Andrea Germanos – Humankind Has Halved the Number of Trees on the Planet

The good news: there are over 3 trillion trees covering the Earth—that’s far higher than the 4 billion estimated just two years ago, a team of international researchers has found. But here’s the bad news: there were far more trees—46 percent more—before human civilization got hold, with an estimated 15 billion trees being lost own each year, with just 5 …

Alex Hutchinson – How Trees Calm Us Down

In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average, than those in otherwise identical rooms whose windows faced a wall. The results …

The Great Burning: On Rising to the Greatest Challenge Humanity Has Ever Faced

We live in a time of what might be called The Great Burning. However, we tend to ignore the tremendous inferno blazing around us. Most of the combustion occurs out of sight and out of mind, in hundreds of millions of automobile, truck, aircraft, and ship engines; in tens of thousands of coal or gas-fired power plants that provide the …