CROZET

--The precious white oaks of Stadium Woods on the Virginia Tech campus are centuries-old trees that cannot be re-created by man or technology once they are gone. A significant number of them are known to be at least 300 to 400 years old, sporting diameters of 3 to 4 feet.

No one would think he shouldn't do his best to preserve a precious painting 300 to 400 years old, even though it could easily be re-created by a talented artist or even a computer. Yet Virginia Tech officials do not want to place Stadium Woods--which is probably without equal in the entire country--into a conservation easement.

These trees could live another 200 years, making this old-growth forest fragment even more special than it already is. This fact should be reason enough for Tech to do everything in its power to preserve Stadium Woods.

Unfortunately, society has become so focused on human endeavors that man and his activities have become the only game in town, literally. As a result, green space has become distressingly rare in developed areas. People see natural areas as wasted space and covet them for yet more buildings.

The result is a populace more and more disconnected from the natural world and thus more and more unaware of the importance of nature to their lives. One would hope that a land-grant university, especially, should be taking steps to educate students about the environment that sustains them.

Students who don't comprehend life in the real world of plants and other kinds of organisms may find it difficult to survive in the future. People need to understand that humans do not live in a world only of their own making, nor can they exist only in the virtual world of computers.

Our existence is very much dependent upon the multitude of organisms and their interactions with one another that take place every day. For example, plants provide the oxygen we need to breathe, while pollinating organisms, such as beetles, bees, bats, and hummingbirds, are responsible for helping about one-third of our crop plants to make the food we eat. Pollinators are also responsible for helping about 90 percent of all plant life to reproduce.