Thanks to Longreads.com, and its regular email, for directing me to one of the most eye-opening pieces I’ve read in a while. Trees, I’ve long been encouraged to believe, are the ultimate carbon-capture and storage machines, and we should be planting them wherever we can. But there are places where “green is the problem, not the ideal”, as the journalist and author Sarah Smarsh puts it in a powerful essay for Orion magazine. In north-east Kansas, she and her partner have cut or burned hundreds of trees over the past five years — in an effort to restore endangered tall-grass prairie. “Bringing death to the overly abundant so that the threatened might live,” she says, “we are removing a scourge of our region’s native prairie ecosystem and a pillar of woody encroachment into the American grasslands: the eastern red cedar.”