The Global Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Author:Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Greatest Sin for Future Generations Is the Reduction of the Biodiversity of Trees

“LET THERE BE LIGHT . . .”

There is a simplicity to the sun. It is a golden disk. It sits in the sky for every eye to see. The sun produces light energy. This energy of light is received and used by people and by plants everywhere, or almost everywhere on this planet. The sun, in a fundamental way, rules our lives from one day-length into another in our necklace of time.

There appears to be simplicity in sunlight itself. It can be seen coming as perfectly straight lines, shining into a dusty room and holding motes of dust in the stream of light. These lines of light illuminate the world; give perspective to landscape and even a meaning to its absence in shadow. This light shines on the bodies of plants and animals and it is absorbed by them in specialized organs called photoreceptors.

Photoreceptor organs occur in all plants except, perhaps, the fungi. They also occur in mammals and man as the pigmented retina of the eye. Mammalian photoreceptors scan a shorter length of the light spectrum and for the most part are more effective in light capture. Insects such as butterflies, bees, and wasps register invisible color. Many go one step further and can read polarizing light. Plants with their green-colored, spongy mesophyll and extraordinary pigmentation read the full spectrum of light, including the regions invisible to man.

In the world of plants, photoreceptors are, for the most part, the green of the leaves. They are also the range of colors that emerge with the shortening days of autumn. This, too, is seen echoed in the oceans. The green of the marine plant world on or near the surface gets the full splash of the sun. As the plants recede deeper into the ocean depths to live out their lives the colors of autumn become necessary for amplification of that much-needed light, so green species are followed by brown species of algae that can endure some depth; then by yellows and finally by the reds who are deeper still and who are so clever at trapping and amplifying the sun in their dark watery homes.

The eye acts as one set of photoreceptors for mammal and man. These are the only truly colorful parts of the body in their brown, green, and blue. Eyes are arranged to receive sunlight and to transfer the meanings of the messages they record to the brain.

Some creatures like cats have extraordinarily adaptive eyes for light. There are other photoreceptive systems in mammals and man that are enzymically based. These are fired into action by trigger flares of individual light spectra like flashlights. These are some of the most important brain regulators in man.

These systems also occur in plants and have a not too dissimilar function of regulation. But in both plants and animals, these enzyme receptor systems are coregulated by the sun, in the circadian cycle of the night and day. They

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