I’m reading this post on e360.yale.edu on the value of natural regeneration.
Simplistic thinking of natural regeneration’s value mainly for carbon sequestration feels limiting, but it’s what’s we listen to.

“When Susan Cook-Patton was doing a post-doc in forest restoration at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland seven years ago, she says she helped plant 20,000 trees along Chesapeake Bay. It was a salutary lesson. “The ones that grew best were mostly ones we didn’t plant,” she remembers. “They just grew naturally on the ground we had set aside for planting. Lots popped up all around. It was a good reminder that nature knows what it is doing.”
Sometimes, we just need to give nature room to grow back naturally. Her conclusion follows a new global study that finds the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb atmospheric carbon and fight climate change has been seriously underestimated.”

I say:
Let it grow! All over–
It’s what’s left to do (thinking of Ursuala Le Guin’s essay “She Unnames Them” ).
And remembering we are entitled to our actions, but not the fruit of them.

It’s so hard to hold that clarity.
The world will manage itself, we just have to follow.
We are not apart.
The beginning of our path.

Like Antonio Machado’s poem, which I can never find quite the right translation for, but is sweet to read.

XXIX
Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.
Traveler, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveler, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveler, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
― Antonio Machado, from Border of a Dream: Selected Poems


“Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.”
http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_CaminanteNoHayCamino.html