Over to Madison for climate rally organized by 350.org. Perhaps if it had been snowing rather than foggy, attendance would have been greater. There were more people at REI than on the Capitol steps, but we were glad to be part of the movement. And the news out of Paris is good!

Inside the Capitol, in the rotunda, a brass band was playing Christmas carols, which in my estimation was a bad idea; with the sound echoing around the marble dome and hallways we listeners were treated to at least eight bars at once, and each song went on quite a long time after the conductor waved the last beat.

As part of our outing we also visited Mount Horeb where Pax and I again walked past one of our favorite trees—a very old weeping beech.

A few posts back I mentioned a book that I failed to finish: H Is For Hawk. Nothing against the author (except perhaps a bit too much self-absorbed sentimentality). Anyway, here is a clip from an article of hers in the NY Times:

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Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognizing the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief. Virulent tree diseases hit the headlines, but smaller, less visible disappearances happen all the time. The flycatchers that nested in my neighborhood 10 years ago have vanished; meadows in my hometown that were full of all kinds of life have become housing developments full of nothing but our own. People of a certain age tend to look back elegiacally at the things that have gone: the store you used as a kid that closed, the room that became a memory. But those small, personal disappearances, however poignant, are not the same as losing biodiversity. Brands are not butterflies. Changes to city skylines are not the same as acres of beetle-blasted trees: Though they are caught up in stories about ourselves, trees are not ever just about us. They support complex and interdependent communities of life, and as forests slowly become less diverse, the world loses more than simply trees. It has been suggested that the rise of Lyme disease in many parts of North America and Europe is in part because less-diverse forests favor the ticks that carry it.

I am old enough to remember elms and the landscapes they made; people only a few years younger than me do not, and to them the elm-free fields are reassuringly normal. Are we now becoming inured to a new narrative of nature, in which ecosystem-level change in accelerated time scales is part of the background of everyday life? Children who are growing up watching glaciers retreat and sea ice vanishing, villages sinking, tundra wildfires raging and once-common trees disappearing — will they learn to regard constant disappearance as the ordinary way of the world? I hope it is not so. But perhaps when all the ash trees are gone and the landscape has become flatter and simpler and smaller, someone not yet born will tap on a screen, call up images and wonder at the lost glory of these exquisite, feathered trees.