The best book I have read this year is The Hidden Life of Trees. The seas and the breeze. It’s not about the tease. Let us look at publishing. My annoying whine with publishing is that it doesn’t tell me anything I do not already know. It’s safe. And then BAM. I will confront a book that shakes my world. The Hidden Life of Trees is one of those two books. The other one was by me. What are the standards by which we measure the worth of trees. Or dead trees. Lumber. Usually, this is done by dimension, mass, and history. But how much land did it take to grow the trees we beat up into paper.

No one reads my books. Bookstores shred them. Churches burn them. And the trees laugh. They talk to me (dogs do this, too, even the crazy ones). The trees and my local lumber yard friend tell me that it took three acres of wood. To make the books (covers are expensive) that sold in single digits. Or digit. We are the waste. Trees. Water. We rip the earth up for coal which we send into the air as ash that flies over the Ohio Valley to land in my Blue Ridge backyard. We fail at our impact on the planet.

We obfuscate. Readers turn to the Internet which pretends to be free. Anyone who thinks the Internet is free, please raise your hand. Mystification could get so good as to evaluate highs and lows in a marketplace that only knows capitalism. It’s not about those numbers. It’s about the Sacredness of the Platform, the economy.  Homo sapiens and the parasites. The price of lumber is a sheer giveaway to satiate our greed with insects that stick to you like home.