Even before awareness of the pandemic I’d begun to think much more deeply about the trees. And I’m already outdoors and living in relationship with wildness much more than most people I know. And it’s true, too, that my mind’s been in Richard Powers’ The Overstory for a while now.
And from the beginning I’ve thought that the task at hand is actually promoting health more than avoiding illness (for ourselves and others). And that health, as Wendell Berry says, is much more than etymologically connected to wholeness.