The 42nd edition of the Festival of the Trees is now live at Via Negativa. The title refers to a new initiative by Nobel laureate and tree-planting guru Wangari Maathai, and tree-planting forms the leitmotif for this month’s festival. I was gratified by the response to my somewhat pathetic pleading last month for more participation, and I hope we’re able to continue this trend in the months to come. Please remember to blog, tweet, Facebook (is that a verb yet?), or otherwise link to this new edition… and no, I’m not saying that because I want the link-juice, honest! It’s all about the trees, and reaching more people with our message of appreciation and reverence for trees and forests.

wild apple in November, central Pennsylvania

Just a quick reminder that less than a week remains in which to post something about trees or forests and send the link to me (bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com) for inclusion in the December 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees. The deadline is November 29. See here for complete details.

Today we are pleased to welcome Jade L. Blackwater as the third official organizer/coordinator of the Festival of the Trees. Jade is a writer, artist, and naturalist living in the evergreen forests of western Washington, and most Festival supporters will recognize her name: she’s hosted four different editions of the FOTT at her blog Arboreality, and has always been one of its most enthusiastic champions. She runs an independent writing/editing business, and is the first person thanked in the acknowledgements for the wonderful book Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees, by Nalini M. Nadkarni.

The blog carnival’s uniquely decentralized publishing model presents special challenges for promotion, as we’ve discovered. But we’re determined to do a better job of telling people what the Festival of the Trees is and why they should participate, and we’re very glad to have Jade on board to help us do that.

If you’re on Twitter — and a lot of writers and nature bloggers are these days — you can now follow the Festival of the Trees there @treebloggers. (Thanks to Georgia of Local Ecologist blog, @localecologist, for the suggestion.) We also signed up for an account on the much smaller but steadily growing Identica service, also @treebloggers, both because we believe in open-source software, and also because we suspect that in the long run, Twitter’s centralized, closed-silo model will lose out to a federated microblogging system, which Identica is part of. But for now we’ll be pushing the same content to both services, and the updates will consist mainly of links to posts here at the coordinating blog and to new festival editions as they come out. So you don’t need to join Twitter or Identica just to keep on top of FOTT developments; you can still just subscribe in a feed reader or via email.

Host: Via Negativa
Deadline: November 29 (bribes accepted to include late entries)
Email to: bontasaurus(at)yahoo(dot)com – or use the Contact form
Important! Put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line of your email

You remember the Once-ler, right? The bummed-out old narrator in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, who gives the boy the last remaining truffula-tree seed at the end of the book? I’ve been feeling a lot like that lately. Probably many of us do, watching the world’s forests burn or succumb en masse to new insect pests, new diseases, and stronger and more frequent storms. Will the kids “care a whole awful lot”? Will they care at all?

The next edition of the Festival of the Trees will return to my blog Via Negativa for the fourth time, and while I’m not suggesting themed submissions — all tree-related blog posts are welcome — I do expect that my gloomy, yet still desperately hopeful outlook on the future of trees and forests will color my presentation. A lot of forest activists like to cast themselves as the Lorax: “I speak for the trees!” But I’ve never presumed to do that myself. For one thing, the trees are quite capable of speaking for themselves, if we were only inclined to listen. And also, like the Once-ler, I have no illusions about my own culpability in the desperate state of the global environment.

I’m also a little gloomy because participation in the Festival of the Trees has really fallen off in recent months. Maybe blog carnivals are becoming a thing of the past, I don’t know. But the sheer size of the Nature Blog Network does suggest that interest in nature blogging is greater than ever, and nature bloggers seem eager to read and link to each other. So why not take advantage of the superior inter-linking power of nature blog carnivals? (We list many of the others in our left sidebar.)

Besides blogging about trees, we each need to take just a few extra steps each month. Participation shouldn’t stop with submitting your own links and then clicking on all the others when the new edition comes out. Please consider giving each edition some link-love, too: in your blog, and also on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, or any other online social network you happen to be active in. (You could start with the current edition.) One of the best things about the Festival of the Trees is the way it straddles the divide between the sciences and the humanities, including people who are all over the map in terms of what they blog about and the audiences they attract. That’s great for spreading nature appreciation and getting the word out about conservation, but it does mean we can’t just rely on the Nature Blog Network for promotion, much as we appreciate their support.

I’ll admit I haven’t always done as good a job of promoting the Festival as I could’ve — not compared to my co-conspirator, Pablo, at Roundrock Journal — but from now on I intend to be more consistent in plugging it and in reaching out to other tree-bloggers and encouraging them to participate. I hope you’ll join me.

We need more volunteers to host the Festival, too. There’s not a whole lot to it other than a dash of of creativity, a modicum of organization, and maybe about six hours of work — see our page on how to go about it, and give us a holler. (The New Year’s edition has just been snapped up by Jason of the wonderful blog xenogere, but as of this moment, all dates from February 1 on are still open.)

O.K., off to water my grickle-grass. Hope to hear from you soon.

Festival 41 is up at Blog do Árvores Vivas/Living Trees Blog. A fully bilingual edition (except of course for the entries themselves), it includes essays, poems, artwork and more from Brazil, India, and the United States.

The theme this time was “If I Were a Tree,” and Juliana explains that the point of this exercise was to try and enlarge our vision, and thereby our capacity to empathize and care for the earth. The title of this post means “to see the trees,” and it comes from a piece by the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who Juliana mentions in Festival 41:

Não basta abrir a janela
Para ver os campos e o rio.
Não é bastante não ser cego
Para ver as árvores e as flores.
É preciso também não ter filosofia nenhuma.
Com filosofia não há árvores: há ideias apenas.
Há só cada um de nós, como uma cave.
Há só uma janela fechada, e todo o mundo lá fora;
E um sonho do que se poderia ver se a janela se abrisse,
Que nunca é o que se vê quando se abre a janela.

To see the fields and the river
It isn’t enough to open the window.
To see the trees and the flowers
It isn’t enough not to be blind.
It is also necessary to have no philosophy.
With philosophy there are no trees, just ideas.
There is only each one of us, like a cave.
There is only a shut window, and the whole world outside,
And a dream of what could be seen if the window were opened,
Which is never what is seen when the window is opened.

(Translation by Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa & Co.)

We hope this edition of the Festival of the Trees will encourage you to try and see beyond your own fantasies and preconceptions. You don’t have to hug a tree — but it helps.

The November Festival, #41, travels to Brazil and the Blog do Arvores Vivas. The theme is “If I were a tree” and submissions are due to arvoresvivas (at) gmail (dot) com by October 29, 2009. (Submissions that don’t fit the theme may also be accepted, but there are no guarantees!)

This is Juliana’s second time to host, and if you remember her first edition, you won’t want to miss the chance to be part of this one.

Local ecologist is hosting a milestone edition of the Festival of the Trees: the big 4-0. Submissions were down this time — we’re hoping that’s just because it was the start of the school year — but bloggers from as far afield as British Columbia, France, Tamilnadu, and exotic Chicago contributed posts for this special themed edition on the benefits of trees. Check it out!

Georgia has asked us to extend the deadline for the next edition of the Festival of the Trees until Monday the 28th in hopes of garnering some more submissions. So if you have yet to post something about trees this month, you have all weekend to work on it.
Send links to info[at]localecology[dot]org, or use our handy contact form.

Next month, the Festival returns to local ecologist for the second time this year. Georgia did an outstanding job with #33 back in March, so don’t miss your chance to be part of this edition. She’s particularly interested in blog posts on the theme of the benefits of trees to people, wildlife, and the environment in general.

Send tree-related blog posts, images, video, and other online discoveries to info[at]localecology[dot]org (please put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line of your email), or you can use the contact form here. The deadline for submissions is Saturday, September 26 Monday, September 28.

We are also still seeking volunteers to host the Festival of the Trees in December and beyond. If you’ve never hosted a blog carnival before, it can be a great way to learn about new blogs and bring new readers to your own blog. See here for more information on what’s involved.