#bewilder

“As the great Le Guin put it, the word for world is forest....We have depended on trees not just for the invention of civilization but for our very existence. Without them, no us....One of our great errors in thinking — another aspect of that unfortunate idea of human exceptionalism that makes it so hard for us to be at home in this world — is that the natural and the man-made are distinct entities. Like all other parts of the branching experiment, we make and are made by the living environment, and we have done so since before we were us....We came into being by the grace of trees. Now the fate of trees, and of the whole world forest, is squarely in our machine-amplified hands....I like the etymological sense of the word bewilder — to be made wild....[T]here comes a point when you need to take a forest as seriously as a city, and a tree as seriously as a human being.”