Forestry

Isaiah and I sat down here to rest, leaning against the roots of this hundred year old Tamarack. This was about a year ago. Most of our land was blanketed with snow, but the miroclimate here had left a little open ground - moist and aromatic, the kind of forest soil you pick up in handfuls and hold close to your face and breathe in like medicine...one of those days. We had been working hard, thinning and pruning and pulling up noxious brush plants by the roots, getting the burnable wastes to the small fire. As we sat here beneath this tree we had this conversation:

Isaiah: So...Dad. How come you say nature is perfect, but we come out here and chop and cut and burn and work hard to change it, and when we're done, it's better. (The nature is perfect part is a reference to what I have sometimes said about man's position in creation, which goes something like this: The subatomic particulars in a sulfur atom play the part their Creator intended for them to play and therefore interact harmoniously with every part of the cosmos - materially, thermodynamically, and chronologically. There is no abdication from the holy station to which they were assigned. How shall I define myself? and How shall I increase my influence and my holdings? are not considerations by nature's parts. Man alone is displaced from the matrix of heaven, and dissonant to the harmonies of God.)
Me: What?
Isaiah: We change the woods. And it's better. Wasn't it perfect before we worked on it?
Me: Oh. Yeah...OK. Nature is perfect in the sense that its parts are obedient...well maybe that's not the right word, because they cannot very well be disobedient, but they are what they're meant to be. At the atomic level, and the molecular, and this translates to the geological, biological, and meteorological. It's perfect, but there's a plasticity to it, a periodicity, and a flow. It is moving, aligning itself with the polarity imposed by the greater forces of nature that are at work on this particular environment. The weathering mountain, the retreating glaciers, the coniferous distributions, the pests and diseases and fires, the climate..
Isaiah: So why not just let things work themselves out?
Me: We could. And over one or two thousand years we would get a mature forest, a balance, which around here would mean huge pines, scattered across the grasses on the south facing slopes, and a mixture or firs and tamarack on the north slopes, more dense, the understory breaking through where the wind breaks open the canopy. And giant, ancient cedars where it is wet. But you and I working...we are a thousand years of fire and natural selection. We become the weak trees dying of disease and overcrowding. We're the dense canopies shading out the pesky brush, and the deer browsing, and birds dropping seed...if we're smart, we work like that. And we can condense five of six centuries of natural progression into three or four decades. By means of wit and care and working with these tools. And fire.
Isaiah: you didn't actually say it like that.
Me: I know. But that was the idea of it.
Isaiah: Can we go back to the house now?
Me: Yeah, sure I guess so. That's enough for today.