The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

by Sam Kean

  PAUL KVINTA

  David Haskell Speaks for the Trees

  from Outside

  David Haskell’s Bradford pear tree stands at the northwest corner of 86th Street and Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and when we meet there one afternoon in July, he mentions that he hasn’t spent quality time with the tree in nearly three months.

  The previous occasion he visited, he and his girlfriend, Katie Lehman, were traveling by car to Maine from Sewanee, Tennessee, where Haskell is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South. They parked on the street, made their way to this corner, and proceeded to loiter, since there’s nowhere to sit. It was late in the day. Trucks and buses barreled down Broadway. Sirens wailed. Pedestrians flowed past the tree, faces in their phones, while below ground the Seventh Avenue Express hammered by. The tree’s fallen white blossoms whirled in the evening gusts, and discarded wads of gum littered the dirt at the base of its trunk. For an hour and a half Haskell watched. He listened. Then he and Lehman got back in their car and drove to Maine.

  “It was amazing sharing the tree with Katie, introducing her to this creature I’d spent so much time with,” Haskell tells me now. “To be able to wrap other people into my relationship with the tree, and the tree into my relationship with other people—it’s very enriching.”

  Introducing me to the tree, then, is a pretty big deal.

  “This is it,” he says, beaming.

  We eyeball the tree.

  “Yes,” I say.

  It’s not exactly beautiful. It’s not exactly ugly. It reaches maybe 30 feet tall, with an oval canopy of dark waxy leaves and a gray trunk streaked green with algae. A couple of diseased limbs have been removed, leaving pitted nubs. It grows in front of a Banana Republic, between a newsstand and some newspaper boxes, and nearby there’s a flight of stairs leading down to the 86th Street subway platform. At the base of the trunk, some well-tended pink and white periwinkles share a patch of dirt with two cigarette butts, half a grape, a plastic drink lid, and a couple of straws. Locked to the short iron fence that surrounds the trunk is a blue bicycle missing its seat. Another Bradford pear sprouts from the sidewalk 30 feet north of this one, then another one north of that, then another. There are six of them on this block alone.

  Haskell’s tree is utterly average.

  He is not offended by this assessment. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he includes the Bradford pear in his book, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors, which comes out in April. “This tree appeals to me because it’s a regular street tree,” he tells me. “There are some trees in Manhattan that are famous, like the 9/11 Survivor Tree. People actually travel great distances to see that tree. No one travels to Manhattan to see this tree.” Except Haskell. And now me.

  He had invited me to spend a couple of days with him here. I couldn’t say no, not after what he had accomplished in his first book, The Forest Unseen, a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and a book that E. O. Wilson called “a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry, in which the invisible appear, the small grow large, and the immense complexity and beauty of life are more clearly revealed.” Haskell believes that we live in a world of countless untold stories hiding in plain sight. In Forest, he selected a square meter of forest floor and visited that spot almost daily for a year. That’s the entire book, all 288 pages of it, him staring at the ground. But Haskell leveraged three remarkable strengths—vast scientific knowledge, prodigious literary gifts, and a deeply meditative approach to fieldwork—to extract from that patch of dirt characters, relationships, drama, and universal themes.

  If Haskell could do that in a quiet corner of the forest, I wanted to see what he could come up with on a loud street corner in America’s most frenetic metropolis.

  Wednesday 7:03 p.m.

  An attractive blonde in a short skirt walking three terriers stops under the tree to untangle her leashes. I focus on the woman. Haskell focuses on the dogs. One white puffball refuses to budge when the woman prepares to resume walking. She coaxes the dog. She jerks the leash. “He’s saying, ‘This is a cool tree,’” Haskell says, meaning literally cool. She’s not hearing him. The woman drags the pooch off down the sidewalk.

  Haskell strides over to the tree, bends down, and touches the pavement. “Feel that,” he tells me. The sidewalk is cool, despite temperatures in the 90s. We then walk out to the median in the middle of Broadway and feel the shade-free pavement there. It’s a good 20 degrees hotter than under the tree. “On average, it’s 7 degrees warmer in New York City than it is just outside the city, partly because of all these hard surfaces absorbing heat,” he says. “But trees change the weather in a city. They have a significant cooling effect. They save a lot on air-conditioning.”

  7:06 p.m.

  Foot traffic is light, probably due to summer vacation. On a normal weekday at this hour, Haskell says, the pedestrian flow would nearly flatten us.

  “It’s typically a sea of humanity?” I ask.

  More like intersecting rivers, he explains. “You’ve got one coming out of the subway and people flowing north and south. There’s a sinkhole with water bubbling up and being drawn back down.” There’s all this fast water, and then the area around the tree is a quiet pool to the side.

  It’s illegal to obstruct pedestrian traffic in New York City, Haskell tells me, so if people need to stop they will duck under the tree. That links the plant to the city’s sociocultural power dynamics. Haskell calls the area around the tree “gendered and raced space.” Over two years, he has seen dozens of folks stop under the tree to check phones or adjust bags. Three-quarters were women of a variety of races; of the men, none was white. Most white guys dominate the middle of the sidewalk, yielding to no one. It’s white male privilege, he says, played out on the streets of New York.

  7:22 p.m.

  Haskell peers into the canopy. “Note the lack of insect damage,” he says. A native species would support a riot of caterpillars and leaf miners, munching on leaves, fattening up for predatory birds and spiders. But the Bradford pear hails from China, and Haskell explains that as a foreigner it deploys formidable chemical defenses against local herbivores. This tree ended up here for the same reason Bradford pears ended up across the eastern half of the United States in the 1960s—horticulturalists, smitten by the tree’s snowy blossoms, desired an attractive, bug-resistant species for burgeoning suburbs and city beautification projects.

  Government officials now classify the tree as a “woody invasive.” In 2015, when the Million Trees NYC project realized its goal of planting a million new trees, not one was a Bradford pear. “There was an article spread on Facebook describing them as evil,” Haskell says. He’s appalled by this. Obviously, native trees are better for the ecological community. But vilifying the Bradford pear denies the full story of our tree here. For starters, it denies what Haskell calls “ancient biogeographical connections,” meaning that while this tree is considered a foreigner, it’s really not. Millions of years ago, the forests of eastern North America and East Asia were connected, which explains why Bradford pears thrive here. Secondly, human priorities and needs change. “We loved these trees once,” Haskell says. “Now we view them as a massive problem. Isn’t that more about us and our values than it is about this tree?” What will our needs be in 100 years? Corn, he reminds me, is an exotic species. Due to human need, it has decimated most Midwestern prairies.

  Haskell is forty-eight, tall and lanky, with a prominent nose and a bearing that is both slightly formal and slightly awkward. His most distinguishing feature is his accent, which is impossible to place. He was born in England, raised in Paris, and educated at Oxford and Cornell, and he spent the past 20 years in Tennessee. As he has mentioned to journalists before, wherever he goes people tell him: “You’re not from here.”

  The Songs of Trees is similarly global. The book focuses on 12 individual trees around the world. Along with our Bradford
pear, the lineup includes a balsam fir in the backwoods of northwestern Ontario, an olive tree at the Damascus Gate in the old city of Jerusalem, and a giant ceibo deep in the Ecuadorean rainforest, a tree that requires a plane, a bus, two boats, and two days to access. There’s a bonsai white pine, two feet tall, that spent its first 350 years in Japan before arriving at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., in 1976 as a bicentennial gift. There’s a cottonwood sapling in downtown Denver that’s been repeatedly reduced to wood chips by beavers. Haskell’s hazel tree in Scotland is 10,369 years old. It exists as fingernail-sized bits of black charcoal stored in carefully labeled plastic bags in the Edinburgh offices of a commercial archeology firm.

  For two years, Haskell visited all these trees multiple times, spending dozens of hours with each. Day and night, through rain and snow, he watched and listened over long, contemplative stretches. Some sessions were less contemplative than others. One time in Ecuador, having climbed 10 stories up metal ladders attached to the trunk of his ceibo tree, Haskell was taking in the endless biodiversity around him when a bullet ant stabbed him in the neck. “The pain was like a strike on a bell cast from the purest bronze: clear, metallic, single-toned,” he writes. Dazed, he flailed at his attacker, only to have it carve a chunk out of his left index finger with its powerful jaws. “Unlike the stinger’s purity,” he continues in the book, “this pain was a shriek, a fire, a confusion. Over minutes, the sensation ran across the skin of my hand, a cacophony and panic that soaked the hand in sweat. For the next hour my arm was incapacitated.” Similarly, he arrived at his olive tree in Jerusalem on one occasion to find its branches “hung with medical equipment and fluorescent safety vests,” the gear of Palestinian medics anticipating violence associated with Nakba Day (the “catastrophe” of the founding of Israel). Haskell watched from the tree as security forces slammed into surging protesters, headlocking and dragging several into an armored truck. Still another time, he wandered at night through the dunes of St. Catherines Island off the Georgia coast during a terrifying tropical storm, unable to locate his sabal palm:

  Tonight I discovered that the tree had fallen. Every wave soaks the upturned rootball, and ocean water drowns fronds that, a few days ago, stood atop a nine-meter-tall trunk, lush and vigorous. The fronds were talkative, full of rustle and snap. Now, I hear in them only the detonations and bellow of the sea’s quarrel with the land.

  Through all this Haskell extracted stories, tales of conflict and cooperation, of life and death. Consider just one example—ants and fungi. High in the crown of the ceibo lives a parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps, that specializes in invading the body of an ant, consuming it from within, and then somehow commanding it, in its final throes, to anchor itself with its mandibles onto a leaf. From this dangling carcass, infectious fungal spores fall onto the ants beneath. But in other instances, ants and fungi enjoy symbiotic relationships. Below the ceibo, fungi growing inside leafcutter colonies receive a steady supply of fresh leaves and in turn provide meals for the ants. These stories, or “songs” in Haskell’s parlance, reveal biological networks—trees networked to other trees, to other plants and animals, to the physical world, to the ancient past. Human beings are very much integrated into these networks, whether the particular tree is located deep in the Amazon or in the heart of Manhattan.

  “Muir said that if you want to experience nature, get the hell out of the city!” Haskell tells me, yelling to be heard over a double accordion bus roaring down Broadway. But the very notion of nature stands as a barrier between people and the rest of the community of life, he insists. Cities should be viewed as no more or less natural than a mountain stream running through the so-called wilderness. Noting the urban chaos surrounding us, Haskell says, loudly, “This city is the product of a species that evolved, an advanced primate, Homo sapiens.” In Haskell’s view, Manhattan can’t be anything but nature.

  We’re starting to draw looks. The guy running the newsstand momentarily leaves his post and stares at us. Then he swigs some water from a bottle, spits it out under the tree, and goes back to selling papers.

  7:26 p.m.

  The Seventh Avenue Express throttles through the subway tunnel two stories beneath us. We feel it under our feet. We also watch it on an app on Haskell’s phone, three rippling lines registering the vibration along three different axes. Pressure waves are traveling from the rumbling subway cars into the steel and concrete tunnel, through the ground, and into the iron railing that surrounds the tree and on which Haskell’s phone rests. The accelerometer inside his phone captures the movement. Our tree is experiencing the same vibrations as the railing.

  In response to decades of train reverberation, the tree has pumped major resources into anchorage, he explains. It has fattened and stiffened its roots with more cellulose and lignin. It hugs the earth tighter than most trees in the forest. Hillside trees do something similar, growing stronger roots along whichever axis the wind typically blows. “This tree is taking the vibratory energy of its environment into its body,” Haskell says. The city actually becomes part of the tree. In his book, he explains this by subverting Nietzsche: “What does not kill me becomes part of me, erasing another boundary. Flexure of a tree brings within what was outside. Wood is an embodied conversation between plant life [and] shudder of ground.”

  7:31 p.m.

  A monster dump truck thunders past, grinding its gears. “Did you hear that!” Haskell yells. “Yes!” I yell back. How could I not? “No,” he says. “The sparrows.” The birds are flitting about the tree’s upper branches, swooping down occasionally to fetch crumbs. “I’m hearing the sparrows even though that truck just went by,” he says. “If you planted a spectrogram, it would pick up all the low frequencies, like that truck, and the house sparrows would register above that.” Sparrows and starlings, he explains, move their calls into higher registers to communicate over the urban rumble. Most bird species can’t adapt like that. They lose their acoustic social networks and disappear from urban areas. But sparrows and starlings, along with pigeons, occupy 80 percent of the world’s cities. “Their environment has changed them,” Haskell says.

  7:33 p.m.

  Haskell considers our Bradford pear. “That tree isn’t an individual,” he says. “It’s a community.” The same could be said for the seemingly autonomous people zipping by—the bike messenger, the woman texting, the guy with the groceries. Just as Bradford pears and house sparrows have incorporated the city into their beings, so too have people, insists Haskell. “We’ve been yelling and contorting our faces to communicate over the noise,” he says. In his book, he cites other examples. “Pitch and genre of music change our perception of food and wine. A Tchaikovsky waltz . . . evokes a feeling of sophistication on the tongue that is absent when dining with a soundtrack of rock music.” Or consider any of New York’s street food, he says. It’s almost always salty or spicy, otherwise you’d hardly taste it over the city’s noise and smells. What we think of as inner thoughts and judgments, Haskell says, are very much shaped by external networks. The same rock band performing on this corner would sound louder performing at the same volume in a national park, because we expect national parks to be quieter.

  When he was a boy, Haskell would often sit still near the pond in his backyard and just look at things. “It was my disposition as a kid,” he says. His family moved to Paris from London when Haskell was three, after his father, a physicist, joined the European Space Agency. His mother was a biologist. When Haskell was six, he wrote this story: “Once upon a time there was a golden tadpole and one day he started to grow his hind legs and then he was getting very excited because he was growing his front legs and then a few day’s after his tail went in and he was a frog.” His mother, Jean, was impressed. “Most people think the tail falls off,” she says. “But his story was absolutely biologically correct.”

  At the British School of Paris, Haskell fell in love with Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, and many other poets. But the British education system soo
n demanded specialization, and he spent his last two years at the school and his time at Oxford immersed exclusively in biology. He wrote his thesis, “Parasites and the Maintenance of Sexual Reproduction in Blackberries,” under the tutelage of William Hamilton, one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century. At Oxford, Haskell also learned a fair bit from a pet rat named Bisquit. Watching the rodent range freely about his apartment, he observed that rats “are all about social bonds with others. Bisquit had only humans, but rats in the wild live in complex social networks. What one rat learns gets transmitted through the network. A rat community is like a scaly tailed, hairy super-brain, figuring out where and what is safe.”

  At Cornell, Haskell studied ground-nesting wood warblers. In his Ph.D. research, he found that the reason chicks don’t attract predators with their cries for food is that high-frequency sounds travel only short distances in the forest. It was also at Cornell that Haskell learned to meditate. He described what is now a twice-daily 20-minute practice to me this way: “I sit, and the mental flotsam passes by, sometimes sweeping me into its tangles, sometimes drifting by observed but not entered. I started because I had a sense that my inner disorder needs a practice of trying to pay attention.”