Ok, so I may have missed ‘Bonfire night’ this year, but every night is a bonfire night fueled by humanity’s endless vanity …and ceaseless stupidity!
“The Milky Way contains an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion stars…” That’s quite a wide range and even at the low end sounds like a lot…but, for those who don’t yet know, it pales into comparison when compared with the number of trees on Earth!
“There are an estimated 3 trillion trees on Earth as of 2025, a figure based on a 2015 study that combined satellite data with ground-level measurements…”
Which sounds amazing, and I’d suggest a surprising, number… BUT before we can celebrate this fact, and brush-off any worries, that some may have, about cutting-down swathes of indigenous forest every year… we ought, perhaps, to take account of the apparent inverse relationship between tree population and the dawn and of ‘civilization’ — to whit:
“The global tree population has declined significantly since the start of human civilization, with the current number being about half of what it was approximately 12,000 years ago”.
The Genesis story implies that we were once warned against eating fruit from the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ — which, in typical fashion, we ignored. Since then we have continually pursued ‘knowledge’ and become the self-proclaimed ‘most intelligent species’ — yet we have still failed to marry our thirst for knowledge with a commensurate desire to apply wisdom.
It certainly won’t be another 12,000 years (barely the commencement of a blink of an eye in terms of Earth’s 4.5 billion years of existence) before the only thing we will truly ‘know’ is that we should not have cut down so many trees!
But could we become wise enough in time to stop the process …before it’s just too late to recover? It’s not looking hopeful! 
