Trees: one country gaining forests (video)

Where's the best place to mediate? The forest. But be protected: practice metta first.

Why does this forest look like a fingerprint?

(Vox) Team Vox set out to solve why a forest in the middle of Uruguay, South America, looks like a fingerprint and other odd patterns — and wound up finding something much bigger.

• The most famous Buddhist tree in the world
• The oldest trees in the world live in California
• The largest single stem tree: General Sherman

They're just trees. What's the big deal?

Deep in the geographic center of Uruguay, there’s a peculiar group of trees just a few kilometers down the road from the small town of San Gregorio de Polanco.

From the ground, it's not particularly notable. But from above, from a bird or drone's eye view (and particularly on Google Earth), the view is mind-boggling:

Hundreds of trees are arranged in perfect concentric arcs, all spiraling toward the center. Together, they look remarkably like a human fingerprint.

When the team first saw this forest in a Reddit post, it was fascinated.

• Why had the trees been arranged in this shape?
• Who planted them there?
• And why — when one zooms out on satellite view — was the entire country of Uruguay covered in similar-looking forests?

To answer that question, the team went straight to the source: interviewing locals, experts, and people whose lives have been shaped by a transformed landscape and economy.

Further reading

• Read the text of the original “forestry law”: impo.com.uy/bases/leyes/1...
• Read some of Alexandra’s work on afforestation and wildlife: sciencedirect.com/science...
• Eilís O’Neill has a great feature in the Nation on Uruguay’s forestry industry: thenation.com/article/arc...
• More stories about residents affected by the railway construction: yle.fi/a/3-11756418
• Subscribe to channel: goo.gl/0bsAjO

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• Vox.com, May 9, 2024; Xochitl, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly