“We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.”
We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities.
Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of
omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and
evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated
and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of
stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self
into relationship.
Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,”
separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life,
composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality
that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological
perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn,
wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the
estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of
Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the
beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and
Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.
We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.
Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all
the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying,
rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to
trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit
the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.
The Songs of Trees: A Biologist’s Lyrical Ode to How Relationships
Weave the Fabric of Life
Biologist David George Haskell
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