Time Seen As Old Trees on the Ground in an Old Forest

They're more obvious, more starkly visible in wintertime, these trees lying on the ground where I'm walking in a remnant of an old growth forest, large trees allowed to die a natural death, finally falling when their roots, weakened by rot, lost the strong fiber needed to hold them up. I walk the length of one trunk slowly, noticing the thriving carpet of moss on the tree's remains, almost the only green thing around in the wintry scene. In some places, bark hangs toward the ground, suspended for the moment in its slow-paced separation from the tree trunk.

Most of the trees are oaks. They probably stood upright for more than a hundred years. Some of them have been on the ground so long they're identifiably on their way to becoming the ground. You can look at the remains of old trees in late stages of decomposition, particles of what was once unmistakably wood in a line sloping to the ground, the particles the dark color of the soil. Following the line to the soil, you see that at some point the decomposing tree and the earth are indistinguishable. It's a dramatic, if subtle glimpse into the process of decay and regeneration. The trees become the soil that feeds new trees, progeny of the old.

Walking through a woods like this, and really seeing what's here, offers a sense of a time scale we rarely have such a direct opportunity to reflect on. On a clear winter night I can see the Orion Nebula through binoculars, a place in space called, in a delightfully anthropomorphic metaphor, a "stellar nursery." In this most vivid of constellations, stars, over immense ages of time, are formed. But the pleasures of Orion are not as direct as those of the forest, where I can actually see stages of something unfolding over more years than my life will hold. In the forest, I can even smell it, touch it.

Human education has always been sadly lacking in lessons on what time is really like. So much we do affects the places we live, and can go on affecting them for long spans of time. Our perspective is limited to what we need and want now. Our imaginations are underdeveloped and thus unable to reach across the ages.

And now some say we are the universe becoming conscious of itself. Evolution has reached a point where creation can contemplate its own wonders. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge continues to feed us. Now we have some ability to watch what happens not only across generations, but across geological ages, and even back to a time when there was no earth (the ge in geology) to have ages.

So what are we doing with this knowledge? I can see, in the transmutating trees, a process that extends over hundreds of years--decay forming soil, smaller trees nourished by the decay, large, mature, strong trees that most intensely characterize the forest, and that, left alone, will also feed it one day.

I can see, too, as can a number of other conscious people, a process unfolding over hundreds of years that is changing the climate of the earth. Still, for me as for so many others, what is judged as urgent from my personal perspective usually takes precedence over matters I know to be of greater ultimate importance. It's difficult, this business of being human and taking responsibility, at your own expense, for events that will occur after you die. Most of us just aren't up to it.

And now we've come to a time when our actions have powerful implications for our own descendants, as well as so many other forms of life on earth.

The earth is old, so much older than we are, and eventually, it will regain any health lost to human bungling. This blue and green planet has been through a lot of changes in the last four and a half billion years, and our star is thought to have at least that much life left in it. The question is not whether the earth will remain, but whether, and how long, we and our race will remain.