ETSU’s Environmental Studies Minor and the Department of Literature and Language hosted David George Haskell for a lecture and reading from his latest book, “The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors.”
Haskell, a Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of Biology at the University of the South, traveled to and spent extended periods of time with each of twelve trees over the course of two years.
“If you look across human cultures, trees are one of the things that connect us to one another. Whether it’s in the pages of a book, the wood in a violin, the timbers in a house,” said Haskell.
In the reading from Songs of Trees, which took place on Zoom, Haskell selected a passage from a section about a Callery Pear tree, otherwise known as the Bradford Pear, in Manhattan, New York.
“One way for a stranger to crack the plate metal of Manhattan’s social anonymity is to wire a tree,” read Haskell.
In the text, Haskell details attaching a sensor to the tree’s bark. The sensor is wired to his laptop, and, using headphones, Haskell is able to listen to the tree in what he calls the “tree to human sonic pathway.” Haskell reads the vibration levels as fleeting pedestrians walk and talk, motor vehicles zoom past the intersection of 86th and Broadway and the subway rumbles below the concrete.
“These movements become part of the tree. The city dwells within the Pear,” read Haskell.
The result, which Haskell summed up using Nietzche’s maxim, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” is a tree with more roots and a stronger trunk, a process which happens at the cellular level through the thickening of cell walls.
“A city tree, therefore, clings to the Earth more tightly than its countryside cousins,” read Haskell.
A bit later, Haskell connected this pear tree to larger themes in the book, namely interconnectivity, and consciousness itself. Haskell described how the tree not only absorbs low frequencies but also traps higher frequencies, making them more noticeable.
“In louder environments, you need to put more salt and spice on your food in order to actually taste it. So, what we think of as taste, as an isolated phenomenon coming from our tongue, actually is an integrated phenomenon coming from the world around us,” continued Haskell.
Relating the individual to the gut biome, Haskell described how even when we feel our most isolated, we are still among a community of sorts, even if that community is not apparent.
“Our conscious perception of the world emerges from relationship,” said Haskell.
“The individual is temporary. The self, in some ways, is an illusion. And what really lasts through the ages, what evolution molds and changes, what the stuff of ecology is, is interconnection and relationship.”
