The Consequences of our Desires

 

There were several times when I was re-reading The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell again that I thought that it belonged in the top self of my library -- one of the books that I value most.  Haskell's project is to go to the same small patch of forest and just watch.  He reports that he spends hundreds of hours simply watching and observing.  He's so quiet that birds land on him and coyotes approach within yards.

Each chapter is a dated entry that begins with specific and concrete description of what's going on in the forest at that time of the year.  Then he dives deeper into a specific topic.  As a whole you get a picture of vertebrates and invertebrates, trees, lichen, fungi, springtails, worms, arthropods, etc.  And in each chapter he will go deeper, about medicine, evolution, sexual reproduction, migration, seed dispersal

One common theme is the inter-relatedness of things.  Here's one such passage, which traces the post-death fate of a snail eaten by a bird, which uses the calcium in the shell to create an egg.

As the young bird grows inside the egg it pulls calcium out of the shell, gradually etching away at the walls of its home, and turns the calcium into bone.  These bones may fly to South America and be deposited in the soil of the rain forest, or the calcium may return to the sea in a migrant-killing autumn storm.  Or, the bones may fly back to these forests next spring and, when the bird lays her eggs, the calcium may again be used in an eggshell whose remains may be grazed on by snails, returning the calcium to the mandala.  These journeys will weave in and out of other lives, knitting together the multidimensional cloth of life.  My blood may join the nsil's shell in a young bird that eats or is bitten by a passing mosquito, or we may meet later, in millenia, at the bottom of the ocean in a crab's claw or the gut of a worm.

Winds of human technology blow at this cloth, billowing it in unpredictable directions.  Atoms of sulfur that were locked into fossil plants when they died in ancient swamps are now tossed into the atmosphere when we burn coal to fuel our culture. The sulfur turns to sulfuric acid, rains down on the mandala, and acidifies the soil.  This acidic fossil rain tips the chemical balance against the snails, reducing their abundance.  Mother birds have a harder time bingeing on calcium and so breed less successfully, or not at all. Perhaps fewer birds will mean less blood for mosquitoes, or fewer predatory beaks? Viruses like West Nile that thrive in wild birds may, in turn, be touched by the changed bird populations.  This ripple in the cloth floats across the forest, perhaps finding a hem at which to end, perhaps floating on forever, drifting through the mosquitoes, viruses, humans, ever outward.

In another moment of tracing this inter-relatedness, he focuses on the repercussions of our love for seeing birds in the backyard.

Sharp-skinned hawks in Tennessee do not migrate, but they are oinged by sharp-shinned hawks retreating from winter farther north.  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 appraently 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 litering 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 unpredictably shifting winter food suppply 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 importantly, 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.

After hypothesizing about what fewer migrant hawks might mean in the longer term in his Tennessee forest, Haskell says:

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.