Who cares about the branch they broke off when they were five because they wanted to pretend it was a sword? Who remembers how many initials they've seen carved into bark or how fewer trees there are around their homes? It quickly fades into the general background noise of our lives to the point where deforestation is just another word and barely a reality to so many of us.
Trees can keep their brutalised neighbours alive for centuries, sharing nutrients through their intertwined root system to feed whatever remains. They keep them alive to remember what humans forget in the span of a day and gradually they either grow back or they rot like everything else and their memories are left to rot alongside them until there is nothing but mulch and fragments of thought that continue to feed the rest of the forest.
It's not something humans often consider, that trees are far more aware than we realise and they spread their memories faster and further than we could ever hope to. They hear what we've learned over the centuries and they adapt themselves accordingly to starve us out of their way.
They started so slowly that by the time we were aware, there was nothing we could do. We believed so firmly that our polluting the air was the sole reason for it thinning to the point where almost thirty seven percent of the global landmasses were totally uninhabitable.
How could we have known that the trees no longer produced oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide and allowing us to thrive in spite of our unintentional attempts to poison the world. Canned air and colonising Mars seemed our best options for long-term survival - we never considered that the same memories that began the world's end to begin with were being sent to Mars alongside us to start the cycle anew.
Trees can keep their brutalised neighbours alive for centuries, sharing nutrients through their intertwined root system to feed whatever remains. They keep them alive to remember what humans forget in the span of a day and gradually they either grow back or they rot like everything else and their memories are left to rot alongside them until there is nothing but mulch and fragments of thought that continue to feed the rest of the forest.
It's not something humans often consider, that trees are far more aware than we realise and they spread their memories faster and further than we could ever hope to. They hear what we've learned over the centuries and they adapt themselves accordingly to starve us out of their way.
They started so slowly that by the time we were aware, there was nothing we could do. We believed so firmly that our polluting the air was the sole reason for it thinning to the point where almost thirty seven percent of the global landmasses were totally uninhabitable.
How could we have known that the trees no longer produced oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide and allowing us to thrive in spite of our unintentional attempts to poison the world. Canned air and colonising Mars seemed our best options for long-term survival - we never considered that the same memories that began the world's end to begin with were being sent to Mars alongside us to start the cycle anew.
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