It’s the centerpiece of their case, the grounds for the extraordinary sentence they’re demanding. They mean to prove intimidation. An attempt to influence the conduct of government by force.
ADAM’S LAWYERS argue for mercy. They claim the fires were set by a young idealist calling the public’s attention to a crime against everyone. They say the sales of the forest were themselves illegal and the government failed to protect lands entrusted to it. Countless peaceful protests had come to nothing. But they have no case. The law is clear on every count. He’s guilty of arson. Guilty of destruction of private property. Guilty of violence against the public well-being. Guilty of manslaughter. Guilty, the jury of Adam Appich’s peers concludes, of domestic terrorism.
The law is simply human will, written down. The law must let every acre of living Earth be turned into tarmac, if such is the desire of people. But the law lets all parties have their say. The judge asks, “Would you care to address any final words to the court?”
Thoughts ring Adam’s head. The verdicts have cut him loose, like windthrow or fire. “Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.”
The court sentences Adam Appich to two consecutive terms of seventy years each. The lenience shocks him. He thinks: Seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak. He was thinking Douglas-fir or yew. Seventy plus seventy. With reductions for good behavior, he might even finish out the first half of the sentence just in time to die.
SEEDS
What was the wood, what the tree out of which heaven and earth were fashioned?
—RIG VEDA, 10.31.7
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus, “It is all that is made.”
—JULIAN OF NORWICH
Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.
First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.
NICK WAKES IN THE TENT with his head against the ground. But the earth is soft, as soft as any pillow. The soil beneath is several feet deep with needles, so many dropping, dying needles turning to microscopic life again, under his ear.
The birds wake him. They always do, the daily prophets of forgetting and remembering, deep into their songs even before the light starts to break. He’s grateful to them. They give him, each day, an