I went out to check on my apple trees this morning and it doesn’t look like they are going to make any apples this season. It seems like they skip every other year when flowering. It has been really nice weather the last few days and the sun was out shinning. My Douglas fir tree is in the background. It is a getting very large although it is only about ten years old. It grew from a seed and I had to transplant it to where it is now.

Apple tree, f/2.4 1/56 4.3mm ISO50 – click for viewing full screen

I was out driving around other day and I looked up at a mountain top that was all stripped bare of trees. I’d take a picture and post that but it feels kind of like taking a picture of a dead animal – it is really not that nice to look at, although it is interesting in a way. There are so many giant stumps around here; this used to be a much different area. There were very large forests here with very ancient trees. There is something about very old trees that is so wonderful. A large forest with big old trees makes its own weather. The rain water is held by the soil and trees and it evaporates up to recycle into new rain in the area. The moisture stays in the area and the trees support each other so that if a big storm comes they don’t get blown over as easy. These kinds of old growth forests are mostly all gone. There used to be a large canary here that employed over a thousand people. That closed a long time ago - without the forest and with the increases in pollution, the conditions that the fish needed were gone. I think someone called it, “shifting the baseline,” when you look around at what you see today and think it was always like this. Most people do not remember a time when the rivers were full of fish around here or large trees were all over. I remember a time when, if you drove across the country you had to clean you windshield every time you stopped for gas because there were so many bugs on it you could hardly see. There are not as many bugs now.

Taken August 2017, last years apple tree with a pine tree in background, f/1.7 1/60 4.2mm ISO125 Galaxy S7 – click for viewing full screen

I guess I’ve got the, “Earth day blues,” lol. I really wonder what kind of future we are making. Weather patterns are shifting and we may even have an ice free ocean event sometime this summer in the Arctic. The Atlantic ocean circulation has slowed down by as much a fifteen percent as compared to the mid 20th century, which doesn’t sound like much but it is around three times the amount of water that runs in all the rivers in the world per video below by Paul Beckwith. https://youtu.be/9dC1iVCqmx0 A search on the net shows many different articles on this among this one by the Scientific American: [Slow-Motion Ocean: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slow-motion-ocean-atlantics-circulation-is-weakest-in-1-600-years/) I guess my apple tree harvest seems rather trivial by comparison. But at least no trees were used in the creation of this blog post and I didn’t have to drive anywhere. Additionally, no photons were harmed in the taking of the pictures, as far as I know anyway, lol. *** Thanks for reading! I always value your support and comments. The pictures were taken by me with my Galaxy S9+ and S7. The video is not my work and used by standard license. Tree Tuesday was started by @old-guy-photos

khalilputra