The Woman Redeemed by Trees - Issue 59: Connections
▻http://nautil.us/issue/59/connections/the-woman-redeemed-by-trees
Real life starts in graduate school. Some mornings in West Lafayette, Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school: Purdue pays her to take classes she has craved for years. She gets food and lodging for teaching botany, something she’d gladly pay to do. And her research demands long days in the Indiana woods. It’s an animist’s heaven. By her second year, the catch becomes clear. In a forest management seminar, the professor declares that windthrow should be cleaned up and pulped, to improve forest health. That doesn’t seem right; a healthy forest needs dead trees. They’ve been around since the beginning. Birds use them, and small mammals. More forms of insects live on them than science has counted. She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other (...)