Heresies 101: Trees don\'t have immune systems
Heresies 101: Trees don’t have immune systems
In thinking about many of our recent posts on various problems with trees, I thought about starting a thread with the title, Some troubles with trees is just words.
We had discussed dead wood and deadwood; along with epicormic and epicormal, and the exchanges were rich and provocative. Those threads came to a kind of natural halt because the size and complexity of the dialogues made it difficult to slide in new comments.
It also seemed to me that we had wandered into the world of words, semantics, where words get mistaken for the things themselves and we’re not so much discussing the physical realities and facts about trees as we are the soft and puffy labels we give to miscellaneous chunks of our understandings. Again, none of this is any personal criticism, but we are in our feisty little arena where people can be fiercely challenged about what we seem to think they know and what they don't know.
Trying to step away from wulkowiczian wordiness, I saw Karen Armstrong on the Charlie Rose show a week ago. She was a Catholic nun, who left the Church, stumbled around a while, and apparently ended up as a well-respected writer about the histories of religions. As I listened, I enjoyed her language and focus on many different topics, but was most impressed by her comment about discussions and debates. She said, “… there’s no point in getting into a dialogue unless you are prepared to be changed by the encounter….”
I will try to keep that in mind in my presentations here in this series about what I think are the many different sands that get ground into the gears of learning and understanding. I’m not making any pronouncements about what I say or try to teach, and yes there is no doubt that I am opinionated and argumentative, but I really have tried to work hard at providing clarity for my sense of the world of trees.
In one previous thread, I was asked to provide a broader picture of what I thought about trees. In another, the author cautioned us about not confusing the worlds of animals and plants. I’d like to bang those two questions together and come up with a theme that doesn’t get lost in the global, and the same time gives us a chance to look at some specifics of science, education, and practical matters. So here it is:
Heresies 101
We live in a very complicated universe where the details are so vast and seemingly infinite in number that we would have a chronically boggled mind if we had tried to remember and catalog them all. So we don’t.
Evolutionally, we might prefer to just get through the day with a full belly, a warm den, and a reasonable probability that something larger with big teeth wouldn’t have us for a snack. That worked well as hunter-gatherers, but we did have opposable thumbs and a strange capacity to think, so we evolved intellectually at a much faster rate than our bodies. We have the additional problem that this rate of finding things out is almost exponential; it seems to be getting faster and faster in details that hardly have a chance to molt before we are given a new nest of factoids.
We are told our brains are hardwired and filled with defenses that served us rather well in the long course of our physical evolution. “Flee or fight.” “Being suspicious means staying alive.” “If it don’t smell right, don’t drink it.” “If it’s smaller than you and it runs: chase it.” “If it runs past something bigger than you, turn around and run away.”
All are very practical truths and if we didn’t have them, we’d be fossils uncovered by whales who got to be the next step in the evolutionary ladder because we sunk the planet. But I digress.
My series is Heresies 101 and the first discussion is: Trees don’t have immune systems
Someone can start, on one side or tuther, with the following posts hopefully keeping on topic, and all agreeing to be flexible in remembering ex-nun Armstrong’s comment about being “prepared to be changed by the encounter.”
Bob Wulkowicz
PS: here’s the link to the show. It’s a worthwhile encounter.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11407
(Her New Book: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life)
Heresies 101: Trees don’t have immune systems
In thinking about many of our recent posts on various problems with trees, I thought about starting a thread with the title, Some troubles with trees is just words.
We had discussed dead wood and deadwood; along with epicormic and epicormal, and the exchanges were rich and provocative. Those threads came to a kind of natural halt because the size and complexity of the dialogues made it difficult to slide in new comments.
It also seemed to me that we had wandered into the world of words, semantics, where words get mistaken for the things themselves and we’re not so much discussing the physical realities and facts about trees as we are the soft and puffy labels we give to miscellaneous chunks of our understandings. Again, none of this is any personal criticism, but we are in our feisty little arena where people can be fiercely challenged about what we seem to think they know and what they don't know.
Trying to step away from wulkowiczian wordiness, I saw Karen Armstrong on the Charlie Rose show a week ago. She was a Catholic nun, who left the Church, stumbled around a while, and apparently ended up as a well-respected writer about the histories of religions. As I listened, I enjoyed her language and focus on many different topics, but was most impressed by her comment about discussions and debates. She said, “… there’s no point in getting into a dialogue unless you are prepared to be changed by the encounter….”
I will try to keep that in mind in my presentations here in this series about what I think are the many different sands that get ground into the gears of learning and understanding. I’m not making any pronouncements about what I say or try to teach, and yes there is no doubt that I am opinionated and argumentative, but I really have tried to work hard at providing clarity for my sense of the world of trees.
In one previous thread, I was asked to provide a broader picture of what I thought about trees. In another, the author cautioned us about not confusing the worlds of animals and plants. I’d like to bang those two questions together and come up with a theme that doesn’t get lost in the global, and the same time gives us a chance to look at some specifics of science, education, and practical matters. So here it is:
Heresies 101
We live in a very complicated universe where the details are so vast and seemingly infinite in number that we would have a chronically boggled mind if we had tried to remember and catalog them all. So we don’t.
Evolutionally, we might prefer to just get through the day with a full belly, a warm den, and a reasonable probability that something larger with big teeth wouldn’t have us for a snack. That worked well as hunter-gatherers, but we did have opposable thumbs and a strange capacity to think, so we evolved intellectually at a much faster rate than our bodies. We have the additional problem that this rate of finding things out is almost exponential; it seems to be getting faster and faster in details that hardly have a chance to molt before we are given a new nest of factoids.
We are told our brains are hardwired and filled with defenses that served us rather well in the long course of our physical evolution. “Flee or fight.” “Being suspicious means staying alive.” “If it don’t smell right, don’t drink it.” “If it’s smaller than you and it runs: chase it.” “If it runs past something bigger than you, turn around and run away.”
All are very practical truths and if we didn’t have them, we’d be fossils uncovered by whales who got to be the next step in the evolutionary ladder because we sunk the planet. But I digress.
My series is Heresies 101 and the first discussion is: Trees don’t have immune systems
Someone can start, on one side or tuther, with the following posts hopefully keeping on topic, and all agreeing to be flexible in remembering ex-nun Armstrong’s comment about being “prepared to be changed by the encounter.”
Bob Wulkowicz
PS: here’s the link to the show. It’s a worthwhile encounter.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11407
(Her New Book: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life)
