If the tree project is successful what will it do?


 Hope is a fragile thing, like this tree. When I planted a tree in December, my mother said, 'you should pre-dig the holes when you do tree planting with the children, otherwise it will take too long'. 

I profoundly disagreed with her. But to give the children that task required a leap of faith. 

The whole point of the 'Voices of the Future' project is that we have the faith that the children can dig the holes for the trees. They might be smaller and are light so the pushing part was hard and they might not like the worms and the bugs and the soil that cracks in their hands, but they could plant the trees. 

Each tree will live longer than each child, if it is lucky, and the tree will provide some goodness back to the air. 

So the success of the tree project is partly in that simple act, that would only have happened in the context of the project. It is also in the way that the science has now become our mode - placing science as mode at the heart of the tree project is the other thing it can do. 

Sometimes the fragile bridge of hope is all we have to get to the other side - it is the caftan that the homeless man crossed the river on, and even though the rabbi wanted to be that person, it is the person with the least hope who did the most. (Bloch's Traces 1925). 


Comments

  1. spodsheffApril 6, 2022 at 2:29 AM

    In What Is Philosophy Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between 3 plains of consistency - Art Philosophy and science. They say science has boundaries specifically absolute zero and the speed of light. Science struggles with studying the potentials of what is to be - the becomings of the world. This is critical to Deluzian distinctions between the actual and the virtual that can both be real withing the plane of absolute immanence yet cannot both be defined or catagorised by science - science cannot hold them as they are folded around its edges. Science is the faith I struggle to escape from yet its rational is very compulsive and on some levels its rewards to great. I am worried it will not offer us enough to save us.

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