gm-reflection

  “You don’t plant sugar maples for yourself. You plant them for your grandchildren.” A long time ago, a friend of mine in Oregon, who also farmed maple syrup, said something that stuck. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but now it lives in me.   (This post continues from Blog 1: The Joke That Wasn’t . If you haven’t read it yet, that’s where the crack in my cynicism first began.) https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3745980224068107214/8212771631672611782 There’s something strange about legacy. You don’t really feel it when you’re racing to survive. I used to think in weeks, months, maybe years. What job next. What bill this month. How to fix the world before bedtime. But that one sentence, about sugar maples, has been quietly reshaping how I hold time. It takes decades for a sugar maple to produce syrup. You plant the tree knowing full well you may never benefit from it. And still, people plant them. Not for return, but because they believe someone wil...

  For years, I had a go-to line whenever conversations turned to the climate crisis: “I don’t need to worry. I’ll probably be dead before the real collapse comes.” It was tongue-in-cheek, of course. But like many jokes, it hid something truer than I was ready to say out loud. It wasn’t that I didn’t care — it was that caring hurt. The scale of the problem made me feel irrelevant. So I laughed instead. Then the rivers dried up. In late 2022, the Mississippi River — that mighty artery of the continent — dropped so low that barge traffic stopped and drinking water systems strained. Memphis recorded the river at –10.81 feet , the lowest level ever measured. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Rhine became so shallow that cargo ships were stuck, paralyzing a key European trade route. People were literally walking across riverbeds that had carried ships for centuries. Suddenly, 2050 wasn’t some distant dystopia. It was now. And the joke wasn’t funny anymore. I started seein...