If a Tree Falls in the Forest?

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it does it still make sound.  Yes, it does.  In the wintertime it crackles and pops in my wood stove.

When a tree is alive and well it captures CO2 from the air and it gives off oxygen.  When a tree dies it stops giving up oxygen and starts releasing CO2 as part of it's decaying process.

To heat my home in the winter I have a small wood burning stove.  To fuel that stove I collect the downed trees from the woods. Each year quite a few trees come down during the storms.  I am grateful for the winter warmth.  It is a bit of work and best if I keep at it year round, that way I don't have to hurry the work, and the wood has longer to dry out.  It has just become a part of my daily work to sustain myself.

This is where I live.  This is part of my effort to be where I am and to live in it as part of it.  I use stones and rock for my building material because there is so much of it right here.  I use wood as my fuel because there is so much of it right here.  I watered my gardens from my water barrels during one week long period only because the rain did it the rest of the time.  I am trying to live where I am, not trying to make where I live into something it is not.

I know many people who live in a dry hot part of the country.  To me, they don't seem to live in that region, but rather in spite of it and they exert a lot of energy doing so.  Cafe's are out of doors and they use misters to keep people cool, the water evaporating before it falls onto the skin.  Yet, most people use clothes dryers that run on electricity or gas instead of hanging their clothes outside for an hour or so.
In that same place an open canal carries water across the desert to the big city, losing a staggeringly large amount to evaporation.  Meanwhile, that source for water has dwindled to the point that it no longer reaches the ocean as it once did.  All over are open swimming pools and golf courses that use a lot of water.  Once houses were built of adobe for it's cooling properties, now all are built of wood and use electricity to cool them.

I don't mean to pick on one place but this is what I personally have experienced, so I relate it here.  There are ways that we can live in the place that we find ourselves.  We can be more reasonable about what we ask of our surroundings, of the earth, of each other, of ourselves.

I sometimes stand at different places where I live and just look around.  I try to see what is here, where I am.  I try to see what I am not seeing, what I take for granted, what I look past.  I then try to see how I fit into this place, how my plans for my gardens, for my buildings, for any of my projects might be better thought out to make them fit into this place.  Sometimes, I realize that an idea I have had has no real place here and I have to come at the goal of my desire from a different angle so as to get at what I really want to achieve without forcing it upon the situation.  I have to find a more reasonable way of being in the place I live.