Forest

Surprisingly, we agreed that, yes, this one tree constituted a forest. My argument was that, if a thousand trees were a forest, who could say at what point a lumberjack chopping down trees prevented the remaining trees from being a forest? Was a hundred trees a forest? Twenty? Five? She came at the problem from a different angle and considered the tree’s potential to grow so as to become any number of trees.

Our agreement reached its limit when we took things further; she maintained that a single acorn had to be considered a forest. I argued that a forest survived the removal of any single tree and that, accordingly, a forest was a forest even when the last tree was chopped down.