We thank all of you for accepting a place in this project of ours. You may still be wondering just what it is we are expecting you to do. Here we are putting together all of the best help we can find to prepare a program that will prepare all of you for the possible role of Advocate for the Tree. Carefully chosen instructors from many fields will be presenting their knowledge and their ideas to you. To begin with, we set up a program and tell you what to do, but, from the founding of this Seminary today, the final authority will always rest with yourselves. While you are young, we expect that you will try to take all of this in respectfully, and try to learn the lessons we are trying to teach you. But the whole function and purpose of the Seminary is for you to figure out what has to happen in this world, and tell us what to do, as soon as you are ready to do so.
For the last two or three centuries, the earth has been showing the wear that the human race has put upon it, and has been declining in biological health. This is a Red Alert for the planet. The biological health of our planet is the whole story as far as the survival of the human race is concerned. There are a host of problems associated with this biological collapse of our biosphere, and every one of those problems will have to be dealt with immediately and decisively – the loss of the Trees worldwide will have to be offset by the largest tree planting effort ever attempted, carrying on the work of people such as Richard St. Barbe Baker, whose efforts for the Trees are gratefully remembered.
The burning off as fuel the last forty million years’ worth of the accumulation of fossil fuels will have to be met by capping those wells and closing those mines for the next forty million years, by which time it may be possible to take a sustained yield harvest of some of that material for certain high-value uses, but certainly not to be burned off as fuel, which is a terrible waste, as stupid as cutting down trees to make paper which is then buried as landfill within a few weeks.
War is probably the greatest contributor to climate change – not only from the primary effect of all the bombs, but counting also the secondary effects of the whole war machine and all of the devastation that follows. Resolving disputes through our international court system will finally lay to rest the whole gigantic war industry, which has been physically destroying our earth as well as impoverishing its people for as long as anyone has kept any records. If all of that stops now, our work here will be much easier.
Plant Trees over all of the fields of war, and cultivate all of the earth as a garden.
