‘That tree might be my cousin’: a walk in the woods

Strange hollow tubes, each a little thicker than a pencil and about the same length, are plastered vertically to a rock face in Shakerag Hollow in Tennessee. Each is punctured by a series of similar holes, so each tube looks rather like a crude tin whistle.

These are the exits from which mud-dauber wasps have emerged from individual cells, where their eggs had been laid by the industrious females who built the tubes.

"The female brings a spider to each cell and seals it in with the egg," David Haskell tells me. "They paralyse the spider first with their sting, so that it remains alive and fresh when the larva hatches and eat its first meal."

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Haskell seems to know every secret of this rare remnant of old-growth forest, from its biochemical processes to its vast web of ecological relationships, including its multiple human dimensions. And unlike many natural scientists, he is not afraid to respond to the emotional and philosophical implications of such close observations of nature.

His Pulitzer-nominated first book, The Forest Unseen, focused on a single square metre of leaf litter in the hollow, which he visited almost every day through a calendar year. He calls the site a "mandala" and tries to bring the same quality of mindful perception to his observations there that Buddhist monks bring to the creation of the mandala art form.

The opening chapter considers the evolutionary success of lichen, in which at least two creatures, a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium, co-operate so effectively that lichens cover almost 10 per cent of the land surface on our planet.

Yet he also observes the “piracy and exploitation” of a horsehair worm that writhes between the lichen-encrusted twigs and stones within the mandala. He describes its previous parasitic existence within the body of a living cricket in terms which require the reader to have a strong stomach.

Rose-tinted lenses

So he does not view it through the rather rose-tinted lenses of a Wordsworth or a Thoreau, whose sense of a benevolent presence in nature screened out many of its less cuddly manifestations from their writing.

But neither is he the kind of crude Darwinian who can only see selfish genes competing viciously everywhere he looks. He quotes Tennyson’s distressed response to Darwinian nature as “red in tooth and claw”, but then gives his reading of the poem a typically radical twist.

“Sure, red is the colour of blood, but it is also the colour of solidarity.” Co-operation, he says, is as strong a force in nature as competition, and we must attempt to clear our minds of preconceptions to be aware of both elements and all their complex inter-relationships, as they play out before our senses.

“I think we live in a world marked by a deep paradox,” he says. “It is simultaneously riven with fathomless pain and filled with unspeakable beauty. This paradox partly emerges from our human perceptions and partly from the tension between co-operation and conflict that underlies all biology.

“Yes, the evolutionary process is competitive and is marked by no mercy for all who suffer. But in the crucible of intense competition some remarkable co-operative bonds have been welded. Every living organism exists only because of these bonds: unions that live inside every cell, alliances that allow many species to thrive in forest soil.

“Human observers and commentators can pick out any of these strands to paint a portrait of a nature that is relentlessly cruel or that is suffused with beneficence. A more complete view recognises that cruelty and beneficence are human terms for a world that is not confined by the categories of our intellectual and emotional responses.”

Dizzying variety

I have just taught a class for Haskell, who teaches in Sewanee, a university almost hidden away nearby in this tree-filled landscape. Our walk through nearby Shakerag Hollow encompasses a dizzying variety of scales, and of topics.

At Green’s View, the high point at which we enter the forest where the hollow lies, he briefly explains its geology and its impact on the fertility of the plain below us, which stretches off as far as the eye can see.

“The plateau is limestone with a sandstone cap. It’s been eroding for many millions of years. It originally stretched all the way up to Nashville,” he says, indicating a faint haze on the horizon. “So all the plateau’s nutrients have washed down into those fields below us.”

Cattle pasture and cropfields on the plain fostered a moderately wealthy land-owning (and originally slave-owning) class on the plain for many decades.

Up here in the ravines and “coves”, life for white settlers was not so easy. The name Shakerag Hollow attests to one of the ways they scrabbled together a living. They would shake rags out on the hillside when they had a full still of moonshine, and purchasers would converge to lay their money down for illicit liquor.

The reason the patch of forest around the mandala is “old-growth” – never clear-felled, probably never logged over – is evident when we finally get there. The ground is too uneven, too strewn with massive limestone boulders tumbled by ice from the dramatic bluffs above us, to yield even the sparse crops the often-despised hill-dwellers could raise.

Yet Haskell immediately dismisses any suggestion that this patch is “pristine”, somehow unsullied by human hands.

He points up at the overhanging bluffs. “There has been human presence here for at least 9,000 years. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans managed the forest in all sorts of ways. From the moment a warming climate replaced conifers with oak-hickory woodlands on this plateau, this forest has co-evolved with our species.”

Intricate beauty

Haskell finds this relationship a source of pleasure and insight. We are all – trees, horsehair worms, humans, salamanders, woodpeckers, mud-daubing wasps, orchids – made of the same biological stuff, and we are all constantly exchanging nutrients and energy.

“That means that the forest is my kin. That tree over there might be my cousin. It’s always fascinating to get know your family better, even if they seem crazy, even if they are trying to kill you,” Haskell says.

This thought shoots him back to paradox: along with the joys of finding a tiny salamander gleaming under a leaf or waking up to the haunting calls of whip-poor-wills under the stars, there are deer-borne ticks that may inflict the burden of Lyme’s disease on a young life and the mosquito that carries the occasionally lethal West Nile virus.

The intricate beauty of the sugar maple leaves that are fluttering to the ground form the perfect camouflage for equally beautiful but venomous rattlesnakes.

Haskell’s technique for observing the mandala was borrowed from mindfulness meditation, though he is wary about using this “rather grand term”.

He suggests that we could all learn a lot and derive a lot of pleasure from just repeatedly observing the same place, whether it be a daily canal walk or even a small section of garden lawn.

Certainly, his own observation of a small patch of forest shows it to be intensely alive and linked to every other living thing in myriad ways.

David Haskell's new book, The Songs of Trees, will be published by Viking next April. His blog is at dghaskell.com