Thursday, February 4, 2010

Taking Wilderness in Hand by Michelle Nijhuis

Torreya Taxifolia is an ancient tree species that is also known as the Florida Torreya. It's also known as "stinking cedar". It's a very rare tree, and some time during the middle of last century, it began to die. Connie Barlow, a writer and a naturalist, saw the tree once in 1999, but when she went back, she found out exactly how difficult it was to find. In fact, there are only less than one thousand surviving trees left. It is said that the climate change is a huge factor in the death of many of the trees. Personally, I don't find this article interesting in the least bit. I really don't care about the tree, as rare as it is. But one thing that Nijhuis does is that she assumes all readers know about Global Warming, and it's assumed that Global Warming is what is causing these trees to die out.

1 comment:

  1. Parth, I do agree with you that the author does assume the reader may know about Global Warming, but there were other ideas possibly why the tree is dying out, mentioned in the article so I am not sure the reader really has to understand Global Warming totally. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete