PEACE from TREES

Three of 28

Just as there are doors of living and doors of dying, just as some doors take us far beyond all doors we've ever known; so too there is one door that stands alone, a door that makes all others real, that door is you. Love the way your door opens, learn to return to how it opens when you see it close...

Know our all seeing eyes, our eyelids, our tears... they keep-vision-moist from air's dry: It's our green life's leaf! It's the way we watch ourselves! The way we're real, it's a way our greatness finds itself, finds friends and kin. The expectancy, the resilience, the ever living breathing perseverance.

Leaf's life as love's source, as unending rhythms as steady as stars, as precious as even minds that measure them... It rhythms as it waits to know the tone of taking deep breaths, diving down, deep under water of life's purpose. How deep will you swim to rise up for a more air-open-door?

Poem by DeaneTR (c)2007 Photos/Art by Mark Ryden (c)2007
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This series of 28 photo-poems are inspired by recent scientific discoveries related to forests around the world. The poem above is inspired by the condensed news articles below. If you'd like to learn about forest issues from around the world on a regular basis subscribe to my newsletter / weblog which is called: "Earth's Tree News" and can be viewed on the web at http://www.livejournal.com/users/olyecology or via email by sending a blank message to earthtreenews-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
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NATURE | VOL 424 | 21 AUGUST 2003 |

Stomata, the small pores on the surfaces of leaves and stalks, regulate the flow of gases in and out of leaves and thus plants as a whole. They adapt to local and global changes on all timescales from minutes to millennia. Recent data from diverse fields are establishing their central importance to plant physiology, evolution and global ecology.

Stomatal morphology, distribution and behavior respond to a spectrum of signals, from intracellular signaling to global climatic change. Such concerted adaptation results from a web of control systems, reminiscent of a 'scale-free' network, whose untangling requires integrated approaches beyond those currently used.

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NATURE | VOL 422 | 27 MARCH 2003 |

The dominant forcing factors for past large-scale changes in vegetation are widely debated. Changes in the distribution of C4 plants-adapted to warm, dry conditions and low atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been attributed to marked changes in environmental conditions, but the relative impacts of changes in aridity, temperature and CO2 concentration are not well understood. Here, we present a record of African C4 plant abundance between 1.2 and 0.45 million years ago, derived from compound-specific carbon isotope analyses of wind-transported terrigenous plant waxes. We find that large-scale changes in African vegetation are linked closely to sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. We conclude that, in the mid-Pleistocene, changes in atmospheric moisture content -- driven by tropical sea surface temperature
changes and the strength of the African monsoon -- controlled aridity
on the African continent, and hence large-scale vegetation changes.

PEACE from TREES