The Year

of Dying

It was early in the f ire season, in the year that

would later become known as the Year of

Dying: the year the human population of Earth

started, f inally, reluctantly, to contract. Forest

warden Rocky

Bannerjee picked her way carefully across the

forest f loor of her hillside, somewhere in the

southern reaches of Reforestation Project #13.

She was doing her annual lichen survey, which

was one of the reasons she was walking so

carefully. To stand on one of the rare lichens

she was meant to be surveying – well it just

wouldn’t do, would it?

Another reason for walking so carefully was

that the ground was slick with moisture You

could say many things about RFP 13 but not

that it didnt take the rain part of temperate

zone rainforest extremely seriously Which

was of course a very good thing in the f ire

season

The lichen survey was a crucial one the

biodiversity of temperate zone rainforests was

largely measured by the number of lichens

found there The more biodiverse a forest was

the more lichens it had and as a pretty good

rule of thumb the reverse also held

So More lichens meant more biodiversity

which meant more niches were f illed which

in turn meant that more carbon was drawn

down. And that was the whole point of the

Reforestation Projects.

‘Come on,’ Rocky muttered. ‘Just one more

species and we’re in the clear. We could really,

really do with one more species, #13.’

Not enough different species and bam!

Government funding would be slashed. Rocky

would lose her job; worse, the forest would

lose its status as a Carbon Sink Project and it

would be opened to the public for recreational

purposes. And these days, ‘recreation’ mostly

meant going for a walk in 

the woods and coming out again with all the

blackberries chestnuts and mushrooms you

could get your hands on

Youd think people would learn

Six thousand years of treating nature as a

resource had gotten them into todays mess

or rather todays galaxy of messes And yet

they still thought of the natural world as a

bunch of free stuff

Fortunately many governments had now

decided that forests were carbon sinks that

could help humanity back away from the brink

of extinction

Hence the Reforestation Projects