I posted about Peter Wohlleben twice before in these pages, both in 2016 when his previous (16th!) book was published. It would appear from both of my posts that year, and others, that I idolize trees in a way consistent with that author’s views; but plenty posts also demonstrate that for me, science is the master. Questionable science, and the very questioning of science as a worthy practice, have been divisive issues in some quarters recently, so the review below has my full attention.

That said, portions of the reviewer’s description of the author’s most recent book, and of the author himself, could easily apply to the best naturalist guides in Costa Rica, who bring the rainforest and other ecosystems alive for visitors. Interpretive guiding frequently changes perspectives, sometimes changes lives, and at best can lead to greater support for conservation. So, I am warily sympathetic to the concessions that Peter Wohlleben has made in talking about and writing about trees and forests:

Seedlings from arabica coffee beans collected from the remaining trees on a onetime coffee farm in Escazu, Costa Rica that Organikos is regenerating as bird habitat

After the 2020 coffee did not germinate, I did my homework to ensure we would have more success in 2021. A funny thing happened on the way to germination…

From the time we started packing coffee samples two years ago, well prior to the Authentica shops opening until now, I have been saving every Organikos coffee bag we use in our home, and collecting them from friends as well. I did not know what I would do with them, until it finally occurred to me to take a hole puncher and see if I could replicate the drainage of a typical agricultural planter bag (like the black ones in the photo below). With the bag folded and 7 well-placed punches, 26 holes result.  This year we have close to 300 coffee seedlings, which I am now transplanting into the larger bags for the next phase of their growth.

Kraft bags chosen to reduce plastic waste from more conventional coffee bags are convertible for re-use in planting trees–shown here as we move coffee seedlings to “second shift” planter bags

I will write more on how this will work, so stay tuned; Organikos bags will do double duty as tree planters. Households in the USA can use the bag this way for their own plantings, but we will offer an incentive for those who prefer to leave the planting to others. We have reached agreement with a forest regeneration organization in Costa Rica that every bag like this that we can provide them, they will use for seedlings. There is a low carbon footprint option for how to get these bags from USA households back to Costa Rica for this purpose, and when we have it in place you will hear it here first.

For all the reasons podcasting has proliferated as a medium, I am a podjunkie. And I am subject to algorithmic wonders, one of which was a recommendation of this episode of this podcast in my podcatcher. I listened from start to finish and then listened to more episodes. Anyone who regularly reads from our pages here would enjoy any of those episodes, so I am paying forward with this post.

As it happens, the host of the podcast was a student in a course I taught a dozen years ago, so the algorithm may be demystified slightly by that fact. What remains totally mysterious to me is this episode.

Frank Siebert wanted his Penobscot dictionary to capture how he believed the language was supposed to be spoken. Illustration by Laura Lannes

When we link to stories about efforts to conserve intangible heritage, especially those related to indigenous culture, we feel fortunate to have found them. Those that detail the complexities are rare. Today is my lucky day. Alice Gregory, who has appeared in our pages twice previously, is to thank. The time I first read anything by her I was in a bamboo and thatch structure in northwest Belize awaiting a major hurricane whose path I was in. I had nowhere to go. The distraction I found in her subject, combined with her wordcraft, kept the fear of total destruction at bay. If you are looking for something like that right now, try this:

How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?

The Penobscot language was spoken by almost no one when Frank Siebert set about trying to preserve it. The people of Indian Island are still reckoning with his legacy.

When I first met Carol Dana, in the spring of 2018, she told me that she was thinking of getting a parrot. Dana, a member of the Penobscot Nation, one of five hundred and seventy-four Native American tribes recognized by the United States federal government, was attending a small ceremony at the University of Maine’s anthropology museum. She wore her silver hair pulled back from her face, and introduced herself to me as the tribe’s language master, a title, she added, that she wasn’t fully comfortable with. The idea of mastery seemed an imprecise way to describe the fraught relationship she had with the Penobscot words inside her head. Though not fluent, Dana has a better grasp of the language than anyone else on Indian Island, where six hundred of the world’s estimated twenty-four hundred members of the Penobscot tribe live. She admitted to being linguistically lonely. “I’ve been talking to myself in Penobscot for years,” she said. “You need to say it out loud, so your own ears can hear it.” Though she knew that a bird wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation, she thought that simply hearing Penobscot words spoken at home by another living creature would be better than nothing. Continue reading →