Appreciating Trees

I came across an article in The New Yorker that prognosticates how Greenland would change as the global warming progresses and causes the years old ice sheets to melt. While it touches on many serious topics such as the race for mining for minerals and tensions with Denmark, this passage caught my attention:

Today, Greenland has fifty-six thousand residents, twelve thousand Internet connections, fifty farms, and, by American standards, no trees. (The native dwarf willows top out at about a foot.) One Greenlander I met, who’d recently left the island for the first time to attend a meeting in upstate New York, told me that his favorite part of the trip had been the noise of the wind sighing through the leaves.

I love that sound,” he said. Shoosh, shoosh.”

I realised the other day that since reading this article, I’ve been growing more appreciative of the sound trees make when their branches sway in the wind. With summer in Amsterdam at its peak, and the trees in the park covered in fresh leaves, they also make for a subject I find very calming to shoot - especially when it rains:


Date
June 16, 2017