“For our ghosts” is a nice succinct way of puttinf why we do what we do.
We’re working to restore Eastern forests in honor of the world that was—mending the world indigenous people worked to build; mending the species that sustained Appalachia’s marginalized people for centuries.
We’re also doing this because we know we won’t be around forever. After we’re gone, all of us humans haunt the world in one way or another, even if we’re just talking about our legacies and not, you know, ghoul shit. We want to sow goodness in this place. Do you?
Chestnut blight only attacks American chestnuts above the soil, leaving root structures intact. Combine this with the fact that the American chestnut is a scrappy species, fast to regrow, and this is the result: 430 million stump sprouts of this functionally extinct species are still growing in its native range, doomed to die back before maturity, at which time they will rise and die again until they've exhausted the last of their energy.
We at TACF are working to save the species; in time, we're on track to succeed. In the mean time, though, those wild trees still grow toward certain death. They rise anyway -- and so do we, every day.
Immortality isn't the point of life. We're all here to evolve by rising, rising, and rising again.
Everyone's favorite elegiac quotation from the poem "The Old Astronomer" by Sarah Williams, an English poet who died of cancer, age 30, in 1868.
"Though my soul my set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."
It's juicy. It's sweet. It's exotic and girl-next-door at the same time. It's pollinated by flies and other carrion feeders. It's the second best native forest foodstuff in Virginia. It's a pawpaw!
Tags:
cottagecore, appalachian, earth, forest, american
