Reflection for April 28

For Arbor Day
Human beings have had a short span of existence on this 4.5 billion-year-old planet, and we live only a short time as individuals. That we share the Earth with such a venerable organism [the ginkgo tree], with a history where hundreds and tens of millions of years are relevant, should help to give us a better perspective from which to think of our own lives and existence here and thus prepare as well as we are able for the future. Our short-term actions are ruining the world in which we live much faster than we can imagine, with the world’s sustainable capacity sufficient to provide less than two-thirds of what we consume each year, even though billions of us live hungry and in extreme poverty. The two billion or more additional people who will join our numbers in the next several decades will almost all be poor, entering a world that we, with our largely short-term view of progress, are destroying rapidly. Might not we be able to learn from the deep past and then redouble our efforts to sustainably use our planet’s resources and thus live within its productive capacity while we still have time to do so? (Peter H. Raven, in the Foreward to Ginkgo, by Peter Crane).