The Songs of Trees Quotes

“We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. 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.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Ideas and statutes that live only in disembodied intellect are fragile, easily manipulated by both sides in a debate. This is as true of European "sustainability" regulations as it is for Amazonian súmac káusai removed from its forest home. Knowledge gained through extended bodily relationship with the forest, including the forest's human communities, is more robust.
... There is truth that cannot be accessed through intellect alone, especially intellect that is not aware of local ecological variations.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Bird memories are therefore a tree's dream of the future.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“A tree inhales and stills air’s fibrillating breath, holding it in wood, like a kami. Each year’s growth rings jackets the previous, capturing in layered derma precise molecular signatures of the atmosphere timbered memories. Wood emerges from relationship with air, catalyzed by the flash of electrons through membranes. Atmosphere and plant make each other; plant as temporary crystallization of carbon, air as product of 400 million years of forest breath. Neither tree nor air has a narrative, a telos of its own, for neither is its own.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“The belief that nature is an Other, a separate realm defiled by the unnatural mark of humans, is a denial of our own wild being. Emerging as they do from the evolved mental capacities of primates manipulating their environment, the concrete sidewalk, the spew of liquids from a paint factory, and the city documents that plan Denver’s growth are as natural as the patter of cottonwood leaves, the call of the young dipper to its kind, and the cliff swallow’s nest. Whether all these natural phenomena are wise, beautiful, just or good are different questions. Such puzzles are best resolved by beings who understand themselves to be nature. Muir said he walked “with” nature, and many conservation groups continue that narrative. Educators warn that if we spend too long on the wrong side of the divide, we’ll develop a pathology, the disorder of nature deficit. We can extend Muir’s thought and understand that we walk “within.” Nature needs no home; it is home. We can have no deficit of nature; we are nature, even when we are unaware of this nature. With the understanding that humans belong in this world, discernment of the beautiful and good can emerge from human minds networked within the community of life, not human minds peering in from the outside.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. 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”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“In the boreal forests there is reason to hope that we’ll guide the human part of this relationship with forethought. Over the last two decades, continent wide planning for conservation, forestry, and industry in the boreal forest have brought people together who have fought for years in the law courts. Now timber companies, industry, conservation groups, environmental activists, and governments, including those of the First Nations, are talking to one another. Such human talk is part of the forest’s larger system of thought, one way that the living network can achieve a measure of coherence; a diffuse conversation, able to listen and to adapt. To date, swaths of boreal forest as big as many countries- hundreds of thousands of square kilometers- more than 10 percent of Canada’s boreal forest- have been mapped for conservation, for carbon-savvy logging, for threatened animals, and for sustainable timber production.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Exiles can write down and preserve what we carry in our minds, but knowledge created and sustained by ongoing relationship dies when connections are broken. What remains is a network of life that is less intelligent, productive, resilient, and creative.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Many biologists claim that our thoughts and feelings of”ethics and meaning” derive only from the proclivities of our nervous systems. Our behaviour and psychology developed by the process of evolution, as did the minds and emotions of animals: so no us and them, just different variations on evolutionary themes. If so, ethics are vapors arising from our synapses, not truths with objective validity outside our own minds.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Chinese and Japanese horticulturists have been aware of the primacy of relationship for centuries. Sakuteiki, the eleventh-century Japanese manual of gardening, possibly the oldest written record of landscape design, exhorts people to open themselves to the disposition of mountain streams, to wind and emotion.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“No doubt what a raven, a bacterium, or a ponderosa pine sense in their worlds is radically different from what I perceive. These creatures also process what they sense in divergent ways. But such variations are not necessarily barriers to aesthetic and ethical judgment. Beauty is a property of networked relationships that might be heard through ears of peculiar and multifarious design.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“When we are awakened participants within the processes of the network, we can start to hear what is coherent, what is broken, what is beautiful, what is good.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“We hear the rain not through silent falling water but in the many translations delivered by objects that the rain encounters. Like any language, especially one with so much to pour out and so many waiting interpreters, the sky’s linguistic foundations are expressed in an exuberance of form: downpours turn tin roofs into sheets of screaming vibration; rain smatters onto the wings of hundreds of bats, each drop shattering, then falling into the river below the bats’ skimming flight; heavy-misted clouds sag into treetops and dampen leaves without a drop falling, their touch producing the sound of an inked brush on a page.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Mesolithic hearths likely did more than cook, warm and feed. They opened people to connections with each other, deepening the human social network. Studies of extant hunter-gatherer cultures show that campfires change the nature of human conversation. During the day talk is of economic matters, complaints or jokes. Around the fire the imagination opens and stories emerge. People talk of connections and rifts, of the spirit world, of kinship. Fire anneals the human community, joining strands. Our minds seem particularly attuned to the sounds of fire. Research shows the blood pressure of subjects drops and their sociability increases when the crackle of bring woods fills their ears. The sight of a soundless fire has little effect.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“By the time workers have picked a field, tens of thousands of words have flown from mouth to ear. Part of the landscape’s mind—its memories, connections, rhythms—is thereby held in human consciousness. Work among the olive trees does more than yield oil; it creates and deepens the stories from which are made human and ecological communities.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. 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 Wordsworth’s 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.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Instead, good and harmonious life—súmac káusai, alli káusai—should be “the goal or mission of every human effort.” Such a life emerges from ongoing “reciprocity and solidarity” within the human community and between the human community and the biodiversity and spirits of the forest of which people are a part. Western development destroys these relationships, imposing itself by “blood and fire.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Mesolithic hearths likely did more than cook, warm, and feed. They opened people to connections with others, deepening the human social network. Studies of extant hunter-gatherer cultures show that campfires change the nature of human conversation. During the day talk is of economic matters, complaints, or jokes. Around the fire the imagination opens and stories emerge. People talk of connections and rifts within human social networks, of the spirit world, and of marriage and kinship. Fire anneals the human community, joining strands. Our minds seem particularly attuned to the sounds of fire. In the psychology laboratory, the blood pressure of experimental subjects drops and their sociability increases when the crackle of burning wood fills their ears. The sight of a soundless fire has little effect.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“I continue my search for the place of origin of the bonsaied white pine. The forest’s plants evoke in me a feeling that reality has slipped. All is familiar wind in Japanese oaks and maples sounds as it does in the Americas: coarse grained and deep voiced in oaks, sandy and light in the thin-leaved maples. Yet when I attend to a visual detail- the contour of a leaf, the runnels in bark, the hue of a fruit, I am unmoored by strangeness. My mind is foundering in the geographic manifestation of plant evolution’s deep history. The plants of east Asia, seemingly so far from eastern North America, are in fact close kin to the plants of the mountain slopes of Appalachia, closer kin by far than the plants of the northwestern US, or of Florida, or the arid lands of the Southwest. On Miyajima, I walk with sumac, maple, ash, juniper, fir, oak, persimmon, and rhododendron. A few Asian specialties spice this thoroughly Appalachian community, curiosities like Japanese cedar, snake vines, and umbrella pines. The cedars intermingle their soft, extended sighs with the more familiar sounds of oak and maple.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Survival of urban trees increases when saplings are embedded within the human social network. A tree planted by its human neighbors will live longer than one placed by an anonymous contractor. When a tree bears a tag naming it and listing its needs- water, mulch, loose soil, no litter- the probability of its survival jumps to nearly 100 percent. Psychological bonds to trees in cities are often fierce. In my experience of talking with people about trees, New Yorkers echo, in their own way, Amazonia Waorani. Relationships with trees are deep and personal. Outrage flares when the conversation turns to trees heedlessly damaged, whether a tree in a Manhattan street damaged by building construction or an Amazonian ceibo tree cut to make room for a road. These wounds are keenly felt by the people who live with the tree, people whose lives are wrapped into the tree’s own narrative. Trees, especially those who grow close to human homes, are portals to unselfed experience.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Patterns of urban wildlife seem to lend credence to the antiurbanism of many environmentalists. Yet cities occupy just 3 percent of the world’s surface and house half of the human population. This intensification is efficient. The average citizen of New York releases less than one third of the US national average amount of carbon dioxide. Unlike those sprawling cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, New York’s carbon emissions from transportation have not risen in the last 30 years. Denver, despite its profligate lawns, water one quarter of Colorado’s population with 2 percent of the state’s water supply. Therefore, the high biodiversity of the countryside exists only because of the city. If all the world’s urban dwellers were to move to the country, native birds and plants would not fare well. Forests would fall, streams would become silted, and carbon dioxide concentrations would spike. This is no thought experiment. These outcomes are manifest in the cleared forests and such from suburban peripheries. Instead of lamenting a worldwide pattern of biological diminishment in urban areas, we might view statistics on bird and plant diversity as signs of augmented rural biological diversity, made possible by the compact city.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Like the pear tree, our whole body is sonified. Hearing is not only an aural sensation. In my ear canals bundles floats enclosed in a few drops of ocean water. Rooted in a cell surface, each bundle turns flickers of high and low pressure into nerve signals. The bundles translate fibrillating fluid into electric charge, thence to the brain. Cranium is a dish and a drum, mouth is a wet horn, throat and spine are passageways from the lower body. Torso is pumpkin, half seedy gut, half hollow lung gourd…hearing is modulated by tongue taste, emotion, foot soles, hairs on a skin. What we perceive is the conclusion of our body conversing within a purring, stridulating world.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“The river is not a passageway for lifeless water molecules but a life-form. I hear the Amazonian Sarayaku activist’s words: Rivers are alive and sing; this is our politics. Humans are part of this multitude. Do dams and manipulations by humans tame the river, somehow draining it of its wild nature? No. The hand that writes water-management plans, the page or screen on which words appear, the engineers who devised dams, and the flow of the South Platte in the city are as wild, natural, and at home in this world as the waters upstream. We too are nature. Unsunderable. To believe otherwise is to impose a duality on the world. The South Platte runs through a land created by this fissured imagination. The river gathers its first waters from mountains national parks, forests, and wilderness areas. For some people these areas are places for a grand escape, sacred groves in which to visit Nature, and the last refuge of imperiled ecosystems. For the indigenous and other peoples who were removed and barred from reentry, the same areas are postapocalyptic landscapes...the Sarayaku oppose national parks in Ecuador, knowing the endgame of the idea. They prefer the term “living forests” where Life is understood to include people and the knowledge that swells within people’s many relationships with other species.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“Ponderosa pine senses, integrates, weighs, and judges the world in a manner that combines external and internal intelligence. The tree also possesses its own hormonal, electrical, and chemical network. The trees’ communicative processes are slower than animal’s nervous systems, and they pervade branches and roots, rather than knotting themselves into brains. Like bacteria, they inhabit a reality alien to our own experience of the world. But trees are masters of integration, connecting and unselfing their cells into the soil, the skies, and thousands of other species. Because they are not mobile, to thrive they must know their particular locus on the Earth far better than any wandering animal. Trees are the Platos of biology.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“In this ecological aesthetic we might then root our ethic of belonging. If some form of objective moral truth about life’s ecology exists and transcends our nervous chatter, it is located within the relationships that constitute the network of life. When we are awakened participants within the process of the network, we can start to hear what is coherent, what is broken, what is beautiful, what is good. This understanding emerges from sustained incarnate relationship, becomes manifest in a mature sense of ecological aesthetic, and gives rise to ethical discernments that emerge from life’s network. We transcend, at least in part, the individuality of our bodies and our species. This transcendence emerges from the earthly realities of the processes of life and remains agnostic on the question of whether gods or goddesses are involved.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“The deepening chill that had started when mud buried the redwoods continues to the modern day. Like the Eocene’s climate, the temperature of the intervening years has staggered up and down. We owe the origin of our own species to this cooling trend. When Africa’s forests retreated in a particularly cold and dry spell, our prehumen ancestors strode into the emerging savannah and grasslands. Homo sapiens evolved from these apes of the open country, and all our species’ history has unfolded in relatively cold times. The calm that I feel as I survey the scenery around the Big Stump- open vistas of grasslands and tree copses, created by cool aridity- is perhaps a judgment of the landscape wired deep in my human mind. An affinity for savanna-like grasslands is one of the neurological quirks that we humans carried with us as we spread across the world. Another is the desire to collect curios, especially pieces of the past. We’re a storytelling species, so perhaps these artifacts are anchors and touchstones for the tales from which we find our reality.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“I sit with the ponderosa pine, next to Big Stump. As the angle and quality of light vary through the day and through the seasons, the hue and luminance of the colors change, animated by the touch of the Sun. Before the volcanic flow, this redwood was seventy meters tall and more than seven hundred years old. Now it is fragmented stone column three meters tall and ten meters around. For such a long dead creature, the stump is an acoustically lively character. In the summer violet-green swallows wheel around the exposed trunk, chattering as they ambush insects. Mountain bluebirds gather on the stump to feed their squalling youngsters, to purr at mates, and to snap their bills at rivals. A hummingbird buzzes face first against the stump, investigating a streak of flower like orange in the rock. Fewer animal sounds enliven winter’s air. The wail of ponderosa needles dominates, interspersed with the kok-kok of passing ravens. Wind bends spent grass stems to the ground, as they move, their sharp tips etch curved lines on the snow’s surface, the scratch of a pen on rough paper. Snows falls in clumps from pine needles, a hiss, then a muffled blow.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“What kind of Earth do we think we belong to? If the world is a dance of atoms, regulated by physical laws and no more, then one answer to the question of an ethic of belonging must be ethical nihilism. Our two trees, living in such different climates, suggest a similar path. If we’re a species made merely of atoms like all other species, no more and no less, evolution brought us here.

Yet I seek something less fractured, an ethic that is fully biological yet does not walk us into a starry, cold universe, empty except for self constructed miasma. A hint at such an ethic might be found with the little girl who heard the “huge” sound in the ponderosa, she and her family were attending to Florissant with delight and unaffected east. The girl heard the tree. The boy examined fallen ponderosa cones, peering between their open scales, then poking at immature cones on the tree. The parents noticed and pointed out the wavelike motions of wind on meadow grasses. They stood and admired the giant stone, remarking on its variegated colors.

They remained at the stump far longer than the minute or two allotted in the walks of most visitors. This family was present, a start of a sensory, intellectual, and bodily opening to the place. The people formerly indigenous here- the Ute Indians and their ancestors- were forcibly removed in the 19th century, an act of violence that broke humanity’s millennia long relationship within this part of life’s community. The girl and her family were taking the first small steps in relearning part of what has been forgotten.

The family’s attention to the particularities of Florissant seems at first to have little to do with understanding the ethical import of mud slides in the Eocene and in the present day. The family’s behavior gives no direct answers to the questions about the ethics of climate change. Instead they may show how to move toward answers by engaging the community of life. From this engagement, or reengagement after cultural fracture and amnesia, comes a more mature ability to understand what is deeply beautiful in the world.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

“In Colorado’s snow country, we also hear two evergreens. One near to us, a ponderosa pine living in our own time. Another, the redwood, sings from the distant past. In the ecological dissonance between these two trees there is also an opening to a void, a path to emptiness. The petrified stump, a stony piece of flotsam carrying the memory of the past, reminds us of Earth’s unnegotiable law. What exists today will not exist tomorrow. Climate change is one expression this ephemerality. All the climate has ever done is change: cadences and glissandos of temperature and rainfall, sometimes bending slowly, sometimes screeching in jolts. This is the neverstill of rocks, air, life, water. Next to the petrified wood, the ponderosa cries in a igneous wind, prey to onslaughts of beetles or drought, caught in the change that humans have wrought.”
― David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors