Greetings. I have a felicitous essay with which you can begin your new year.

I have just finished the manuscript of a seventh book that I hope to publish next year (2026), if I find a publisher this year (2025). This is in addition to my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes, which is scheduled for release July 2025. But right now I want to tell you a little about the seventh book, Every Plant Has a Story.

There are lots of books about botany for the general reader. But almost all of them are about why humans should appreciate plants, e.g., they are sources of food, spices, hallucinogens, etc. That is, plants as slaves of humans. But my book is about the stories the plants tell about themselves, as discovered by scientific research. I will not attempt to summarize it here, but will probably do so a bit at a time in the essays I will post in the coming year.

Every plant has a different story of success in the ruthless Darwinian world of competition. One example is that some plants grow as long-lived trees, while others are short-lived weeds. The long-lived trees (like oak trees) invest a lot of time and energy in building up for the future. They are tremendously successful, but it takes centuries for them to earn back the costs that it took them to build themselves. They epitomize long-term investment. Weeds, on the other hand, do not have a long term. They grow like crazy for, in most cases, a single year, then pour all their resources into seed production. There are all stages in between, such as short-lived trees (like cottonwoods).

Above: sequoia trees invest for long-term success, over millennia; below, weeds such as velvetleaf invest for success only one year into the future, then they die.

Weeds specialize on temporary habitats, such as an area disturbed by fire, flood, or human activity. Trees specialize on habitats that remain stable for many decades, even centuries. Since the Earth contains both kinds of habitats, stable and temporary, the weed approach to investing and the tree approach are both successful, in different places.

The analogy with the human economy is inescapable. You can either invest for the long term, building up savings and assets, preparing for the future. You can manage your life like a tree. Or you can spend quickly and go into debt, as if you have no future. You can be a weed. It is the people who live like trees who make the world a better place, who stabilize it. But there are plenty of people who live like weeds also.

Humans are, however, changing the global climate. Not just heating it up, through the greenhouse effect, but creating a climate that is wildly catastrophic—fires, hurricanes, floods, and all the rest. The entire world now has or will soon have an unstable climate, everywhere. Plants that make long-term investments, such as trees, may not live long enough to be successful. Only weeds, which often live just a year, can survive in a world where the climate changes rapidly. No longer will tree investments and weed investments both be successful at different times and places. Now only the weeds will succeed. I summarize this situation in the last chapter of my book: Trees are out, weeds are in.

Trees are out, weeds are in. This means that if you expect to see old forests with big trees, you’d better see them right away. And then prepare to live in a world in which there are no plants except those that grow and die rapidly. Someday, the giant sequoia forests of California, where huge trees live for millennia, will be regarded as part of a mythological past.

The analogy with human investments is again inescapable. Long-term investments, in which a corporation plans to be a stable force for good over many decades, are on their way out. Short-term investments, to make a killing rather than a living, will soon dominate the economy of the world. Only the long term allows a corporation to invest in reputation: we are a company you can trust for life, we want you to like us. Instead, corporations will all be rewarded for being rapacious, treating their customers like garbage, and they don’t care who knows it. Yes, we dump our wastes into the common space in which we all live; yes, we deny your insurance claims; no, you cannot expect us to actually honor our contracts.  In a truly free economy, consumers can choose to stay away from dishonest corporations. But in many cases, when a corporation treats its customers like garbage, and it starts to collapse, the government will come in and rescue it, or else it will merge with another corporation. Corporations lose their recognizable identities, so you cannot choose to stay away from them. The future of the human world, as of the natural world, will be wildly swerving among disasters, in which you cannot responsibly plan ahead.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything. She makes it abundantly clear that our world economy cannot possibly avoid climate-related collapse. Any company, or country, that invests in the future rather than in immediate profitability is swept aside. Countries, companies, and individuals who choose sustainability are usually beaten down. Unless solar energy is, without subsidies, cheaper than government-subsidized fossil fuel energy, it will be driven into extinction. The time is coming, soon, when sustainability will be essentially illegal. By choosing to spend less money, I am making myself an enemy of the consumerist economy. I am basing this view on Klein’s 2014 numbers. It is much worse today.

I was expecting that my seventh book would be a cheerful celebration of the diversity of plant adaptations even to the most challenging environments. I did not plan for it to be an activist book. The time is past when I delude myself into thinking that any book I could possibly write would change the views of any readers who did not already agree with me. But, despite my plans, my seventh book has become an activist book, a voice of a prophet in the wilderness, from what the short-horizon leaders of the world economy think of as the extreme left.

This represents an almost complete departure from everything I wrote in previous years. Before, I was hoping to help change the world. Now, I just want those of you who care about the long-term well-being of humankind to feel a little better about the way you are living.

Trees are out; weeds are in. Happy New Year.