David George Haskell - The Songs of Trees: Stories from Natures Great Connectors

F or the Homeric Greeks, kleos, fame, was made of song. Vibrations in air contained the measure and memory of a persons life.

To listen was therefore to learn what endures.

I turned my ear to trees, seeking ecological kleos. I found no heroes, no individuals around whom history pivots. Instead, living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of lifes community, a net of relations. We humans belong within this conversation, as blood kin and incarnate members.

To listen is therefore to hear our voices and those of our family.

Each chapter of this book attends to the song of a particular tree: the physicality of sound, the stories that brought sound into being, and our own bodily, emotional, and intellectual responses. Much of this song dwells under the acoustic surface.

To listen is therefore to touch a stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, to hear what stirs below.

I sought trees in places whose natures seemed quite different. The first chapters of the book comprise stories of trees that seem to live apart from humans. Yet these trees lives and ours, past and future, are twined. Some of these connections are as ancient as life itself; others are industrial reimaginings of older themes. I then turn to the exhumed remains of trees that have been long dead: fossils and charcoal. These ancients show the arc of biological and geologic stories and attest, perhaps, to the future. The third group of chapters concerns trees that live in cities and fields. Humans appear to dominate; nature seems absent or in abeyance. Yet wild biological relationships permeate every being.

In all these places, tree songs emerge from relationship. Although tree trunks seemingly stand as detached individuals, their lives subvert this atomistic view. Were alltrees, humans, insects, birds, bacteriapluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.

Because life is network, there is no nature or environment, separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with others, so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworths lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a stagnant pool of artifice where we misshape the beauteous forms of things. Our bodies and minds, our Science and Art, are as natural and wild as they ever were.

We cannot step outside lifes songs. This music made us; it is our nature.

Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, natures great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.