A white pine

http://www.arborday.org/trees/treeguide/TreeDetail.cfm?ID=42

“The Eastern White Pine tree has been referred to as "the monarch of the forest." Some that greeted the first settlers reached a height of 250 feet with diameters of 6 feet. They were a bonanza for England in colonial times, as they met a vital military and commercial need for sailing ship masts. Since the colonists were rapidly using up the existing supply of trees close to the ocean that were large enough for masts, the Royal Navy appealed to Parliament. As a result, in 1691 Great Britain imposed the first of the so-called "broad arrow" acts, so named because of the axe mark placed on the reserved trees by the king's men, that reserved these trees for the English government. Growing resentment to the crown's appropriation of the choicest White Pines helped precipitate the Revolutionary War, and the first flag of the revolutionary forces even had a White Pine as its emblem.”

Yes, we have to wonder what effect this apparent departure from the desire to explore the roots/history of the world in which we live will eventually have on future generations.

My problem is that I wonder if we can really say with any obective (empirical) confidence, whether this change is really a positive or negative trend. While my own intuition leads me to believe that collective wisdom, at the very least, will suffer; intuition is not knowledge.

Most troublesome is the fact that the inevitability and usefulness of the technological changes that have percipitated this trend, can not possibly be marginalized. If these technological change needed to happen (and they did), then so does everything else that comes with it.

My own hope is that perhaps we will one day discover that this was all just a temporary hiccup, much like adolescence, in an otherwise sane and useful life.

love sweet love