In The Song of Trees, his second book, biologist David George Haskell describes the reaction of a young family visiting the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado. In front of the petrified stump of a giant sequoia, parents and children marvel, fascinated by the colors and the power of the volcanic forces that buried the forest 35 million years ago, triggering a process that would ultimately transform a tree into stone. gigantic tree trunk.
At one point, the little girl hears the wind passing through the trees and exclaims, delighted: “What a huge noise! » And Haskell is happy. Because this family took the time to see and hear the beauty of the world, and that is perhaps our greatest chance for salvation.
Haskell further gives a definition of what he calls “ecological aesthetics”: the ability to perceive beauty through a sustained relationship with nature. He uses all his senses, his eyes of course, but also his hearing (his most recent work is entitled Sounds Wild and Broken) and the sense of smell (Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree was published in the United Kingdom in 2021). In all, hundreds of pages of captivating erudition and great poetry where he urges us to rediscover nature by going to meet it and opening ourselves to it. After all, as he repeats throughout his work, we are an intimate part of it, just like the hare, the spore, the chlorophyll molecule.
This is an obvious fact that we can easily lose sight of, swallowed up as we are by a climate crisis caused by our species and an often Manichean environmentalist discourse, which finds its echo in this quote displayed in large yellow letters at the Montreal Biodôme: “Between humans and nature, clash is inevitable. »
A shocking formula, it must be said, and which is perfectly justified in a context where the urgency to act is no longer in doubt, but which Haskell reframes gently, kindly and intelligently throughout his work . There is no possible shock, since we are all on the same boat – in fact we are at the same time boat, water and sail, but also the help captain who has lost his way, and only the integration of this truth will keep us from sinking.
No moral here, no point of reprimand, Haskell is far too subtle and benevolent a thinker to lecture anyone, he suggests, he encourages, he says: fall in love again by taking the time to see the world, that’s what will save us.
And he quotes Simone Weil, who said that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
For writing The Forest Unseen, he spent an entire year observing the same square meter of a forest in Tennessee, near the university where he teaches. A year spent watching flowers grow, slugs crawling and dead leaves rotting, listening to crickets and tits, breathing in the smell of humus like that of the first snow.
As a good scientist, Haskell brought his enormous wealth of knowledge every day to his mandala, as he had named his little square meter, but above all, he brought his gaze with him.
We will not steal any punch revealing that the mandala, despite its small surface area, revealed itself to be of almost infinite richness, a world in itself, an inextinguishable source of humble splendour.
In Sounds Wild and Broken, a vibrant plea for us to rediscover the rich sound of our world, he mentions the reduction in his hearing acuity. He is in his fifties, it’s normal to hear a little less well, but he loses a little more than average, the song of a warbler here, the stridulation of large grasshoppers there, as many small ones mourning.
An observation which saddens him, but which he reverses course by focusing on the fact that if he no longer hears today, it is largely because of the Faustian pact that our distant people have entered into. ancestors with nature: cells of exquisite complexity that have traded the ability to regenerate for the ability to perceive the sounds, smells, textures, tastes and hues of what surrounds us. In short, to be able to fully enjoy the beauty of the world, one had to agree to one day give it up.
Haskell sometimes uses the word “poignancy” in his books to describe nature, certain phenomena, the transience of existence. It’s a word that has nothing scientific in it, but which encourages us to love very much what it designates, whether it’s square meters deep in the woods, trees planted on a sidewalk, an entire ecosystem.