Storia di una sequoia - Story of a sequoia by Alessandro Giudice

Author:Alessandro Giudice [Giudice, Alessandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Alessandro Giudice;sequoia;albero
Publisher: la Bussola
Published: 2024-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

Story

of a sequoia

English version by the bilingual author himself

Distilling poetry from a plant

and letting it live in peace.

INTRODUCTION

BY G.U.F.I.

We reckon this easily readable book is very useful to draw and introduce the very young to the knowledge of the world of the trees and of the epochal issues we’re living in our time such as the climate crisis, the disappearance of living species, the environment pollution.

Science and technique have made stunning progress and mankind has come to turn its attention to the exploration, which is about to become direct, of other planets in the solar system. We’ve all admired the landing of NASA’s “Perseverance” rover on Mars and we’re waiting for that sophisticated instruments’ assemblage to give us results on clues about the existence, past or present, of life on that planet, which could have originated when there was superficial liquid water in primaeval form, probably until three billion years ago. We’re also discussing about the possibilities, very arduous indeed, of some sort of its habitability. Even more astounding is “Rosetta” probe’s mission, launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency towards a very far comet, four kilometers wide in its biggest dimensions, which after a 12-year journey reached its objective, landed on it, anchored there and carried out surveys, analyses, and transmitted the results and hundreds of images.

All this is fascinating, and knowledge and research are undoubtedly to be pursued.

Instead, it’s surprising how, on aspects that are fundamental for life and habitability on the planet we’re living in, which is a finite world, the research doesn’t arouse analogous or bigger enthusiasm and the one about trees is not adequately financed. Marcel Proust, the French writer, essayist and literary critic, whose most famous work is the monumental novel “In search of lost time”, in 1914, year in which the crazed humanity waged a disastrous war with millions of victims, wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”.

Having new eyes is still necessary for our relationship with the vegetal world and particularly with the trees. Only recently we’ve discovered that the trees communicate through the production of volatile molecules we call “essences”, sometimes perfumed, and through the mushroom hyphae tissue by which they can cooperate also among different species exchanging nourishment and information that is vital for the general economy and the “functionality” of the ecosystem in which they live. If only we allocated to the vegetal life world research what we spend for the death-causing armaments, we would know much more. Our dependance on the vegetal world is absolute, continuous both for each individual and for the whole world we live in. And not only for food. The same terrestrial atmosphere is a product of life on the ground, a manifestation of the biota: if only we try stop breathing for five minutes, we realize how much we depend on plants, whose photosynthesis has provided that approximate 21% of oxygen which composes the air today. Before the vegetal world appeared, our atmosphere had no molecular oxygen.

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