The cemetery is a unique kind of gathering place. I sit, removed from others, removed from others, separated by hedge walls and soaring trees. 

I worked in rural Maryland this summer, venturing into the woods to record frog calls. Sometimes, the forest became so dense that I couldn’t decide where to step next–here, the community of vegetation and wildlife felt clear to me. In that moment I felt like an outsider, a harbinger of destruction as I clambered over branches and dodged thorny bushes. In the cemetery, I feel the opposite–but what does this mean for the neatly trimmed plants around me? 

 

The carbon footprint of my flight to Denmark was 1.59 metric tons of CO2. I wonder what it would take to recoup those losses. I consider Copenhagen’s many neighborhoods, crowded and sprawling, lush and concrete. Reforestation is a common method of offsetting carbon emissions. I wonder how well this method would work in an urban environment, whether a small forest could take root in the shiny new Nordhavn neighborhood, whether in its center, I could find that same sense of incongruence that I felt before. .