by Sam Kean
After grad school, Haskell took a position at the University of the South, commonly referred to as Sewanee. It was a dream job for an ecologist. Perched atop the Cumberland Plateau, Sewanee encompasses 13,000 acres, 91 percent of it undeveloped forestland. Physically, it’s among the largest universities in the country, with the highest diversity of plant species of any campus. Haskell could stroll out of his office and in minutes be in extraordinary old-growth forest.
In time, Haskell became known at Sewanee for his Yoda-like connection to nature. “One day I walked out of the science building, and David mentioned that the tree frogs were peeping,” says Marvin Pate, formerly Sewanee’s director of sustainability. “It was so subtle. I never would have heard them. If I had, I wouldn’t have known what they were.” Another time, Haskell was hiking through the forest with a former student, Leighton Reid, who directs restoration-ecology projects around the world for the Missouri Botanical Garden. “He hears something and asks me, ‘Are those katydids?’” recalls Reid. “I could barely hear anything. At most it was white noise. And I pay attention to things. I’m in the forest all the time.”
Haskell hated the boundaries between academic disciplines and felt scientists needed the arts and humanities. “He’s a serious biologist, so there’s that scientific side of him,” says Jim Peters, a philosophy professor who co-taught “Ecology and Ethics” with Haskell. “But science as purely objective reasoning, he doesn’t believe that. Science can help us understand, but it’s not pure infallibility. David has an interdisciplinary mind.”
Haskell sometimes canceled class so that his students could experience distinguished visitors on campus, of any discipline. They watched Buddhist monks create a mandala. They listened to pianist Jeremy Denk play a concerto. Haskell’s “Food and Hunger” course was a multi-subject free-for-all that incorporated two of his passions, meditation and horticulture. (On one acre, Haskell grew most of the vegetables he consumed, along with raising goats, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and bees.) The course explored the ecological aspects of food production, alongside the historical and social aspects of poverty in nearby rural communities. Students practiced a form of lectio divina, reading aloud about hunger and then reflecting silently on the text. For Thanksgiving, they prepared a meal for 80 needy local residents.
7:50 p.m.
Haskell shows me some photos. Strolling here today, he had snapped pictures of several tree beds. One shows a trunk surrounded by carefully placed pieces of broken brickwork and creeping ivy. Another has miniature white plastic fencing enclosing what appears to be marijuana growing around the tree. The photos delight Haskell. “These are stories of how people are connected to their trees,” he says. The bed beneath our tree is tended by the management of the apartment building on this block, the Belmont. Studies show that the survival rate for trees cared for by neighborhoods in the city is 100 percent, whereas trees that are planted by municipal workers and left on their own have a 60 percent chance of dying within a decade. “Literally, the life of this tree depends on its connection to the community,” Haskell says.
It’s a two-way relationship. Haskell presses his hand against the trunk and shows me his sooty palm. The tree is filtering the air. Annually, the city’s 5 million trees remove 2,000 tons of air pollutants and 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide. New York’s tree-planting program now consults maps of asthma hospitalization rates and tree cover in determining which blocks to revegetate.
8:06 p.m.
The howling starts.
A gentleman with wild eyes and terribly mismatched clothes is slouching across Broadway from the other side, coming straight at a group of women who have just exited a yoga class. The racket he’s producing contains hints of melodic content, but only hints, like someone singing the blues while getting his prostate checked. For their part, the yogis scatter like billiard balls on the break.
Haskell segues into some ecological play-by-play: “With social networking, you’ve got all sorts of people manifesting in different ways of being. It’s like the interaction between tree roots and fungi. There are a lot of social interactions, but there’s also an immune system. If someone seems threatening, you’re going to close off. What we’re seeing here mirrors what a root is doing when it’s conversing with fungi. It’s open to conversation. In fact, it will die without conversation, without connection. But if you’re open to any kind of connection, you’re going to get exploited. A tree root would get overrun with pathogenic fungi and soon die.”
Haskell just compared the singing drunk to a deadly fungus.
8:16 p.m.
Haskell’s eyes dart skyward. “That high-pitched call,” he says. “Kestrel.”
I hear nothing. I look up in time to glimpse a black comma soaring high over 86th Street, heading toward Central Park.
Haskell’s not an overly emotional guy, but I can tell he’s completely jacked up. In two years of observations here, he has spotted exactly five faunal species: house sparrows, starlings, pigeons, one high-flying red-tailed hawk, and one seemingly lost warbler. Kestrels are cavity nesters, so he wonders if someone has erected kestrel boxes in Central Park. “A kestrel is another dimension to the story of this tree, but on a different scale,” he says. “It’s like connecting a strand from the tree to wherever the bird is headed. It speaks to my excitement of flight. It’s flying over the city and seeing the buildings from above.”
In 2004, on a cold January morning, Haskell hiked into Sewanee’s Shakerag Hollow, wandered off-trail, and stopped only when he found a flat slab of sandstone to sit on. Internally, Haskell had reached a crossroads. He could continue publishing papers with names like “Phylogenetic Analysis of Threatened and Range-Restricted Limestone Specialists in the Land Snail Genus Anguispira” that few people read. Or he could try something that accessed more parts of who he is. For some time he had maintained a poetry blog, posting a new haiku every day. And of course he had his meditation practice. What if he combined these three strands—science, meditation, and creative writing? What if he did that right here, in this exact spot in the forest? What might he create?
He had no idea. But it felt right.
Haskell determined to return to this spot over and over. He would come with no agenda, conduct no experiments, collect no specimens. He would simply pay attention. He would later augment his observations with library research. He began calling the meter-square area of ground in front of his rock his “forest mandala,” supposing that, just as Buddhist monks believe that the entire universe can be seen through a small circle of colored sand, so too are a forest’s ecological stories all present in a mandala-sized area of ground.
What’s striking about the essays Haskell subsequently produced aren’t necessarily the passages on horsehair worms commandeering the bodies of unsuspecting crickets, or the role of natural selection in shaping our fear of copperheads. That stuff is wonderfully weird and mind-blowing, as is the scene in late January when Haskell almost gets hypothermia after stripping naked at the mandala to compare his body’s reaction to the freezing temperature with that of the Carolina chickadee. But the project’s real juice flows from his treatment of the least appreciated inhabitants of the mandala—the algae, the fungi, the bacteria. Here’s a passage from the book about lichen:
Lichens don’t cling to water as plants and animals do. A lichen body swells on damp days, then puckers as the air dries . . . This approach to life has been independently discovered by others. In the fourth century BCE, the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi wrote of an old man tossed in the tumult at the base of a tall waterfall. Terrified onlookers rushed to his aid, but the man emerged unharmed and calm. When asked how he could survive this ordeal, he replied “acquiescence . . . I accommodate myself to the water, not the water to me.” Lichens found this wisdom four hundred million years before the Taoists. The true masters of victory through submission in Zhangzi’s allegory were the lichens clinging to the rock walls around the waterfall.
Nobody had ever heard of Haskell
when Viking published The Forest Unseen in 2012, but soon people were comparing him to Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. The book won a National Academy of Sciences Award, and along with being short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, it was runner-up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. “I started reading it and thought, ‘Oh no, another concept-driven book,’” says Tom Levenson, a Pulitzer judge and professor of science writing at MIT. “The fear is that the author lays out this very clever premise and it won’t work. And it’s a really constrained premise, one square meter of ground. But he extracts an enormous amount of meaning from that by using incredibly precise poetic language.”
Forest was translated into nine languages, including Latvian and two forms of Chinese. Ultimately, the book helped land Haskell a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, providing him funding for his next project—listening to trees.
Haskell was interested in arboreal acoustics—wind rustling through branches, raindrops falling on leaves, woodpeckers hammering bark—and what they indicate about ecosystem networks. But he also saw trees as characters that could provide access to the stories of different landscapes across the globe. The overriding theme, as it had been in Forest, was connection and relationships, but this time Haskell wanted to explore how humans fit into these networks, both in places where they seemed absent but weren’t (the Amazon) and in places where nature seemed absent but wasn’t (Manhattan). If people were as connected to the community of life as other organisms, what did that say about the kind of environmental ethic humans should have?
Of course, the idea of listening to a tree is a little weird, especially if you stumble unknowingly upon Haskell doing it. In 2013, Rebecca Hannigan, then a Sewanee sophomore with no knowledge of Haskell’s upcoming tree book, attended the school’s island-ecology field camp on St. Catherines. Haskell was there to teach but occasionally stole away to visit a particular sabal palm, one of his 12 chosen trees. Late one afternoon, Hannigan spied Haskell alone behind the dunes, holding an audio-recording device beneath the tree. “He was talking into it, then holding it up to the tree, like he was interviewing it and expecting a response,” Hannigan recalls. “It was odd.”
Thursday 8:40 a.m.
“That guy in the green shirt,” Haskell says, “that’s Stanley.” A 70-year-old African American man is glad-handing his way down the sidewalk. For most of the year except summer, Stanley Bethea sells children’s books from under the shade of our tree.
“How ya doin’?” Bethea says, recognizing Haskell. “The tree sure looks good, don’t it?”
“It does,” says Haskell.
Bethea can’t chat long. Kids are clamoring after him. “They get very upset if I don’t speak to them!” he says.
Had he stayed, Bethea could have told us everything that’s blooming in the city right now—the crape myrtles, hydrangeas, hibiscus, everything. “He’s tuned in to the flowering rhythms of this place,” Haskell says. “He’s been around a long time.”
Ultimately, Haskell contends that guys like Bethea—not academics like himself, or Sierra Club activists, or Washington bureaucrats—are best positioned to make good judgments about landscapes and ecosystems. Bethea is a deeply rooted member of this ecological community, as are the neighborhood folks caring for Manhattan’s street trees. They have a mature sense of ecological aesthetics based on belonging, and their ethic will stem from what they view as beautiful and whole. At his olive tree in Jerusalem, Haskell found Bethea’s counterparts in Israeli and Palestinian olive farmers. At his ceibo tree in Ecuador, it was the Waorani Indians. “Embodied, lived experiences within the community of life seems like a pretty good guide to me,” he says.
8:45 a.m.
A small white butterfly flits by. Haskell is stunned. “I’ve never seen a butterfly here,” he says. It’s nothing more than a garden-variety cabbage white, but you’d think he’d just spotted an elusive snow leopard. We’re still digesting this historic wildlife sighting when I happen to look up and notice three geese passing overhead.
“No, cormorants,” Haskell corrects me. “Double-crested cormorants! Those are fish-hunting birds. They must be feeding in the rivers.”
Haskell can barely contain himself. There’s a direct connection between the city’s trees and the Hudson and East Rivers, he explains. Roughly half of New York’s sewer system combines sewer and storm runoff, so traditionally, during heavy rains, untreated sewage would back up into the rivers. But trees slow rainwater and divert it into the soil. The city’s increased tree cover, combined with sewer improvements, has cleaned up the rivers significantly. There are more fish now, and thus more cormorants.
“In two days we’ve nearly doubled our species count at the tree,” Haskell says, delighted. He stares at the sky in wonder. We watch the cormorants fly toward the Hudson, until they disappear behind tall buildings.
JOSHUA ROTHMAN
A Science of the Soul
from The New Yorker
Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun.
The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves—constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made.
This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it’s been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of 40 years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind. Into his own he has crammed nearly every related discipline: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence. His newest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, tells us, “There is a winding path leading through a jungle of science and philosophy, from the initial bland assumption that we people are physical objects, obeying the laws of physics, to an understanding of our conscious minds.”
Dennett has walked that path before. In Consciousness Explained, a 1991 bestseller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focused exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness—qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.” Nowadays, philosophers are divided into two camps. The physicalists believe, with Dennett, that science can explain consciousness in purely material terms. The dualists believe that science can uncover only half of the picture: it can’t explain what Nabokov called “the marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.”
Late last year, Dennett found himself among such skeptics at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, where the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research had convened a meeting about animal consciousn
ess. The Edgewater was once a rock-and-roll hangout—in the late 1960s and 1970s, members of Led Zeppelin were notorious for their escapades there—but it’s now plush and sedate, with overstuffed armchairs and roaring fireplaces. In a fourth-floor meeting room with views of Mount Rainier, dozens of researchers shared speculative work on honeybee brains, mouse minds, octopus intelligence, avian cognition, and the mental faculties of monkeys and human children.
At sunset on the last day of the conference, the experts found themselves circling a familiar puzzle known as the “zombie problem.” Suppose that you’re a scientist studying octopuses. How would you know whether an octopus is conscious? It interacts with you, responds to its environment, and evidently pursues goals, but a nonconscious robot could also do those things. The problem is that there’s no way to observe consciousness directly. From the outside, it’s possible to imagine that the octopus is a “zombie”—physically alive but mentally empty—and, in theory, the same could be true of any apparently conscious being. The zombie problem is a conversational vortex among those who study animal minds: the researchers, anticipating the discussion’s inexorable transformation into a meditation on Westworld, clutched their heads and sighed.
Dennett sat at the seminar table like a king on his throne. Broad-shouldered and imposing, with a fluffy white beard and a round belly, he resembles a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus. He has meaty hands and a sonorous voice. Many young philosophers of mind look like artists (skinny jeans, T-shirts, asymmetrical hair), but Dennett carries a homemade wooden walking stick and dresses like a Maine fisherman, in beat-up boat shoes and a pocketed vest—a costume that gives him an air of unpretentious competence. He regards the zombie problem as a typically philosophical waste of time. The problem presupposes that consciousness is like a light switch: either an animal has a self or it doesn’t. But Dennett thinks these things are like evolution, essentially gradualist, without hard borders. The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have selves is that they sort of have them. He loves the phrase “sort of.” Picture the brain, he often says, as a collection of subsystems that “sort of” know, think, decide, and feel. These layers build up, incrementally, to the real thing. Animals have fewer mental layers than people—in particular, they lack language, which Dennett believes endows human mental life with its complexity and texture—but this doesn’t make them zombies. It just means that they “sort of” have consciousness, as measured by human standards.