Corporate Engagement Director Andrew Goldberg waxes philisophical on all that nature has to offer this season…

While I spend my professional time working to protect forests, this time of year my thoughts can’t help but turn to the amazing generosity of nature found in my backyard.

First there’s the garden. It has survived the stomping, pulling and weeding of two kids, the indiscrete wanderings of the lawnmower the vagaries of the Southern Appalachian weather and much more than can be told in this family oriented blog. In spite of this or perhaps because of being a product of being such a rich life our little scrap of garden has this year given us the best tomato ever. Sweet, sour, juicy, firm and very, very red. It is exactly the kind of experience you hope to have when you grow these things.

Then there’s the jungle that has emerged from the gutters that drain my wife’s office attached to the side of our house. Oak and pine sprouts, grasses and possibly shrubbery are visible from certain angles in the backyard. How is it possible for this gutter eco-stem to mature so fast? I swear I was up on a ladder this spring cleaning those gutters out. And what is the possibility that they contain some heretofore undiscovered life form?

And don’t get me started on the wonders of Southern Forests. From the native population, the slave-powered rice plantations, to the yeoman farmer and to the destruction at the hands of the pulp and paper industry happening today, our forests have long felt the hand of man. Yet their self-renewing power is amazing. Southern Forests are the most diverse on the continent. Indeed there are some threads in the web of life which exist only here. So much life is still out there. And that’s why we fight. Nature you rock!