Arbor Day: Celebrate trees

We are post-industrial human beings. The sagebrush steppe is not our natural habitat. We are far too fragile, too easily burned, baked and desiccated to survive long in the open in a place like this. We have decided by circumstance to make our homes on piles of sand and grit washed out of the hills, this place where without unnatural assistance, nothing lives that cannot be sustained on less than 10 inches of moisture in a year. This is a place once best suited to rodents and reptiles, and a few hardy human beings better equipped than we soft-ripened Nordics.

And yet with thrive here. With benevolent nature and human ingenuity we have created a place to envy, a leafy oasis, a patch of green at the foot of the brown hills, where many of us would rather be than any place we have seen.

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Arbor Day: Celebrate trees