Vicki Conley

Tree Rings
Tree rings offer us a unique historical view of our essential ecosystems; a window to variations in Earth’s past climate. As you look at my abstracted tree, I encourage you to pause to think about how mankind’s devastating impact on our planet will be recorded in the future. Perhaps more urgently, as climate change in forested areas contributes to ever worsening forest fires and deforestation for human consumption continues unabated, will we even have old growth trees left to record our planet’s history? In Apocalyptic Planet, Craig Childs says, “The ancient mosaic of different habitats that interacted with one another in the original climax forest is gone, replaced with a tangled mess that may require hundreds, even thousands of years to rise back to true diversity.”