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jdoetsch's review against another edition
5.0
I did not expect to be this engrossed about a book about a single patch of forest in Tennessee, but here we are...
kshatrya's review against another edition
3.0
An in-depth watch on an eastern US forest. Haskell shows the pattern and rhythm of a year of insects, plants, fungi, and animals in a forest clearing. A gently delightful read!
rebeccakb's review against another edition
4.0
You can read this book from page 1 to the end, or skip around a bit and still enjoy it. The author uses some lovely phrases that are quite poetic.
chriskoppenhaver's review against another edition
5.0
This book is a fascinating, enchanting, and joyful way to learn about nature. And our place in it.
Haskell randomly selected a square meter of old-growth forest in Tennessee and spent a year observing it. Hundreds of hours of silently sitting: watching, listening, smelling, and musing. Trying to discover what he might notice by slowing down and really focusing. And producing this series of meditative essays about the process, capturing through his scientific lens the poetic wonder of his experience.
His reflections are prompted by a wide multitude of different lifeforms he encountered: snails, newts, mosquitoes, ticks, flowers, trees, fungi, bacteria, mice, raccoons, birds, coyotes, wolves, deer, the distant sound of a chainsaw, and much, much more. He considers none of them in isolation, for the largest theme underlying every thought is the interconnectedness of all life. Cooperation and competition. Evolution and change. And how dynamic and interdependent everything is. Even humans.
To give you a feel for Haskell's writing, a couple of extensive samples from different essays:
Haskell randomly selected a square meter of old-growth forest in Tennessee and spent a year observing it. Hundreds of hours of silently sitting: watching, listening, smelling, and musing. Trying to discover what he might notice by slowing down and really focusing. And producing this series of meditative essays about the process, capturing through his scientific lens the poetic wonder of his experience.
His reflections are prompted by a wide multitude of different lifeforms he encountered: snails, newts, mosquitoes, ticks, flowers, trees, fungi, bacteria, mice, raccoons, birds, coyotes, wolves, deer, the distant sound of a chainsaw, and much, much more. He considers none of them in isolation, for the largest theme underlying every thought is the interconnectedness of all life. Cooperation and competition. Evolution and change. And how dynamic and interdependent everything is. Even humans.
To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves.He offers a far-ranging, intertwining mix of perceptive description, scientific detail, insight, and wisdom. Moralizing is minimal, though a deep appreciation of nature is taken for granted. Emphasized throughout are the complexity and fundamentally relational nature of life. His words echo that form, simultaneously free-flowing and piercing, creating clear images that are a delight to read. The Forest Unseen is an immensely enjoyable book.
To give you a feel for Haskell's writing, a couple of extensive samples from different essays:
I lie facedown at the edge of the mandala, readying myself for a dive under the surface of the leaf litter. The red oak leaf below my nose is crisp, protected from fungi and bacteria by the drying sun and wind. Like the other leaves on the litter's surface, this oak leaf will remain intact for nearly a year, finally crumbling in next summer's rains. These surface leaves form a crust that both hides and makes possible the drama below. Protected under the shield of superficial leaves, the rest of autumn's castoffs are pulverized in the wet, dark world of the litter. Yearly, the ground heaves like a breathing belly, swelling in a rapid inhalation in October, then sinking as the life force is suffused into the forest's body.
Below the red oak leaf, other leaves are moist and matted. I tease away a wet sandwich of three maple and hickory leaves. Waves of odor roll out of the the opening: first, the sharp, musty smell of decomposition, and then the rounded, pleasant odor of fresh mushrooms. The smells are edged with a richer, earthy background, the mark of healthy soil. These sensations are the closest I can come to "seeing" the microbial community in the soil. The light receptors and lenses in my eyes are too large to resolve the photons bouncing off bacteria, protozoa, and many fungi, but my nose can detect molecules that waft out of the microscopic world, giving me a peek through my blindness.
A peek is about all that anyone is given. Of the billion microbes that live in the half handful of soil that I have exposed, only one percent can be cultivated and studied in the lab. The interdependencies among the other ninety-nine percent are so tight, and our ignorance about how to mimic or replicate these bonds is so deep, that the microbes die if isolated from the whole. The soil's mocrobial community is therefore a grand mystery, with most of its inhabitants living unnamed and unknown to humanity.
As we chisel away at the edges of this mystery, jewels fall out of the eroding block of ignorance. The earthy smell that embraces my nose comes from one of the brightest jewels, the actinomycetes, strange semicolonial bacteria from which soil biologists have extracted many of our most successful antibiotics. Like the healing chemicals in foxglove, willow, and spirea, the actinomycetes use these molecules in their struggle with other species, secreting antibiotics to subdue or kill their competitors or enemies. We turn this struggle to our advantage through medicinal mycology.
Antibiotic production is a small part of the huge and varied role of actinomycetes in the soil's ecology. There is a as much diversity within the feeding habits of this group of bacteria as exists within all the animal kingdom. Some actinomycetes live as parasites in animals; others cling to plant roots, nibbling on them while fighting off more damaging bacteria and fungi. Some of these root dwellers may turn against their hosts and kill the plant by belowground assassination. Actinomycetes also coat the dead bodies of larger creatures, breaking them down into humus, the dark miracle ingredient of productive soils. Actinomycetes are everywhere but seldom enter our consciousness. Yet we seem to have an intuitive understanding of their importance. Our brains are wired to appreciate their distinctive "earthy" smell and to recognize the aroma as the sign of good health. Soil that has been sterilized, or that is too wet or dry for most actinomycetes, smells bitter and unfriendly. Perhaps our long evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers and agrarians has taught our nasal passages to recognize productive land, giving us a subconscious tie to the soil microbes that define the human ecological niche.
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The earthstars and mushrooms that ring the mandala's golf balls may devise a way to digest and recycle the balls' plastic. Fungi are masters of decomposition, so natural selection might produce a plastic-munching mushroom. Stupendous quantities of matter and energy are locked up in plastic. Evolutionary triumph awaits the mutant fungus whose digestive juices can free these frozen assets and conjure them to life. Fungi, and their equally versatile partners in the business of rot, bacteria, have already shown themselves capable of thriving on other industrial innovations such as refined oil and factory effluent. Golf balls may be the next breakthrough.
-----
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 apparently 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 loitering 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 unpredictable shifting winter food supply 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 important, 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. Fewer migrant hawks from the north make life a little easier for the hawk in the mandala. Winter becomes less dangerous for songbirds also, perhaps edging up winter wren populations. More abundant wrens may nudge down ant or spider populations, sending an eddy out into the plant community when the spring ephemeral flowers offer their seeds to be dispersed by ants, or into the fungus community when a dip in spider numbers increases fungus gnat populations.
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.
eryne's review against another edition
2.0
Pretty navel gazy, light on science. Could use a review by an ecological or forester. But someone gets naked in the forest so it meets cliche requirements.
persypie's review against another edition
3.0
"We are Russian dolls, our lives made possible by other lives within us."
A gentle reminder of the symbiotic nature humans have with the environment. We come from the same place as trees and animals, and that can be easy to forget in the society of metal that we have built up around ourself.
This book is a collection of short essays that describe the author's perceptions of nature, and contains as many interesting anecdotes as it does pointlessly extravagant language. The parts I enjoyed I loved, and the parts I did not enjoy had me skimming to the next section.
A gentle reminder of the symbiotic nature humans have with the environment. We come from the same place as trees and animals, and that can be easy to forget in the society of metal that we have built up around ourself.
This book is a collection of short essays that describe the author's perceptions of nature, and contains as many interesting anecdotes as it does pointlessly extravagant language. The parts I enjoyed I loved, and the parts I did not enjoy had me skimming to the next section.
wonderbub's review against another edition
3.0
I really liked the subject matter of the book and learning about different aspects of science from a small patch of forest. However, the writing was not that great and often times distracted me from what the author was trying to convey. I'd give it a 3.5/5 if I could.
kathy_f's review against another edition
5.0
A wonderful book, beautifully written, one to be read slowly and savored. It makes me long to find "my own" mandala in the forest and visit it regularly for a year, experiencing the seasonal changes and learning about its residents.
jeanettelenore's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.0