I thought that this was a brilliant book not only of the spiritual magnificence of trees but an existential story of human beings. To me the book was more about us as fallible human beings with poor judgement. We think we know how to save and protect trees like the mighty sequoias but we don’t even understand trees. “Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it and more. “ As Adam explains the faults in us: “He’ll build a corner on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and conflation of correlation with causality - all these faults built into the brains of the most problematic of the large animals”. As Adam is transferred to a correctional facility he realizes that “four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the the race can afford”. But in the long scheme of nature, “The fires will come despite all efforts, the blight and wind thaw and floods. Then the earth will become another thing and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted earth will rebuild it’s pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as coed wood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends “. Page 500. In the final analysis, he seems to be saying that we are merely bit players in Nature’s continual process of birth, decay and death only to be reborn and go on. Life and nature using man for its own ends.