Nature Writing

The Wild Trees
Choose two of the following: 1 and 3

1. How did you react to the idea that even in the 21st century, there are still parts of California (and the world) that are completely undiscovered? What does this make you think & feel?
 At first I thought, "Oh, there are plenty of places in the world that are undiscovered--like the sea", but then as I read on I was sucked into this whole different world--it was a forest growing inside of a forest high up in the air and I thought, "I want to see that!" and it made me wonder if there were other places like that. I doubt there's anything like that underwater, unless they've got little humans or something living down there, then that would be something to see. Or mermaids. Anyway, as I read through the book, I kept wondering if any animals would show up, but there weren't many that I knew--there were little shrimp, which completely surprised me and made me stare for a while at the picture in the book, and they looked more like ticks than shrimp. And they talked about rain forests and jungles and stuff too, but I had to wonder if those were as explored as these redwood trees were. Were there life in those trees? Was there a hanging garden somewhere in Asia too? Or even Africa. It makes me excited and I wonder how beautiful it will be when it is discovered.

2. Preston describes the wild trees as living "at the outer limit of biology, on the edge of the possible." Many of his characters seem to also live by this concept in their lives, near-deaths and through their discoveries. Analyze how this concept manifests itself in different aspects of the story, and how it might play out in the future of environmentalism.
Wild trees are titans that have yet to be explored, and while they look completely impossible, an able-bodied and knowledgeable person can climb it--it is possible. The characters, Steve and Marie and Michael, all prove it--they climb the trees and prove that there is life and that there is so much yet to be discovered, like how high the tallest tree is and how they grow to be that high and how old they are and if there's a limit to their magnificence. They haven't quite found it yet, as trees grow every year and like humans, they are ever-changing.

3. Before people started exploring the tree canopies, many people assumed it was like a desert up there (barren of life). It turned out to more like a coral reef (teeming with biodiversity). Why were so many people so wrong? Why did they make the wrong assumption? What lessons should we learn from these discoveries?
I think a lot of people just didn't know that a whole different type of tree could grow on another type of tree, or that berries or shrimp or worms or salamanders could survive and thrive all the way up there. A regular tree that we can see in our front yards or along the streets or anywhere else, they don't have miniature bonsai trees growing off of them, they don't make smaller copies of themselves and get wider as they go up. The thing is though, from below, nobody could see into the canopy of the redwood trees, and so they couldn't even guess the magnificence of it. All they saw were leaves and bark--they didn't see a brownish spot crawling around or that the leaves belonged to different trees or that berries and fir needles and lichens fell into little plots and fertilized it as if it were the ground. It's human nature to jump to conclusions, and once they do, it takes the impossible to prove to them that their assumption was wrong.