frogs, butterflies, hedgehogs, etc. sharing our land. It is so quiet now. Eerily quiet. When you’re driving at night your windscreen is no longer covered in dead insects and moths like it used to be when you were a small child.
As a species, we immediately forget what is lost and only see what exists right here, right now as the new normal. Every generation is experiencing huge shifts in what passes for a natural system. These changes have become more extreme over the last few generations. What we see as dead landscapes, our kids will see as natural and normal. There is a phrase for this and most of us these days suffer from it. It’s called ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’.
“Generational amnesia is when knowledge is not passed down from generation to generation. For example, people may think of as ‘pristine’ wilderness, the wild places that they experienced during their childhood, but with every generation this baseline becomes more and more degraded” Dr. E.J. Milner-Gulland

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