small group lectured on survey methods. eventbrite link posted to statistics & programming meetups, three hours discussing complex sample designs
received grandpa joe's death certificate to finish births and deaths dot xlsx, a 7x7 grid with six nearest ancestors. namesake tonio 84.6 years older
write to the next animal to evolve to both tame this earth and recognize yourself in mirrors: if we humans suffer extinction, as species have before, if-then sentient life evolves again here and only here on this one eden of a planet, so impossibly far within our milky way from other intelligences for even correspondence, when you arrive, when you dig down and excavate our buried cities and inspect our iphones the way my day's paleontologists inspect dinosaur bones, i brim with pleasure just to think of all the cool shit that your newly-minted consciousnesses will learn about our crazy selves
watched chicxulub seafloor core sample mining day the dinosaurs died. megafauna vaporized to texas, new mexico & beyond burnt, pelagic starved
distressed granite
shocked quartz
ten billion hiroshimas
on that day 66 million years ago when everything changed
soot and charcoal found in k-t boundaries suggest that much of the world burned
read the overstory by richard powers. unlike the lorax, who spoke for the trees, richard powers prefers to let them do their own talking
and on the first day of spring, 1903, john hoel positions the no. 2 brownie and takes a full-length portrait of the sentient chestnut leafing out. one month later to the day, from the same spot and the same hour, he takes another. the twenty-first of every month finds him up on the rise. it becomes a ritual devotion, even in rain and snow and the killing heat, his own private liturgy of the church of the spreading vegetative god. his wife teases him without mercy, as do his children. "he's waiting for it to do something interesting"
"my silk farm. finish. it never make one thread."
"maybe you should plant another."
"best time to plant a tree? twenty years ago."
"yep, and you always said the next best time was now."
"wrong. next best time, nineteen years ago."
the ironwood's fluted muscle
soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. colonies and hives
humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. what seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. we're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other
if you want a person to help you, convince them that they've already helped you beyond saying. people will work hard to protect their legacy
the generalist emblem of all trees. thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years, dying. oak
anyone caught smirking must sing "amazing grace" with his arms flung out
the guard who all the prisoners call john wayne says, "what if i told you to fuck the floor? five seventy-one, you're frankenstein. you, 3401, you're the bride of frankenstein. okay, kiss, motherfuckers"
each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it
greatest flaw of the species is the overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth
he makes it through the portable nietzsche and continues with the complete nostradamus, burning it page by page in the woodstove as he finishes each one
life is as good as it has been since he fell out of the sky and into the banyan. the truck radio drifts in and out through the canyons, like the songs are coming from the moon
savagery is a slippery slope
a frog tries to cross a busy street. an ape defends himself with barrel bombs
when her tiny wooden doll's head twists off, she plants it in the garden, certain it will grow another body
she rides copilot in the beaten-up packard with the pine side paneling
if you carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half a century?
pawpaw! the only tropical fruit ever to escape the tropics
photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral. all the razzmatazz of life on earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act
the inscrutable generosity of green things
you and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. a billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. but even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes
life will not answer to reason. and meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it
her supervisor apologizes for the state of the cabin they give her, on the edge of an ancient cedar grove. there's no running water, and the varmints outweigh the new biped in biomass, many times over. she can only laugh. "you don't understand. you don't understand. it's the alhambra"
acacias alert other acacias to prowling giraffes
every one of the pieces bears a green tag reading $0
"photographs. one a month for seventy-six years. i come from a long and distinguished line of obsessive-compulsives"
"chestnut. the redwoods of the east"
diagnosing schizophrenia..beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms
huckleberry and currant, showy milkweed, tall oregon grape, yarrow and checkermallow. she marvels again at how the planet's supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for
so many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified
before it dies, a douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament
"the game is definitely chronophagic." he hears a little question mark pop up in a thought bubble on the other end of the line. "time-eating"
stop sacrificing virgins
a sonoma chipmunk with giant chopstick incisors
a rotting log is home to orders of magnitude more living tissue than the living tree. "i sometimes wonder whether a tree's real task on earth isn't to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a long time"
cones - serotinous - that can't open without flame. lodgepole pines hold on to theirs for decades, waiting for a fire to spring them
"you can replace forests with plantations. you can also arrange beethoven's ninth for solo kazoo"
sassafras, those root-beer-scented twigs that stay green all winter
asylum laughter
in that dream, the trees laugh at them. save us? what a human thing to do. even the laugh takes years
say it ain't so, smokey
the free bioregion of cascadia
potemkin forest, vista curtains only a few feet deep
"hungry?" he remembers to lift his eyebrows just a hair..but confirmation bias will always beat out common sense. all the data prove it. "starving"
"pareidolia," patricia says..the adaptation that makes people see people in all things. the tendency to turn two knotholes and a gash into a face
ovid her father gave her. let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things
raises her glass..to tachigali versicolor
people aren't alone, and they never have been
but, of course, it's not the world that needs saving. only the thing that people call by the same name
11/21