In Professor Miller’s class, we just finished reading Ellison’s Nature’s Way: Trees and Their Importance to Our Environment. As part of this assignment, Professor Miller has asked us to summarize the work. Miller’s main point in Nature’s Way is that trees provide so much more than the necessities, like oxygen. In fact, trees are integral to the entire human experience, he argues. From creating the houses we live in to the parks we enjoy to the leaves that fall and feed the grass, losing trees would mean so much more to us than losing air. Though oxygen is perhaps their most unique resource, no other resource (or combination thereof) could ever match the humble tree’s contribution to our society. Miller first uses houses to explain his point. While a house could be built without wood, it would be a chore—even with modern construction technology, he notes—and probably would have been impossible even a few hundred years ago. Miller next brings up the environment. Not the environment that keeps us alive, but the environment that we enjoy looking at. Trees break up the endless blue of the sky, he claims. This can help at least give us humans something visually interesting to look at. Similarly, they break up long stretches of flat ground. Every plain, as he puts it, is a few hundred trees away from being a forest. It may seem like a minor change (or a large one, depending on perspective), but it means everything about how we enjoy our surroundings, the paper says. From a more ecological standpoint, trees also house many other living things—from plants to animals to insects. This, he says, ties into two arguments: the one stated in the previous paragraph regarding our environment and our enjoyment of it, as well as another, easier-to-prove one regarding the fragile nature of our ecosystem and all the various species it sustains. Miller agrees that trees must be killed for us to live, and says we are overall doing a very good job sustaining them through mass planting operations as seen in Quebec, the Pacific Northwest, and other sites worldwide. He agrees that the systems have their flaws, notes that all programs like this are imperfect, and says that, until a better method is found, what we have should sustain us for the foreseeable future. His message of hope doesn’t come without warning. We must slow down excessive tree-killing, as seen in the overproduction of phone books and the like, and be more conscious of those wood products we do consume. Other than that, though, Miller argues trees are doing well. It’s a good thing, too. Without them, we wouldn’t be doing very well ourselves!