...because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as i go along.

Plant numbers are staggering: there are eighty billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred. As a rule, people live among plants but they don't really see them. Since I've discovered these numbers, I can see little else.

Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical. Remember that you are your tree's only friend in a hostile world.

At the end of a mass extinction, the tree of life has lost several branches-and yet, afterward, life does go on. Plants regreen the earth and animals repopulate the oceans; different species relentless forward march. There will be life on planet Earth after the sixth mass extinction, but we are not able to imagine it any better than the dinosaurs could have imagined a world dominated by mammals walking on two legs, driving bulldozers, and flying airplanes.

The initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory, won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism. This unique intellectual agony shapes the character of the tree experimentalist and selects for those with a religious devotion to science. Patient, with overtones of masochism.

There is no time to discuss the fact that this horrible, horrible system is not working, or to assert that we are neither criminals or machines. There are only endless medication orders, given by exhausted people with nobody better than us to depend on.