plants are our very flesh.
Over millions of years
plants have created the atmosphere we breathe; the soils from which we harvest
food; and the fossil fuels on which our present economy runs. Without plants, without trees, we are
dead. It’s that simple, and no
exaggeration. Yet fossil fuels and arable
soils and water-generating ecosystems are all under huge stress from human
activity. Trees are being cut down at
terrifying rates globally, un-homing orang-utans and gorillas and butterflies,
lemurs and wolves and owls, as well as age-old human communities from the
Amazon to Myanmar.
We may feel we can’t
do much about the destruction of forests in New Guinea or Brazil, but we can do something in Grahamstown. We can write about, document, record the
memories of local trees that once graced our streets or hills or gardens. We can try to preserve the trees we still
possess. And we can try to take the long
view and try to plant new trees that in a hundred or two hundred years will be
places in which ecosystems can thrive and great-grandchildren can play and new
cultural meanings can be forged.
Makana's Kop: Impression (c) Dan Wylie |
Trees carry meanings and
memories.
Trees are havens in
which we hid or cried or shared secrets or companionship. They housed other mammals or intriguing birds
or threatening insects. They heaved up
our houses’ foundations or suffused our mornings with beauty or yielded sweet
or bitter fruits that became who we are.
They are scented with seasonal weathers and ghosts. Our town is dominated at one end by the grove
on Makana’s Kop, with all the cultural weight of those who are buried there;
and at the other by the Botanical Gardens, with its quilt of foreign trees at
once imperial and beautiful, both alien and educative.
Our relationship to
trees is not always just beauty and benefit.
They break walls and harbour venomous snakes. Some alien species are astoundingly lovely,
but others are ecologically damaging and have to be rooted out. But overall, remember – without trees, we’re
dead, and so are a zillion other species, upon every one of which a functioning
ecosystem may depend. Dead simple.
So here is the call. Send in your memories of trees.
You may know of and
direct us to photographs or paintings of Grahamstown’s now-forgotten and
vanished trees of the past. You may know
of old travelogues, or letters, poems or stories. You may have photos or paintings or drawings of
trees you once played in, or planted, or cut down, or that still exist, on your
street or in your back yard. Certain
trees may commemorate or recall specific individuals or events. Write down what you know and remember, and
send it in. Anything. It doesn’t have to be literary or
polished. Be sentimental, or scientific,
or angry. The more specific your information – the precise location, the species,
the exact time or age – the more useful it may be. Take more photos. Get your kids and students doing
projects. Let’s think afresh about our
trees. Let’s think about what we can
leave behind, not just for tomorrow, or next year, but for fifty, a hundred, a
thousand years.
We don’t know what
we’ll do with it yet. The Facebook page
is just a start. In time we can start
compiling and correlating and mapping and sifting it all into something that
will find its own shape. It’s for
everyone to participate in. Just keep it
to Grahamstown-Rhini and its immediate surrounds for now!
or to Dan
Wylie at d.wylie@ru.ac.za,
or mail to Dan
Wylie, Department of English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
freemake video converter key
ReplyDeleteAcdsee Pro 2020
ReplyDeleteaiseesoft-blu-ray-player-crack
ReplyDeleteis a powerful media player for PC that supports all video formats without any codec and directly loads the disc. So, get here the simple playback option and need a click to take the screen snapshot.
freeprokeys
bitdefender-total-security-crack can be an expansion of this window operating-system security offer deal. This app includes system protection bundles, such as optimization. For example, instance,
ReplyDeletenew crack