According to The Four Tendencies I am a Rebel. Now the challenge is to not rebel against doing all the things! Challenge accepted.
I have read:
My list of what I've read. Everything goes in here, even the embarrasing stuff. That way I, (hopefully), don't get duplicates as gifts, and eventually I can be proud of my long list.
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Simplicity Parenting
Author Kim John Payne makes the case we should stop jamming so much stuff in our kids lives, and enforce free time for them to explore and play freely.
Want to read it yourself? Get from Amazon:
The Brave Learner
We have been homeschooling since the start of the first full pandemic school year in fall 2020. This past summer, when making decisions about future schooling plans, I read Julie Bogart’s The Brave Learner. Thanks to The Brave Learner I now think of homeschooling, at least on a high level, as something to look forward to and enjoy. This doesn’t mean I have started relishing preparing lesson plans, and I, by far, do the minority of the homeschool work in our household, but at least everything isn’t dread, and I know that homeschooling, despite rough moments, can be great.
Ru
I’m trying to improve my French comprehension and vocabulary. This was suggested as part of the book club for the course I signed up for.
The Hidden Life of Trees
With a full title of The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World this book is going to be amazing or terrible. We got lucky. Part of The Overstory is about a forest scientist who discovers how trees communicate and writes a book about it. I believe that The Hidden Life of Trees is the inspiration for that book-within-a-book from The Overstory.
The Hidden Life of Trees starts out with a bang describing several mechanisms that trees use to communicate with each other in forest settings. We go on to a deep dive into many fascinating aspects of trees and forests that I didn’t know, despite growing up around forests and foresters. The book wraps up with a passionate argument for managing forests in a more wholesome way than most forests are managed now.
In some cases the author Peter Wohlleben ascribes more intelligence and emotion to trees than I personally believe they actually have, but that doesn’t take away from the arguments showing that as a society we know much less than we think we do about trees and we should treat them, and forests, better.
As I was reading The Hidden Life of Trees I took a bike ride that went through Angrignon Park here in Montreal, where I was surprised to find a scene that remind me of my childhood: piles of cut logs. It turns out that Montreal is cutting 4000 trees from the forested areas of Angrignon Park. This is mostly to control Emerald Ash Borer, but also to remove “dangerous” trees. Some of the trees are being turned into lumber for use by the city, and others are being chipped and returned to the forested areas of the park. After reading The Hidden Life of Trees I wonder if this is the best approach, and have so many questions. For example, if the goal is to get rid of of Emerald Ash Borer then why are any cut trees being returned to the forest? If it is ok to return trees to the forest shouldn’t they all be returned? If trees are to be returned to the forest why use the fuel to chip them when nature will decompose the trees for us in a way that increases biodiversity?
