Toni Morrison (on Trees)

In a letter supporting Barak Obama for president, Toni Morrison said something that made me think about the honeybee crisis:

"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.

"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace—that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom."

...finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.... This is our problem—the failure to take in, and take responsibility for, the interconnected whole. This collective lack of wisdom and maturity is what's sinking us fast.