text: What follows, should you chose to proceed, is an abbreviated choose your own adventure of human history. This limited experience is designed to provide a space in which to re-imagine our concept of a concrete history, and to provide spaces for questioning society as we have come to know it. You, dear reader, have two choices going forward, each path is represented by a character, but not limited to any singular experience. Rather the names work as names should, as labels designed to ease understanding and simplify direction. Each path necessarily includes endings. Additionally, there are possibilities in the story which yours truly has not had time to explore. Please feel free to imagine alternatives where they present themselves. Will you take up the mantel of Rowan, the European human, and follow their path through history from the advent of agriculture? Or will you be a Spruce tree in the North West, standing stalwart against the ages (or not, the choice, of course, is yours)?
  
  > Spruce
  You poke your head above the soil and sigh, slowly unfurling leaves. A handful of years go by and you develop a slim trunk, feathery branches. You have avoided death by consumption, partially through your own capacity, and partially through sheer happenstance. No hungry deer, no subterranean creatures, your predators at this state. You have fellow saplings to communicate with, and there is a patch of sunlight wide enough for all of you.
  
  But what's this? Your neighbor has grown taller than you and is blocking your sun! There is a branch out to your side that could serve as a new trunk, there is a small stump there and so no competition for sunlight. Or you could press on and try to catch up with your neighbor.
  
  > divert energy to a branch
  You put the energy that would have gone to growing a strong trunk into the development of a branch jutting out and away from your neighbor, not neglecting your other branches in the process. You are an untraditional shape now, but the choice pays off and you grow, slowly, taller and stronger.
  
  > focus on expanding horizontally
  What a bushy little tree you are! Only a few feet tall, and almost as wide, you stand amongst your fellows and watch the world go by. Your forest is home to some strange creatures that walk on their hind legs and whisper words to each other. You watch them amble about, endless iterations of the same head, shoulders, knees and toes, those strange hairless animals who find their food around you.
  
  Because of the low nature of your branches, deer come to munch on you more than your neighbors that have taken a more vertical rout, but it is not enough to kill you and you continue to grow. Years go by, and you reach a height at which you tower over the "humans" who still meander through the woods. They have set up a village now, and cut down the the larger trees around you on occasion. You see them build structures from these trees, crawling in and out of them like ants. Sometimes they use hollow out the pulp from the trunks of the trees and pile in them to float on the river that runs near you.
  
  As time has passed, one of your lower branches has become dead near the end- as nibbled by deer as it was. It is a part of you, and it is not dead all the way through just yet, but you wonder if it is doing you more harm than good to have it attached to you.
  
  > stop allocating energy to the limb and let it fall
  You stop diverting energy to that branch, and it falls within a year- taking longer than you thought to die off and drop to the forest floor. The rest of you is healthy and growing steadily. You are now easily twice the height of the humans below you, even the tallest bear cannot reach your top when he is standing on his hind legs!
  
  Not all of the seeds you started out with have made it is as far as you. Not even all of the saplings you once shared sunlight with have progressed. One was munched by a deer in the thick of winter, one was burnt by a strange and curious human, one lost itself to beetles. You feel their absence in the tips of your branches, in the space where there roots were in the soil with yours. They have become nutrients for you, and for the mushrooms that grow out of them, and out of you at your base.
  
  But the forest is still plenty thick, the soil is of good quality and there is plenty of water.
  
  > focus on Growing fast and reproducing ASAP
  You grow so fast! Shooting up around the trees around you that chose to take a more slow and steady approach! You are able to reproduce. You grow many bushy pine cones.
  
  Unfortunately, you sacrificed strength for efficiency and your tip breaks off in a spring thunder storm. This is not fatal, but it does set you back a little. You will grow more slowly in the future.
  
  > let your pinecones grow as long as possible
  You let your cones grow until the absolutely can not stay in your boughs any longer and they drop to the ground. Unfortunately for you, the squirrels swarm them and eat most of your seeds. While a few will survive, it is not the boon you had hoped for.
  
  Far below your broken tip, something strange has happened with the humans. It took you a while to notice it at first, as they came in ebbs and flows and endless tidal skirmishes, but there are different looking ones here now, and everyone is cutting down more trees.
  
  > focus on growing hard wood
  You allocate energy to producing the strongest trunk possible.
  
  Your height has allowed you to watch the hairless creatures below you skirmishing with other, paler, hairless creatures for a number of years but now the pale ones have made their way inland from the ocean, and one night they battle around your trunk.
  
  Beetles come to bore into the wood of your neighbors, preferring others to your dense trunk.
  
  Some time goes by and a man comes walking through the forest, knocking on the trees. There are few enough humans that they still only cut a few of your neighbors a year, but today the skin creature knocks on your trunk and smiles, cutting a notch into your bark. He continues on through the forest, knocking and frowning, knocking and smiling and notching.
  
  Time goes by and the skin creature comes back with others, carrying metal tools. The skin creature smiles and points at the notch in your trunk- "This one is very solid! It will make great building material."