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Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This

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is Forest Stories. I am the Poet in the Forest,

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a children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,

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none of it would be possible if it wasn't for

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this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I

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talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's

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time that you get to know what has inspired me

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for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation. Hey,

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welcome back to the forest. Spring day not as green

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as it normally is. Everything seems to be yellow. We've

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got a fire warning, is what we do. It's so

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dry this early in the season, and the bulk of

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the land that I can see is not green. The

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green is gone for right now. You just never know

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what the oceans will bring to us or the West coast.

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But the fire warnings are pretty scary because we've got

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giant forest fires an hour maybe an hour and a

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half away from us. What would it take to spark

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something like that up here? And what would happen if

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you know it's not creating, you know, a fear in

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your soul, but rather it's preparing your heart for How

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can I help prevent something from taking place. That's why

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they have fire prevention. That's why they're teaching us every

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day through social media on what we can and cannot burn.

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And yet people do in their backyards. It's the South.

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They do that. But you can't do it now because

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they'll find you fire danger. In the forest, it's no

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longer green. You can walk by people's lawns and see

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that there's bare earth, there, no grass. They're not watering

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because watering is expensive. The color green disappearing. Is it

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just a seasonal thing or is this the way it's

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always going to be? And in this forest, if the

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groundcover is suffering, what's happening to the trees? Now? If

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you step into my forest, the one closest to my home,

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the limbs are falling, The land is shifting. Things are

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moving in ways that I couldn't predict. But I do

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remember in nineteen ninety seven, before we planted that seventeen

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hundred trees inside this forest to give it a vibrant life,

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there was such a thing as acid ren that was

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killing our trees. All these years have gone by, and

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all of those little seedlings have matured to face barely

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any green Hey. Thanks for being a part of the

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conversation