Welcome to the first issue of the Personal Rewilding Pulse, the monthly newsletter of PersonalRewilding.com!

Summer has arrived here in the US Midwest in its usual way, with a sudden leap. Extreme heat is forecast to roll in over the next few days, completing the jackets-to-flipflops transition in rapid time.

Spring was a typically busy season here. The start of gardens and yard work and the resumption of outdoor projects abandoned in the fall. The container herb garden is thriving with dill, cilantro, and basil which we trim into salads, pastas, and other dishes.

The rhubarb is done for the season, but not without treating us to rhubarb cake, rhubarb pie, and even rhubarb cookies. Try our family recipe for Rhubarb Cake at the bottom of this newsletter.

The very first of the tart cherries are ripening on the trees. Cherries signal the beginning of wild fruit season here. We love walking into the yard to pluck a sun-warmed cherry, a black raspberry, sweet mulberries, and in six or eight weeks juicy peaches and sloe berries. There is something sweeter and more rewarding about home-grown or wild-picked foods.

We hiked through portions of Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest, Mt Rainier National Park, the Columbia River Gorge, and explored some of the scenic seafronts and beaches the state has to offer. It was truly a memorable and humbling experience.

We also saw huge tracts of cleared forest, feed for the hungry paper mills and lumber industry. Tens of thousands of acres of old-growth forest reduced to a wasteland of smoking stumps and broken boughs.

We were taught in school to view trees as a renewable resource, something we can replant and regrow and re-harvest over and over, like a crop.

Except we reap the biodiverse old-growth of Western Cedar and Sitka Spruce and Redwood - slow-growing trees many hundreds of years old - and replace them with a monoculture of fast-growing Lodgepole Pines, trees to be cut and replanted again in their time.

This changes the entire dynamics of the ecosystem and feeds the increasing wildfire risks. And we are just starting to understand the positive impact that trees and forests have on slowing climate change and storing carbon.

Richard Powers' novel The Overstory changed the way I view and understand the role trees play in our lives and the health of our planet. If you haven't read it, I can highly recommend it as the sort of book that will make you see the world in a slightly different (and richer) way.

But what can you do about all this? The world needs lumber and paper, right? Of course it does.

Personal impact begins with living more simply, consuming less, recycling and reusing, and supporting environmental efforts - like the Sierra Club and Mossy Earth - that fight to protect our old growth habitats, rewild areas with native species, and hold government and industry accountable for sustainable and eco-friendly harvesting.

Bammy's Rhubarb Cake

1 1/2 cups of sugar

1/2 cup butter

1 tsp baking soda

2 cups of flour

1 cup of sour milk

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups chopped rhubarb

1/3 cup Cinnamon-Sugar Mixture

Steps:

1.) Preheat over to 350 degrees F

2.) Grease a 9x13 baking pan

3.) Cream together sugar and softened butter

4.) Add in vanilla and eggs and mix

5.) In separate bowl, use fork to combine baking soda and flour

6.) Blend baking soda/flour mix with batter from step 4

7.) Add sour milk (sour milk can be made by adding two tablestoons of lemon juice to 2% milk)

8.) Mix in chopped rhubarb

9.) Pour into baking dish

10.) Sprinkle top generously with cinnamon/sugar mix

11.) Bake at 350-degrees for 40 minutes. Top should be golden-brown.

12.) Serve warm with vanilla ice cream and enjoy!