Counting Trees

I'VE LOST COUNT of the number of trees in my one third acre yard in a tiny town in the American south. My best guess is that, including saplings and volunteers, it totals about sixty. My yard is well shaded, even during the height of summer, when sun hits the bright red shingles of my house only around early afternoon for an hour or two.I can endure most summer days in comfort without using the air conditioning. My love of and interest in my tres and all trees is evidenced by the dozens of essays I have wirtten and published about them. I am happiest when waking or jogging along a wooded trail. I other essays I reported that at the dqwn of neolithic civilization, it is estimated that there were seven trillion trees on Earth, adn that now the number is less than half that, about three trillion. My reversed mortgaged house will devolve to coporate ownerhsi when I die, and I've got to believe that the next owner-occupant will see a need to remove some of them,feeling a bit hemmed in by a forest. I won't e around to see it,but if people rally roll over in their graves with post mortem disapproval of the living, I'll be rolling. When I bought a barren third of an acre and put of a ranch style house, then planted saplings all over god's green one third acre, my mother, a gardenre but a practical woman, predicted that I would rue the day when I made the fateful choice to forestate my homestead. I could see her point and still can, but she was wrong. No regrets here, inundation of autumn leaves notwithstanding.I bag up many of the leaves, and include thm in th outgoing garbage. what remains I mow over, composting the soil. The forty foot oas and maples which sorround my house and leave it in perpetual shade is cool, dark comfort in summer's blistering heat, and in winter, the leafless trees offer no obstruction to the winter sun coming in through large windows from low in the south, the direction my house faces. My heart lepaed with joy when I saw on Facebook that China is in the procees of planting sixty six billion treest, I believe mostly along its northenr border, bordering the Great Wall, which never kept out anybody but give s feelig of comfort to the ancient kingdom. Wouldn't it be wonderful it humanity could restore the four trillion missing trees, and thrive with them on a planet with eight or nine billion humans, and millions of other species of flora and fauna? With efficiency, there is no telling how many people could populate the world. Maybe ten or twenty billion, although some estimates are that the most the planet can handle is about nine billion. Rest assured that whatever estimates and numbers science generates tdoay will be augmented and corrected by ever self improving science soon enough, and this is a good thing. What good would any science be if it didn't get upgraded constantly? Let's leave the rigid, unbending dogma to religion, which still has a place, somewhere, within human society and within the human mind. We sipmly don't knwo how many people we want or need in the world. Not too many, and not too few, let's say, and "leave" it at that. Trees are another matter. for trees, its themore the merrier. If most of the Earth's land eare is heavily forested where nature intends it to be, while animals of many sorts frolc healthily among them and people build cities in and around them without destroying them, a beautiful balance will have been reached. Balance, it appears, is the key to natural health and harmony. The keys to human health and harmony remain largely a mystery, but for starters, let's assume that it has something to do with an absence of human destruction, and an abundance of harmmonious human habitiat, among the beloved trees.