PAST RETIREMENT AGE, Patricia works like there’s no tomorrow. Or like tomorrow might yet show up, if enough people dug in and worked. She has two jobs, each the other’s opposite. In the one she hates, she stands behind podiums begging for money, stuttering like a black-backed woodpecker pile-driving a pine. She trots out a small stable of dog-and-pony quotes. Blake: A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Auden: A culture is no better than its woods. Ten percent of her audience gives her seed bank twenty dollars.

Her staff tells her not to, but she cites the numbers. Wasn’t Shaw right about how the mark of true intelligence is to be moved by statistics? Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees. Half the woody species on the planet, gone by this new century’s end. Ten percent of her audience gives her twenty dollars.