The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors - Softcover

Haskell, David George

 
9780143111306: The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143111302 ISBN 13: 9780143111306
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

WINNER OF THE 2018 JOHN BURROUGHS MEDAL FOR OUTSTANDING NATURAL HISTORY WRITING

“Both a love song to trees, an exploration of their biology, and a wonderfully philosophical analysis of their role they play in human history and in modern culture.” —Science Friday
 
The author of Sounds Wild and Broken and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Forest Unseen visits with nature’s most magnificent networkers — trees 

David Haskell has won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world. Now, he brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees, exploring  connections with people, microbes, fungi, and other plants and animals. He takes us to  trees in cities (from Manhattan to Jerusalem), forests (Amazonian, North American, and boreal) and areas on the front lines of environmental change (eroding coastlines, burned mountainsides, and war zones.)  In each place he shows how human history, ecology, and well-being are intimately intertwined with the lives of trees.
 
Scientific, lyrical, and contemplative, Haskell reveals the biological connections that underpin all life.  In a world beset by barriers, he reminds us that life’s substance and beauty emerge from relationship and interdependence.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His 2017 book The Songs of Trees won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and won the 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies, the National Outdoor Book Award, and the Reed Environmental Writing Award. His new book, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction, will be published in March of 2022.
 
To listen to a collection of sounds from the trees in this book, visit dghaskell.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Ceibo

Near the Tiputini River, Ecuador 0¡38'10.2" S, 76¡08'39.5" W

Moss has taken flight, lifting itself on wings so thin that light barely notices as it passes through. The sun leaves not a color but a suggestion. Leaflets spread and the moss plants soar on long strands. A fibrous anchor tethers each flier to the swarm of fungi and algae that coats every tree branch. Unlike their crouched and bowed relatives in the rest of the world, these mosses live where water has no skin, no boundary. Here the air is water. Mosses grow like filamentous seaweeds in an open ocean.

The forest presses its mouth to every creature and exhales. We draw the breath: hot; odorous; almost mammalian, seeming to flow directly from the forest's blood to our lungs. Animate, intimate, suffocating. At noon the mosses are in flight, but we humans are supine, curled in the fecund belly of life's modern zenith. We're near the center of the Yasun’ Biosphere Reserve in western Ecuador. Around us grows sixteen thousand square kilometers of Amazonian forest in a national park, an ethnic reserve, and a buffer zone, connected across the Colombian and Peruvian borders to more forest that, seen through the lofty gaze of satellites, forms one of the largest green spots on the face of the Earth.

Rain. Every few hours, rain, speaking a language unique to this forest. Amazonian rain differs not just in the volume of what it has to tell-three and a half meters dropped every year, six times gray London's count-but in its vocabulary and syntax. Invisible spores and plant chemicals mist the air above the forest canopy. These aerosols are the seeds onto which water vapor coalesces, then swells. Every teaspoon of air here has a thousand or more of these particles, a haze ten times less dense than air away from the Amazon. Wherever people aggregate in significant numbers, we loose to the sky billions of particles from engines and chimneys. Like birds in a dust bath, the vigorous flapping of our industrial lives raises a fog. Each fleck of pollution, dusty mote of soil, or spore from a woodland is a potential raindrop. The Amazon forest is vast, and over much of its extent the air is mostly a product of the forest, not the activities of industrious birds. Winds sometimes bring pulses of dust from Africa or smog from a city, but mostly the Amazon speaks its own tongue. With fewer seeds and abundant water vapor, raindrops bloat to exceptional sizes. The rain falls in big syllables, phonemes unlike the clipped rain speech of most other landmasses.

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.

The leaves of plants speak the rainÕs language with the most eloquence. Plant diversity here reaches levels unrivaled anywhere on Earth. Over six hundred species of tree live in one hectare, more than in all of North America. If we survey an adjacent hectare, we add yet more species to the list. Every time I have visited, my anchor in this botanical confusion and delight is a Ceiba pentandra tree, a species that many local people call ceibo, pronounced SAY-bo. Twenty-nine paces take me around its base, steps that circle buttress roots radiating from the center, each root starting head high at the trunk, then sloping down into the forest. The trunk is three meters across, wider by half than the columns that support the Parthenon. Despite its impressive size, the tree is not nearly so ancient as the pines, olives, and redwoods that live in cold or dry climates and count their years in millennia. In the fungus- and insect-filled Amazon, few ceibo live more than a couple of hundred years. Ecologists estimate that this tree is between 150 and 250 years old. The tree is large not because it is old but because young ceibo lance upward by two meters every year, sacrificing wood strength and chemical defenses for speed of growth. The ceiboÕs crown, its uppermost branches, form a wide dome that rises ten meters higher than the surrounding trees, themselves forty meters high, the equivalent of about ten stories in a human building. From a perch in the crown I see a forest canopy unlike that of relatively smooth-topped temperate forests. A dozen other ceibos grow between my eye and the horizon, each one a hummock protruding from the uneven, fissured surface created by the surrounding trees.

The tree is a giant. An axis mundi? Perhaps, but the rain's sound refutes any attempt to use a single idea to isolate the tree from its community. Every falling water drop is a tap against leafy drumskins. Botanical diversity is sonified, calling out under the drummer's beat. Every species has its rain sound, revealing the varied physicality of leaves of the ceibo tree and the many other species that live on and around its massive form.

The expansive leaflets of flying moss tick under the impact of a drop. An arum leaf, an elongate heart as long as my arm, gives a took took with undertones that linger as the surface dissipates its energy. The stiff dinner-plate leaves of a neighboring plant receive the rain with a tight snap, a spatter of metallic sparks. A rosette of lance-shaped leaves sprouts from the tip of a Clavija shrub, each leaf twitching as the rain smacks the surface. The sound is flat, tup, with none of the urgency of less yielding leaves. The leaf of an Amazonian avocado plant sounds a low, clean, woody thump.

These sounds come from the ceibo's understory plants, species that root themselves under the spreading branches and amid the duffy soil around the trunk. The water that strikes the understory has already passed across many leaves above. In the treetops most leaves have forms characteristic of the tropics: smooth surfaces ending in sharp tips or filaments. These "drip tips," combined with slick leaf surfaces, gather water, drawing it into large teardrops. As tears swell on the leaf tip, the water becomes a lens, refracting light so that an inverted image of the forest appears within. The drop has only a thin tip to hold, so every few seconds the leaf releases the accumulated water, then another lens bulges, flashing its image before falling away. The leaf thus sheds water, drying itself and slowing the growth of moisture-loving fungi and algae. These drip tips in the upper levels of the forest enlarge the already-giant raindrops, sending them down to understory plant skins. Larger leaves gather the most water and drip fastest, so the rhythms of the understory are born in the diversity of leaf shapes in the ceibo's crown. The myriad sizes, shapes, thicknesses, textures, and pliancies of the leaves below add texture to the sound. Even the litter sings with a vigor that I have not encountered elsewhere. This ground sound is the clack and tick of thousands of spring-wound clocks, each releasing its...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143111302
ISBN 13 
9780143111306
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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