Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Jackson

There’s a sober, almost bureaucratic clarity to Jackson’s line: it’s a reminder that the easiest-sounding climate fixes are rarely simple, and that geography carries consequences. By pointing to “places where trees aren’t growing now,” he punctures the feel-good assumption that carbon sequestration is just a matter of planting seedlings wherever there’s space on a map. The phrase is quietly accusatory: if trees aren’t there already, something has made that absence rational - thin soils, aridity, fire regimes, grazing pressure, permafrost, competing land uses, or an ecosystem that isn’t supposed to be forest in the first place.

The intent reads like governance, not poetry. It’s a warning dressed as a planning principle: the marginal lands that appear “available” for new forests are often marginal for a reason, and turning them into carbon farms can create collateral damage. Subtext: afforestation pitches can become a kind of political laundering, letting states or industries promise future trees to offset present emissions, while ignoring permanence (will the trees survive drought, pests, or shifting climate zones?) and justice (whose land gets reclassified as the planet’s sponge?).

The line also carries a rhetorical pivot that statesmen like: it reframes optimism as risk management. “Most likely” isn’t a promise; it’s a probability statement with a ledger behind it. Jackson is pushing listeners to see sequestration not as a moral gesture, but as a policy choice constrained by ecology, property, and time.