How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 1
What we can learn from the ones who don’t move.
The Jungle
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 2
The sal tree makes many appearances in the great Indian epics and is also represented by the nymph of the sal tree or Shalabhanjika. She is a woman so fertile, plants flower as she walks past them. And she enjoys a cigarette every now and then.
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 3
One of the nice things about settling down is the feeling that we’ve reduced our universe of possibilities, and so it’s easier to make plans. Some people say that the ability to anticipate is what makes homo sapiens unique. But a tree makes plans too, a plan of how it is going to grow over the course of its life.
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 5
Genetically speaking, no, a dipterocarp is not an individual tree—although it appears to be one. Who the tree is at the beginning of its life is different from who it is at the end. A tree is not a tree but many trees.
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 6
To die is the price we pay to be ourselves.
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 7
Can you really have a community when you don’t have roots? Is virtual interaction an equivalent substitute to real life interaction?
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 8
Every so often, all the dipterocarp trees in a forest canopy will flower together in a phenomenon known as mast flowering.
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 9
Because of the ideological slant of my alma mater, I graduated with the dogma “autarky is bad, trade is good” drilled into my head. But if dipterocarps can do so well on their own, would it really be so bad if we humans, with all our ingenuity, tried to buy local more often?
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How to Be Rooted in One Place, Part 10
The most “successful” dipterocarps leave little left over for anyone else. They hog the light and suck up all the nutrients in the soil.
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What is a tree?
To a mathematician, a tree is a data structure, starting with the root or node at the top, branching out and terminating in leaves…