There’s a tree in our front yard, right outside our living room window, that has been a significant presence in our lives since we bought our house 16 years ago. I should know what kind of tree it is - but I don’t. It’s about 30 - 40 feet tall. It’s got broad, small deciduous leaves. It’s been through one very brutal hurricane (since we’ve lived in the house) and only seemed to shake a few leaves while several other, much larger trees in our neighborhood toppled over.

I have tried to come to terms with industrialization as well as the urban and suburban sprawl it produces. I do this by thinking of the ever encroaching human development as nature in a different form. And it really is, I suppose. In a sense, everything our species creates is a garden of sorts. But instead of growing tomatoes and lettuce, some gardens produce chemical plants, skyscrapers, and Starbucks.

~ There are people, and there are animals. ~

That in and of itself is a weird statement. We might more accurately say, there are people and other animals. Or better yet, there are human people, and dog people, and elephant people and dolphin people, and so on. I find my mind shifts a little with relation to other animals when I add “people” after each type of animal. For example, I’m typing this blog post on the beach as some bird-people fly over in v-formation. I’m hoping I can look out at the waves at some point and see a dolphin person or two.

I read somewhere that humans share 50 percent of DNA with trees. To compare this with our more closely related but still distant cousins, we also share 98.8 percent of DNA with chimps, 98 percent with pigs, 90 percent with cats, and 84 percent with dogs. On the lower end, we share 26 percent of our DNA with yeast and 25 percent with daffodils.