Re: old trees and size. They’ve found small cedar trees on the Niagara escarpment that are 500 to a 1000 years old.
Re:inefficiency. I worked for a consulting firm where you had to keep track of the hours (to the quarter hour) of the work you did on different projects. Very stressful for me. When I was thinking or daydreaming or free associating and coming up with ideas that could relate to several different projects, who did I bill? If I spent 4 hrs developing a spreadsheet template that would turn 8 hrs work to an hour of work who do I bill for that time if that template will be used for all future projects?
If I spend 2 hrs on an introduction for reports, do I bill 2 hrs to the first company but all the other companies don’t get billed because I copy-paste that intro?
And do I bill 2 hrs when I could have written it in 30 min but 90 min was spent thinking of the best way to approach and then write it? There was so much inefficiency in what I did when tackling brand new projects I felt bad for billing full hours.
Yes - that's it exactly. What a tangle. That old adage "if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist" has its limitations in terms of the value of processing, analysis, considered wisdom arising from raw data. At the very least, the process itself is surely the wrong thing to measure - and yet that's at the heart of so much, including business timekeeping.
One of my first jobs was as a Work Study trainee in a pottery, standing with a stopwatch and timing how long potters took to perform certain tasks so we could give them an efficiency standard to maintain. The potters hated me, and I don't blame them! But I remember there was also a quality problem going on that was filling a nearby warehouse with 'seconds' the pottery couldn't sell. When there's immense pressure for the process to be faster *and* more accurate, it can get very toxic.
What really should be measured - is results. Did spending 5x time on this thing create 10x the impact? But that's a very different proposition and mindset in a lot of cases, and not much good for billable hours!
A great article, Mike. Being able to simply identify a tree turns looking into seeing, tripping a switch in the brain, sparking neurons of recognition, enquiry, wonder; a growing familiarity, a bond of friendship grows, a caring for and protection of another living thing, and the simple fun derived from sharing these experiences with others to create a community kinship enriched by a deep commitment to protect and delight in our precious natural world.
Even in the coldest, wettest, windiest depths of a West of Scotland storm.
Thanks, Jim. Yes, it unlocks so much! I was reminded of it when writing about Stef Roberts recently, who said about naming trees: "“So now one thing - ‘tree’ - is now a million things.” https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/4-years-sleeping-in-woods It feels like such a small thing, too, and the kind of thing that's easily farmed out to a smartphone app. But internalizing the names of things - birds, trees, clouds etc - seems to unlock a lot of what we go out into the natural world in search of. All those deeply felt feelings of connection and understanding and, in rich and complicated ways, belonging.
I found it comical that the UK government reacted with such outrage at the hacking down of the tree in the Sycamore Gap in September 2023, but was quite happy to supply armaments to a foreign power for it to start 9 days later to lay waste to a strip of land where, now, barely a tree has been left standing at all. Given the rate of destruction of trees, let alone intentional deforestation, campaigns like "Plant A Tree" just look puerile.
If we want to know what effect large-scale tree planting would have on the planet, including whether it would warm the polar regions too much, we can look at what the climate was like a thousand or two thousand years ago. Most of Europe was forested, most of North America was forested,the rainforest in South America was much more extensive than today, and the polar regions were frozen. I doubt we could ever plant too many trees. But we also can't plant enough to compensate for all the things we're doing wrong. We need to rethink our values, globally. Google alone is hogging an immense amount of energy and generating an immense amount of heat, primarily for the purpose of collecting information about us so ads can sell us more stuff we don't need. And Google is just one company (or conglomerate) of many trying to sell us stuff we don't need. Don't get me wrong. I like being able to buy clothes instead of growing a plant (or animal) to spin into fibre to weave into cloth to cut and sew into clothes. But when we did have to get our clothes that way, we got along with far fewer of them. The same is true of almost anything technology has mad possible. It has made us contemptuous of the true cost.
ach. i had a sycamore that volunteered in a garden bed just in front of my verandah, and yesterday I cut it down (it's non-native where I live) to reduce crowding and give the little native species I'm planting a chance to see the sun.
and as for inefficiency, it would be efficient to spray or scrape my whole block and then plant with selected species for the desired result. but then what would happen to the frogs and lil lizards and where would the wee birds nest while my "transformation" project takes place?
instead, I'm pootling. some very weedy areas, I keep the edges back from encroaching elsewhere, but when i wander outside for some headspace, i spot a bit of weedy grass that looks like I could get out and then the next fifteen minutes are spent wandering and hand pulling the interlopers, and allowing the tender soft native grasses that have always been there, to escape the smothering and set seed, and in the meantime, i'm learning about them, what they like, where they live, and pondering puzzling problems and now and again coming up with a possible way forward. I can't imagine this happening if I took the blitz route. and by being out there in a gentle way, the little birds get to know my habits and come and do their thing around me instead of fleeing at my approach.
Yes, I’ve read about those bristlecone pines. They’re now keeping their locations secret to the greatest extent possible so idiots don’t go carving their initials in them or cut them down. Fortunately, these trees tend to live in very desolate and harsh areas it’s hard to get to anyway.
I am a resolute tree hugger, as long as poison ivy isn't also hugging that tree. To that end, I have several tree hugging stories, but this is a favorite.
I was on a cruise in the Caribbean, and we had been on island after island, learning about the cultures in that superficial way you get with a cruise. We were on yet another island, but without a planned tour. Instead, we talked a taxi driver into taking us around to see the best parts of the island, in his opinion. (Highly recommend.)
One of those was a small church, which my companions wandered through. I never made it inside. In the churchyard was a massive mahogany tree. Our driver-turned-tour guide told me that the trees were protected, since there were so few of the old ones left. I walked up to it, put a hand on it, and couldn't help myself. I was so water-weary, and this ancient being was welcoming, and as you noted, deeply grounded. I hugged that tree the best I could. It would have taken all four of us to complete the circle of its girth. I took a deep breath and felt the best I had in days.
Happily a friend took a picture of me hugging a massive mahogany tree in a churchyard on a Caribbean island.
I’ve got to say, I like being able to, while pouring broth and picking a chicken carcass clean, listen to your narration. Perhaps the fine quality of your voice comes from decades of growth rings and being as old as a larch. And being out in the rain with the wind whipping it up one’s nostrils.
You are the most considerate person ever -- not only thinking about the Daves who might be offended about being considered the type who occasionally go into a chaotic fury, but also the Daves who might be offended about being considered the type who never has chaotic furies.
I find my use of AI somewhat bifurcated. One use is as a junior "colleague" that I can give substantive but -- to me -- tedious tasks that I know well because I've done the same or very similar many, many times over the years. These tend to be python tools development and tailoring. These are things that I won't learn anything from doing myself yet again. The other use, which I'm adoring, is as a super-encyclopedia-wikipedia for deep-diving into topics I find fascinating. Unlike the first use case, this is *very* time-consuming, as I am a very slow reader. I feel like a kid in the candy store, though; it's delightful. Do I use AI for writing? No. Other than for a tone and polish check for sensitive emails that I can't allow to sound harsh for whatever reasons. (I am normally very blunt and direct, which is not always appropriate.) I really like and enjoy writing. AI is not welcome to take that from me. I am slow -- a consequence of being thorough and angsting over a word or clause or sentence that just doesn't ring quite right. But so what? Most joyful things are slow: it's called savoring. Society would benefit from a lot more of that.
AI isn't accurate enough to do deep dives on any topic. It's just as likely to make up complete nonsense than to give you objective facts. Be careful using it that way.
Your assessment is not wrong but I think might be a bit outdated. Unlike most, apparently, I check references and work through arguments myself. AI can be a very useful aide, but you still have to do significant, time-consuming work yourself. For the most part, AI that you pay for (to enable the best models and modes) is currently quite on-target. At least regarding Claude Opus 4.6, anyway. Also, I suspect many people don't know that you can significantly affect an AI's behavior (including gratuitous hallucination) with a well-crafted set of restrictions and rules in the profile settings. After many iterations, I've constrained Claude to show its "thinking" and, importantly, to just stop when it hits a wall. It works surprisingly well.
Regarding forestation, definitely agree that we shouldn't consider it an easy solution to greedy overconsumption, but by all accounts, there were far more forests 500 to 1000 years ago than there are now. Years ago, I read Marco Polo's account of his journey to the Mongolian empire, and as he was passing through the mountainous regions of Central Asia, he talked about how heavily wooded they were - they aren't now. Living in Canada, I am very conscious of just how much European settlers not only deforested this landscape, but as urban areas expand, are paving it over - I am convinced pavement must be contributing to the rise in cities' average temperatures.
Re: old trees and size. They’ve found small cedar trees on the Niagara escarpment that are 500 to a 1000 years old.
Re:inefficiency. I worked for a consulting firm where you had to keep track of the hours (to the quarter hour) of the work you did on different projects. Very stressful for me. When I was thinking or daydreaming or free associating and coming up with ideas that could relate to several different projects, who did I bill? If I spent 4 hrs developing a spreadsheet template that would turn 8 hrs work to an hour of work who do I bill for that time if that template will be used for all future projects?
If I spend 2 hrs on an introduction for reports, do I bill 2 hrs to the first company but all the other companies don’t get billed because I copy-paste that intro?
And do I bill 2 hrs when I could have written it in 30 min but 90 min was spent thinking of the best way to approach and then write it? There was so much inefficiency in what I did when tackling brand new projects I felt bad for billing full hours.
Yes - that's it exactly. What a tangle. That old adage "if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist" has its limitations in terms of the value of processing, analysis, considered wisdom arising from raw data. At the very least, the process itself is surely the wrong thing to measure - and yet that's at the heart of so much, including business timekeeping.
One of my first jobs was as a Work Study trainee in a pottery, standing with a stopwatch and timing how long potters took to perform certain tasks so we could give them an efficiency standard to maintain. The potters hated me, and I don't blame them! But I remember there was also a quality problem going on that was filling a nearby warehouse with 'seconds' the pottery couldn't sell. When there's immense pressure for the process to be faster *and* more accurate, it can get very toxic.
What really should be measured - is results. Did spending 5x time on this thing create 10x the impact? But that's a very different proposition and mindset in a lot of cases, and not much good for billable hours!
Time is not money, contrary to what they say. It is the excuse for money.
A great article, Mike. Being able to simply identify a tree turns looking into seeing, tripping a switch in the brain, sparking neurons of recognition, enquiry, wonder; a growing familiarity, a bond of friendship grows, a caring for and protection of another living thing, and the simple fun derived from sharing these experiences with others to create a community kinship enriched by a deep commitment to protect and delight in our precious natural world.
Even in the coldest, wettest, windiest depths of a West of Scotland storm.
Thanks, Jim. Yes, it unlocks so much! I was reminded of it when writing about Stef Roberts recently, who said about naming trees: "“So now one thing - ‘tree’ - is now a million things.” https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/4-years-sleeping-in-woods It feels like such a small thing, too, and the kind of thing that's easily farmed out to a smartphone app. But internalizing the names of things - birds, trees, clouds etc - seems to unlock a lot of what we go out into the natural world in search of. All those deeply felt feelings of connection and understanding and, in rich and complicated ways, belonging.
Plant a tree in 73. Plant one more in 74.
If they make it a slogan and issue a postage stamp, then there's more to it than meets the eye.
Aaaand I just learned a new thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_A_Tree_In_'73 Thanks, Graham!
I found it comical that the UK government reacted with such outrage at the hacking down of the tree in the Sycamore Gap in September 2023, but was quite happy to supply armaments to a foreign power for it to start 9 days later to lay waste to a strip of land where, now, barely a tree has been left standing at all. Given the rate of destruction of trees, let alone intentional deforestation, campaigns like "Plant A Tree" just look puerile.
Thank you! This is exactly what I needed today and why I open substack in the morning. Wonderful.
If we want to know what effect large-scale tree planting would have on the planet, including whether it would warm the polar regions too much, we can look at what the climate was like a thousand or two thousand years ago. Most of Europe was forested, most of North America was forested,the rainforest in South America was much more extensive than today, and the polar regions were frozen. I doubt we could ever plant too many trees. But we also can't plant enough to compensate for all the things we're doing wrong. We need to rethink our values, globally. Google alone is hogging an immense amount of energy and generating an immense amount of heat, primarily for the purpose of collecting information about us so ads can sell us more stuff we don't need. And Google is just one company (or conglomerate) of many trying to sell us stuff we don't need. Don't get me wrong. I like being able to buy clothes instead of growing a plant (or animal) to spin into fibre to weave into cloth to cut and sew into clothes. But when we did have to get our clothes that way, we got along with far fewer of them. The same is true of almost anything technology has mad possible. It has made us contemptuous of the true cost.
What a hopeful perspective! Thanks, Mike.
*tips hat*
ach. i had a sycamore that volunteered in a garden bed just in front of my verandah, and yesterday I cut it down (it's non-native where I live) to reduce crowding and give the little native species I'm planting a chance to see the sun.
and as for inefficiency, it would be efficient to spray or scrape my whole block and then plant with selected species for the desired result. but then what would happen to the frogs and lil lizards and where would the wee birds nest while my "transformation" project takes place?
instead, I'm pootling. some very weedy areas, I keep the edges back from encroaching elsewhere, but when i wander outside for some headspace, i spot a bit of weedy grass that looks like I could get out and then the next fifteen minutes are spent wandering and hand pulling the interlopers, and allowing the tender soft native grasses that have always been there, to escape the smothering and set seed, and in the meantime, i'm learning about them, what they like, where they live, and pondering puzzling problems and now and again coming up with a possible way forward. I can't imagine this happening if I took the blitz route. and by being out there in a gentle way, the little birds get to know my habits and come and do their thing around me instead of fleeing at my approach.
Yes, I’ve read about those bristlecone pines. They’re now keeping their locations secret to the greatest extent possible so idiots don’t go carving their initials in them or cut them down. Fortunately, these trees tend to live in very desolate and harsh areas it’s hard to get to anyway.
A really beautiful piece by Robin Wall Kimmerer in the research on Oregon you mention and the ongoing life of a tree after it falls: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/becoming-earth/
I am a resolute tree hugger, as long as poison ivy isn't also hugging that tree. To that end, I have several tree hugging stories, but this is a favorite.
I was on a cruise in the Caribbean, and we had been on island after island, learning about the cultures in that superficial way you get with a cruise. We were on yet another island, but without a planned tour. Instead, we talked a taxi driver into taking us around to see the best parts of the island, in his opinion. (Highly recommend.)
One of those was a small church, which my companions wandered through. I never made it inside. In the churchyard was a massive mahogany tree. Our driver-turned-tour guide told me that the trees were protected, since there were so few of the old ones left. I walked up to it, put a hand on it, and couldn't help myself. I was so water-weary, and this ancient being was welcoming, and as you noted, deeply grounded. I hugged that tree the best I could. It would have taken all four of us to complete the circle of its girth. I took a deep breath and felt the best I had in days.
Happily a friend took a picture of me hugging a massive mahogany tree in a churchyard on a Caribbean island.
I’ve got to say, I like being able to, while pouring broth and picking a chicken carcass clean, listen to your narration. Perhaps the fine quality of your voice comes from decades of growth rings and being as old as a larch. And being out in the rain with the wind whipping it up one’s nostrils.
“Older than me and some of them even look it,” LOL!
You are the most considerate person ever -- not only thinking about the Daves who might be offended about being considered the type who occasionally go into a chaotic fury, but also the Daves who might be offended about being considered the type who never has chaotic furies.
I find my use of AI somewhat bifurcated. One use is as a junior "colleague" that I can give substantive but -- to me -- tedious tasks that I know well because I've done the same or very similar many, many times over the years. These tend to be python tools development and tailoring. These are things that I won't learn anything from doing myself yet again. The other use, which I'm adoring, is as a super-encyclopedia-wikipedia for deep-diving into topics I find fascinating. Unlike the first use case, this is *very* time-consuming, as I am a very slow reader. I feel like a kid in the candy store, though; it's delightful. Do I use AI for writing? No. Other than for a tone and polish check for sensitive emails that I can't allow to sound harsh for whatever reasons. (I am normally very blunt and direct, which is not always appropriate.) I really like and enjoy writing. AI is not welcome to take that from me. I am slow -- a consequence of being thorough and angsting over a word or clause or sentence that just doesn't ring quite right. But so what? Most joyful things are slow: it's called savoring. Society would benefit from a lot more of that.
AI isn't accurate enough to do deep dives on any topic. It's just as likely to make up complete nonsense than to give you objective facts. Be careful using it that way.
Your assessment is not wrong but I think might be a bit outdated. Unlike most, apparently, I check references and work through arguments myself. AI can be a very useful aide, but you still have to do significant, time-consuming work yourself. For the most part, AI that you pay for (to enable the best models and modes) is currently quite on-target. At least regarding Claude Opus 4.6, anyway. Also, I suspect many people don't know that you can significantly affect an AI's behavior (including gratuitous hallucination) with a well-crafted set of restrictions and rules in the profile settings. After many iterations, I've constrained Claude to show its "thinking" and, importantly, to just stop when it hits a wall. It works surprisingly well.
Yes! Thank you for this reminder. “Trees teach us the value of patience.”
I am working on an essay tentatively titled “The case against efficiency and achievements,” and you just gave me some extra things to ponder.
Regarding forestation, definitely agree that we shouldn't consider it an easy solution to greedy overconsumption, but by all accounts, there were far more forests 500 to 1000 years ago than there are now. Years ago, I read Marco Polo's account of his journey to the Mongolian empire, and as he was passing through the mountainous regions of Central Asia, he talked about how heavily wooded they were - they aren't now. Living in Canada, I am very conscious of just how much European settlers not only deforested this landscape, but as urban areas expand, are paving it over - I am convinced pavement must be contributing to the rise in cities' average temperatures.