Trees, seven thoughts

TREE - I

As the river
So the tree
Apparently they're skewed
One sideways, the other
'Up' and 'down'

But look again
The branches form the delta
and roots are the rivulets of
'Origin'

The Tree - a vertical river
And the river - a horizontal tree
The drop and the leaf
they look the same

Multiply, therefore by dividing
In this biology and the Veda agree

(If you wish, on Google search type "vedic+mathematics" and see what you get. Too bad, Bucky was most probably not introduced to it. I recall it was 'rediscovered' sometime in the early fifties of the last century - and took its time to get around because, at the time and exceptions apart, most 'mainstream' MDPs discounted 'wisdom' from the 'east' - and the 'east' had been trodden upon and dispossed - and forgotten its 'orientation' too, - and were kind of reinventing the wheel, going through weaponry to livingry.)

TREE-II
Some years ago, National Geographic had a piece about botanists who decided they wanted to study the forest canopy, which is where the 'action' is. So they had themselves dropped on the canopy from helicopter for which they had to devise a large netted hexagon of a radius that would encompass several tree crowns and they had little tents they would crawl into at night. And what was the first thing they noticed? A non-stop water spray. The trees were pulling the water up to the topmost leaves and they were kind of spraying the excess out. The botanists loved it and for six months they learnt to work in that 'clammy' feeling.

Tree-III
The Arid Zone Research Institue in Rajasthan has invented a 'double' pot which needs water every fifteen days. That invention became necessary because conventional sprinkling doesn't work. The air is so dry it plays 'uncle' and takes up the water before it can percolate to the roots and get sucked in. The outside of the outer pot is tarred and its pores sealed so the air can't get to the water which is between the 3" gap between the walls. This gap is covered by a plastic ring so the air can't get to it. The waer then is sucked by the plant through the pores of the inner pot. They discovered that the plant doesn't need a shower of water sprinkled from the top. All it needs is for the earth to be damp.

Tree IV
A single, large emergent forest tree pumps some 200 gallons of water per day into the atmospere. Through this process, one acre of tropical rain forest releases 20,000 gallons of water into the atmosphere daily for cloud formation. That's twenty times the amount the sea contributes through evaporation for the same surface area.

Tree V
Q. Why are most Hindoos vegetarian?
A. Per one of the ways they have understood their heritage, there's a link between drought and meat eating. This was thought to be bizarre - until they did some research to find out what has caused the Great Brown Spot on the Australian continent - an area so dry and large that,even today, most humans live on the fringes of the continent, near the oceans.

It turns out that until about 10,000 years ago, Australia was, like India, annually visited by monsoonal winds. So first the slash and burn farming cut down the trees and the place became grassy that would survive the summer by becoming tumble weed. Then the Europeans can and brought their plants and started the wool business in a big way. The grazing sheep would cut down the life span of the grass even shorter. Researchers at Cornell found out that the dying/killed plants were somehow able to send out pheromones that signalled "We are going. We won't need water any more." And the winds got the message and the monsoons stopped visiting Australia. There was no one there to pull them in!

Tree VI
Every year when green things inhale carbon to put out buds, shoots, leaves and stems, the biosphere inhales. When the leaves fall and molder on the ground, the biosphere exhales. It is one of the most beautiful, regular and global of all cycles in nature. If you pause to listen, you can hear the breathing of the forest; and if you pause deeper, you can feel the breathing of the planet. A forest takes one breath a day. The planet takes one breath a year.

Tree VII
Then.. he told them about the Earth Woman. He madethem imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred millions old - was a forty-six-year-old woman - as old, say, Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was, For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chako said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared (Vyom says - Note the coincidence in age). The first animals, creatures like worms and jelly fish, appeared only when she was over forty-five - just eight months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

'The whole of human civilzation as we no it,' he said, 'began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life. As long as it takes us to to drive from Ayemeneem to Cochin.'

It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chaco said, the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, kiterature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye.

'And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be - are just a twinkle in her eye' he said grandly".... Arundhati Roy in