Our Biggest Failing Is Lack of Compassion for the World, Including Ourselves.

To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness.

Why Forests Give You Awe

In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt wrote that "nature-produced awe involves a diminished self, the giving way of previous conceptual distinctions (e.g., between master and servant) and the sensed presence of a higher power. Natural objects that are vast in relation to the self…are more likely to produce awe."

I asked Keltner what it might be about forests—as opposed to, say, single very large trees—that inspires feelings of awe. "I think it’s the perception of collectivity in forests," he said, "where the eye doesn’t focus on one object but on interconnections amongst many." That chimes with my experience. When you walk in a tropical forest, the sheer abundance and variety of life can have a powerful and somewhat disorienting effect.

In 1836, in his essay Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson hinted at this: "Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

It’s a positive experience. Keltner’s research has revealed that awe is good for our minds, bodies, and relationships. Awe may even make us kinder. It appears to encourage us to look beyond ourselves and to cooperate with others. Tapping into this power may be as simple as taking a walk in a forest; the less familiar it is, the better—Keltner and Haidt say nature is more likely to produce awe if it transcends one’s previous knowledge.

I want to share my review of and some excerpts from The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell:

This book is a fascinating, enchanting, and joyful way to learn about nature. And our place in it.

Haskell randomly selected a square meter of old-growth forest in Tennessee and spent a year observing it. Hundreds of hours of silently sitting: watching, listening, smelling, and musing. Trying to discover what he might notice by slowing down and really focusing. And producing this series of meditative essays about the process, capturing through his scientific lens the poetic wonder of his experience.

His reflections are prompted by a wide multitude of different lifeforms he encountered: snails, newts, mosquitoes, ticks, flowers, trees, fungi, bacteria, mice, raccoons, birds, coyotes, wolves, deer, the distant sound of a chainsaw, and much, much more. He considers none of them in isolation, for the largest theme underlying every thought is the interconnectedness of all life. Cooperation and competition. Evolution and change. And how dynamic and interdependent everything is. Even humans.

To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves.

He offers a far-ranging, intertwining mix of perceptive description, scientific detail, insight, and wisdom. Moralizing is minimal, though a deep appreciation of nature is taken for granted. Emphasized throughout are the complexity and fundamentally relational nature of life. His words echo that form, simultaneously free-flowing and piercing, creating clear images that are a delight to read. The Forest Unseen is an immensely enjoyable book.

To give you a feel for Haskell's writing, a couple of extensive samples from different essays:

I lie facedown at the edge of the mandala, readying myself for a dive under the surface of the leaf litter. The red oak leaf below my nose is crisp, protected from fungi and bacteria by the drying sun and wind. Like the other leaves on the litter's surface, this oak leaf will remain intact for nearly a year, finally crumbling in next summer's rains. These surface leaves form a crust that both hides and makes possible the drama below. Protected under the shield of superficial leaves, the rest of autumn's castoffs are pulverized in the wet, dark world of the litter. Yearly, the ground heaves like a breathing belly, swelling in a rapid inhalation in October, then sinking as the life force is suffused into the forest's body.

Below the red oak leaf, other leaves are moist and matted. I tease away a wet sandwich of three maple and hickory leaves. Waves of odor roll out of the the opening: first, the sharp, musty smell of decomposition, and then the rounded, pleasant odor of fresh mushrooms. The smells are edged with a richer, earthy background, the mark of healthy soil. These sensations are the closest I can come to "seeing" the microbial community in the soil. The light receptors and lenses in my eyes are too large to resolve the photons bouncing off bacteria, protozoa, and many fungi, but my nose can detect molecules that waft out of the microscopic world, giving me a peek through my blindness.

A peek is about all that anyone is given. Of the billion microbes that live in the half handful of soil that I have exposed, only one percent can be cultivated and studied in the lab. The interdependencies among the other ninety-nine percent are so tight, and our ignorance about how to mimic or replicate these bonds is so deep, that the microbes die if isolated from the whole. The soil's mocrobial community is therefore a grand mystery, with most of its inhabitants living unnamed and unknown to humanity.

As we chisel away at the edges of this mystery, jewels fall out of the eroding block of ignorance. The earthy smell that embraces my nose comes from one of the brightest jewels, the actinomycetes, strange semicolonial bacteria from which soil biologists have extracted many of our most successful antibiotics. Like the healing chemicals in foxglove, willow, and spirea, the actinomycetes use these molecules in their struggle with other species, secreting antibiotics to subdue or kill their competitors or enemies. We turn this struggle to our advantage through medicinal mycology.

Antibiotic production is a small part of the huge and varied role of actinomycetes in the soil's ecology. There is a as much diversity within the feeding habits of this group of bacteria as exists within all the animal kingdom. Some actinomycetes live as parasites in animals; others cling to plant roots, nibbling on them while fighting off more damaging bacteria and fungi. Some of these root dwellers may turn against their hosts and kill the plant by belowground assassination. Actinomycetes also coat the dead bodies of larger creatures, breaking them down into humus, the dark miracle ingredient of productive soils. Actinomycetes are everywhere but seldom enter our consciousness. Yet we seem to have an intuitive understanding of their importance. Our brains are wired to appreciate their distinctive "earthy" smell and to recognize the aroma as the sign of good health. Soil that has been sterilized, or that is too wet or dry for most actinomycetes, smells bitter and unfriendly. Perhaps our long evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers and agrarians has taught our nasal passages to recognize productive land, giving us a subconscious tie to the soil microbes that define the human ecological niche.

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The earthstars and mushrooms that ring the mandala's golf balls may devise a way to digest and recycle the balls' plastic. Fungi are masters of decomposition, so natural selection might produce a plastic-munching mushroom. Stupendous quantities of matter and energy are locked up in plastic. Evolutionary triumph awaits the mutant fungus whose digestive juices can free these frozen assets and conjure them to life. Fungi, and their equally versatile partners in the business of rot, bacteria, have already shown themselves capable of thriving on other industrial innovations such as refined oil and factory effluent. Golf balls may be the next breakthrough.

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This autumnal flow of southbound sharp-shinned hawks has dwindled in recent years. Scientists first suspected that pollution or habitat loss was causing the falling numbers of migrating hawks. But this is apparently not the case. Instead, more sharp-shinned hawks are choosing to stay in the frozen northern forests rather than head south for the winter. These lingering hawks survive by loitering around human settlements, making use of a remarkable new arrangement in the ecology of North America: the backyard bird feeder.

Our love of birds has created a new migration. This novelty is a west-to-east migration of plants, not a north-to-south migration of birds. The productivity of thousands of acres of former prairie land is shipped eastward, locked in millions of tons of sunflower seeds. These dense stores of energy are trickled from wooden boxes and glass tubes, adding a steady, stationary source of food to the otherwise unpredictable shifting winter food supply of songbirds in the eastern forest. Sharp-shinned hawks are therefore provided with a dependable meat locker, turning the forest into a home for the winter. Bird feeders not only augment the forest's larder but, more important, they gather songbirds into clusters that make convenient feeding stations for hawks.

The expression of our yearning for the beauty of birds sets off waves that circle outward, washing over prairies and forests, lapping onto the mandala. Fewer migrant hawks from the north make life a little easier for the hawk in the mandala. Winter becomes less dangerous for songbirds also, perhaps edging up winter wren populations. More abundant wrens may nudge down ant or spider populations, sending an eddy out into the plant community when the spring ephemeral flowers offer their seeds to be dispersed by ants, or into the fungus community when a dip in spider numbers increases fungus gnat populations.

We cannot move without vibrating the waters, sending into the world the consequences of our desires. The hawk embodies these spreading waves, and the marvel of its flight startles us into paying attention. Our embeddedness is given a magnificent, tangible form: here is our evolutionary kinship splayed out in the fanning wing; here is a solid, physical link to the north woods and the prairies; here is the brutality and elegance of the food web sailing across the forest.

End review.

The more I read, not just in this book but lots of sources, the more it seems we're learning we're nothing close to individual beings, as core to our composition are gut bacteria and a countless host of other creatures that combine within us to make us who we are. Another good quote.

We live in the empiricist’s nightmare: there is a reality far beyond our perception. Our senses have failed us for millennia. Only when we mastered glass and were able to produce clear, polished lenses were we able to gaze through a microscope and finally realize the enormity of our former ignorance.

For a while now my answer to the question, "What is your favorite season?" has been "The next one." I love all of the seasons each in their own way, but most of all I love the variety they provide. I look forward to the changes. Haskell would seem to agree.

We crave rich variegations of light. Too much time in one ambience, and we long for something new. Perhaps this explains the sensory ennui of those who live under unchanging skies. The monotony of blank sunny skies or of an endless cloud ceiling deprives us of the visual diversity we desire.

I'm looking forward to more spring.

(Pictures are from last year.)