Vol. III — No. 7 Hortus Vivens, Anno 2026

SUSTAINING quest

"To preserve a thing is to know it well enough to be unwilling to lose it. The first act of sustainability is unsentimental attention." — preface, this volume.

A field journal of sustainable practices documented with the precision of catastrophe
§ I

Of Restoration, And Why It Is Not Optional

Cogitamus ergo silvae sumus. — ascribed, perhaps falsely, to a forester in Saxony.

There is a polite version of sustainability that I will not be writing in these pages. The polite version says: choose the better tote bag, refuse the receipt, and you have done your part. The polite version is a useful fiction sold by people who would rather you not measure carefully. This journal does not subscribe to it.

The honest version is harder. It begins with an inventory of what is being lost and proceeds, slowly and unsentimentally, through the question of what could plausibly be retained. It accepts that not everything will be. The honest version requires a forester's patience, a botanist's eye, and a coroner's willingness to say what has died. It is not a happy science. It is, however, the only science we have left.

Begin with this: a single mature European beech, Fagus sylvatica, transpires roughly 400 litres of water on a hot day. It hosts more than fifty species of insect that occur nowhere else. Its shade keeps the forest floor cooler by 4°C. To replace one, after felling, is the work of a hundred and twenty years. We fell them in an afternoon.2

This is not a metaphor. This is the arithmetic. The arithmetic is the case for restoration -- not because nature is sacred, although it may be, but because restoration is the only ledger that, kept honestly, balances over a long enough horizon. Every other ledger we have tried collapses by the second generation.

The work, then, is to see the species before us. To name them. To understand their roles in the systems we depend on. And -- and this is the rebellious act, the one that the polite version omits -- to refuse the loss of any one of them as necessary.

2. Schmidt-Vogt, H., Die Buche, Hamburg, 1973. The figures hold; the trees, mostly, do not.

Every act of sustainability is, at root, a refusal: a refusal to accept that the next loss is inevitable. Without that refusal, what we call "stewardship" collapses into a polite accounting of losses already permitted.

— from the editor's preface
§ II

A Practitioner's Catalogue

Five entries, drawn from longer interviews. Names and locations changed where the practitioner asked.

  1. Anna H., dryland orchardist, Aragon

    "They told me the apricots could not survive the heat dome. I lost half the trees. I did not lose the rootstock. The new grafts go in next spring. The orchard will be different. The orchard will continue."

  2. L. Tarrou, soil ecologist, Massif Central

    "A teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are humans on Earth. We have lost an estimated forty percent of that biology in the post-war century. The good news, if it qualifies, is that soil is the only ecosystem we know of that can rebuild itself within a single generation. We are running the experiment now."

  3. K. Iwasaki, fisheries biologist, Setouchi

    "The bay is recovering. Not because we stopped fishing -- we did not -- but because we stopped fishing the same way. The new permits are issued by ecology, not by quota. There are still fish. There will be fish in 2070. That is not a sentence I could have written ten years ago."

  4. R. Olusegun, urban-canopy planner, Lagos

    "A street with a closed canopy is six degrees cooler at three in the afternoon than the same street twelve metres away. We are not planting trees for nostalgia. We are planting trees because the alternative is admitting we will not live here in fifty years."

  5. S. Berdyev, seed-bank custodian, Pamir

    "Three hundred and forty-seven varieties of wheat in the vault. Eighty-one of them grow nowhere else in the world. If the vault loses power, we lose them. The vault has not lost power in forty-one years. We are quietly proud of this fact."

§ III

Bibliography & Further Quests

This journal is not the work of a single hand. It is the visible portion of an iceberg of long, patient, mostly unfunded scholarship by people who refused to look away. The list below is partial. It is what could be cited within the page count.

  • i.Berry, Wendell. "The Whole Horse." In The Art of the Commonplace, Counterpoint, 2002. The argument that scale is a moral question.
  • ii.Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Still the foundational document. Still uncomfortably current.
  • iii.Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future, Orbit, 2020. Fiction, but the only honest accounting of the ledger we are running.
  • iv.Schmidt-Vogt, Henning. Die Buche, Hamburg: Parey, 1973. Two thousand pages on one species. The standard.
  • v.Wohlleben, Peter. Das geheime Leben der Baume, Ludwig, 2015. Popular but rigorous. The mycorrhizal chapters are excellent.
  • vi.Hortus Vivens, ed. Field journals 2018-2026, archived under CC BY-SA. Available on request.

— The editor, late winter, in a room that smells of rain and wet paper.