First off, introductions: Hello all, there’s a new Maggie of Lemuria in town!
Well, not really. You might recognize my face. I’ve been in and out of the Lemuria rotating staff since the summer of 2013 before my senior year of high school. After a summer internship in Oz, I worked part-time as a senior, learned enough to provide an extra hand to wrap or work Oz during the holidays, and here we are. I just keep coming back, even after my freshman year at Ole Miss. I’m working on an English degree my parents still disapprove of.
Okay, glad we got that out of the way.
Recently, I’ve become acquainted with the genre of “environmental creative nonfiction”. Bear with me- it’s a fascinating niche of literature despite its horrendous umbrella term.
When I say environmental creative nonfiction, I’m talking about adventure pieces by John Krakauer, Cheryl Strayed’s wilderness memoir Wild, and Rick Bass’s diary-style Winter: Notes from Montana. What these pieces have in common are their personal narratives of growth and experience as influenced by their environment. The environment becomes a character within the work because it plays such a crucial role in where the piece goes.
One of my favorite pieces within this highly specific genre is David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen. I was first introduced to this work in Nature Writing, an English course I was lucky enough to weasel my way into during my second semester. I was mostly in it for the chance to get some real writing critique and a trip to Costa Rica (lemme tell you friends, it was awesome), but I was lucky enough to also be exposed to some really phenomenal works of nonfiction.
David George Haskell is a professor of biology at Sewanee, and The Forest Unseen follows what he refers to as “A Year’s Watch in Nature”. Haskell observes a one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest, referred to as the mandala, for an entire year. The work is divided into chapters concerning specific anecdotes and aspects of life in the mandala, from fungi to insects to plant and animal interaction, touching on how all are linked together in a complex web. Everything is intensely researched and backed up with scientific fact. There are detailed descriptions of life cycles, bizarre adaptations, histories of scientific discovery. But what makes The Forest Unseen such a phenomenal book is Haskell’s skilled weaving of the scientific and the spiritual.
It begins with Haskell’s use of the term “mandala”. Mandalas are small circular sand drawings that are representative of the entirety of the universe and are in the tradition of Tibetan monks. From this one concept, Haskell brings into his book a complex layer of spirituality. He alludes to many different branches of faith and their relationship to the environment, discusses the nature of souls within the concept of the natural world, and draws parallels between his observations and religious concepts. By discussing spirituality in relation to science within the concept of the mandala, Haskell connects humanity to the environment, something we so often tend to view as some inconceivable other.
I want to put this book into everyone’s hands. I look for any excuse to recommend it to someone, but it is such a hard book to quickly summarize. It is about so much. It is about humanity and the environment and religion and science and the relationship between it all. It is about the past and the future. It has the power to speak to you if you let it.
In short, Haskell transforms a potentially dry, textbook subject into an ethereal reading experience (okay, maybe it’s a bit dry at the beginning but you can’t have everything). He creates intoxicating yet informative prose that reads like a poetry collection and a textbook. He brings the environment he observes to life, lets it breathe on the page and gives it a voice. Haskell has me head-over-heels in love with environmental creative nonfiction, and I have a feeling this is going to be a rather drawn-out love affair.
Comments are closed.