After learning that I had value just as I was and without having to do anything to earn it, it was a small next step to see the same thing in other people.

This, in turn, reduced the quantity of iron in the island’s coastal waters. The lack of iron stopped the division and multiplication of microscopic marine life, which meant a famine for the sea creatures that depended on that life to survive. Cutting down trees, then, is not exclusively a suicidal act. It is homicidal as well.

be intellectually independent, to come to my own conclusions and resist the strictures with which other people tried to constrain my thinking.

noticed that rare species tended to occur in places where a river ran into the sea and fresh water and salt water mingled.

trees created those conditions through the community of forests. Trees paved the way for the human family. The debt we owe them is too big to ever repay.

Wetting her hands on a plant, she showed me the pattern she used to apply the dew. She

The photosynthetic reaction is the reverse of ordinary breathing.

go out into the sunshine. Take a stand and spread out your arms, palms up. Tilt your head up, too, and let the sunshine land on your face, your hands, the rest of you. Feel the sun on the surface of your skin. With this act, you are becoming like a tree. You are acting like a tree, with your arms spread out towards the sunshine just like the leaves

Cutting down trees was a suicidal act.