Heliophage

From Profiles of the Future

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Pictures: Hubble ultra deep field image from NASA; “Minehead Blue” by Gary Newman, all rights reserved (and with many thanks)

Over the holiday I read Richard Mabey’s Beechcombings (Amazon UK), a fascinating and enjoyable book about which I may well have more to say, but which I currently wish simply to digest and to put into the context of some other current reading.

However, this passage from Edward Carpenter (mystical socialist and, wikilegedly, the man who introduced the sandal into Britain) that he quotes in a chapter called “Electric Beeches” struck such a chord of recognition with me that I thought I’d share it here, along with the passage in Eating the Sun it reminded me of:

It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early spring. Suddenly I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and upturned fingertips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged into the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky, and full of the most amazing activity.

– Pagan and Christian Creeds, 1904

Now reverse the polarity:

Think of a beech tree in winter, its leaves lost, its architecture revealed in dark lines against cold grey cloud. Do what Robin Hill used to urge his children to do to cultivate the artist’s eye—take away the tree’s established “common sense” context by turning round, bending over and looking at it upside down through your legs. Its growth looks less like something pushed from the earth than it does something drawn from the sky. Its limbs, branches and twigs spread into the air like ink into blotting paper or cracks spreading through glass, embodying something between desire and transubstantiation.

The tree’s form tells the truth. The tree grows into the air because it grows out of the air. The bulk of the tree is not made from the soil beneath it—indeed, the soil is in large part made by the tree. Both soil and tree are made from carbon drawn from the sky above. Trees are built from sun and wind and rain. The land is just a place to stand.

– Eating the Sun, 2007

“No longer a separable organism” strikes a strong chord with me, and “ramifying into space” always seems like a good idea. Most crucially, “Sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky”, as Carpenter had it, is more or less what photosynthesis does, and as such what I set out to celebrate. But it does it by pumping celestial energies into the earth, not vice versa. As in electric circuits of a more mundane sort, the earth is the sink, not the source.

Beech tree picture from Treehugger, under a creative commons license. And while we’re at it here are some more beeches from talented people on Flickr

Since one of the infrequent commenters here actually asked, I dug up what I wrote about Prince Charles (One of Time’s Heroes of the Environment) in Newsweek International, June 14th 1999. It’s basically just another example of my tedious banging on on the subject of “nature”, but still current, in that I don’t think my views on this aspect of the subject have changed much in the intervening eight years.

Getting Nostalgic About ‘Nature’

In the debate over genetically modified crops, the question isn’t what’s natural–it’s what’s right. And that’s hard political work.

One of the few diverting aspects of Britain’s largely joyless European election campaign has been the Natural Law Party’s approach to the issues. Other parties say simply that a particular version of Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe would be a rather good or bad thing–whatever. The Natural Law Party [now defunct, alas], on the other hand, promotes the values of Transcendental Meditation and yogic flying, an advanced form of the art which consists of flapping your knees while bouncing around in something like the lotus position. Apparently this has already lessened levels of violence in both Merseyside and the Middle East. The Natural Lawyers do, however, have one concrete political policy. The party wants a Europewide ban on all genetically modified crops.

In this, if in little else, the Natural Law Party is very much in the mainstream. The British public has taken against genetically modified crops in a big way. Activists uproot them and supermarkets attempt not to furnish their customers with them. This week the Prince of Wales–a landowner and organic farmer–came out against them for the umpteenth time, a piece of non-news that still managed to provoke headlines throughout the realm.

Europeans have in general been more skeptical about genetically modified crops than Americans, who have so far swallowed the idea, and the food, with relatively few qualms. And among the Europeans the Brits have been particularly adamant in their refusal to have any truck with such things. The recent history of British agricultural politics–the culling of millions of cows for fear that their increasing madness was spreading into the population at large–has left the public profoundly distrustful of unnatural tinkering in the food chain. The prince says that he wants us to reject all genetic modification and instead work with nature for the long-term benefit of humankind.

The problem with this desire is that nature has no interest at all in the long-term benefit of humankind. Nature has no interest in anything. And even if it did, mankind has been overriding nature routinely for millennia. That’s what agriculture is all about. A natural Britain would be a woodland that could feed only a few–when not covered by the glaciers of a natural ice age. Selective breeding–a subject royalty understands in its bones–removed nature from the farmyard long before the first endonucleases started to cut up the first artificial strands of DNA.

People like the prince use nature not biologically but nostalgically, to refer to a time when things were not so dashed artificial. This is the perennial window dressing of the reactionary, nature as an ideological prop for people whose notion of what is natural tends to include their own position in society. For the prince–doubtless considered by many, if not himself, as Britain’s natural sovereign–nature is part of our very souls, which is why we have an instinctive nervousness about tampering with it. His love for authentic British farming practices is thus part of his sense of what the nature of the British people is, an ideology of blood and the Soil Association.

It is no shock that a man whose own genes have a constitutional importance should worry about genes elsewhere. And some issues that the prince brings up are legitimate causes for concern. The effect of genetically altered organisms on the wider environment needs to be understood better than it is today. The idea that this technology may be controlled by very few companies is disturbing. It fuels widespread fear that genetic modification will serve only as a handmaiden to agribusiness, rather than producing higher-yielding crops to be distributed equitably among farmers in developing countries. But these are all arguments for getting the genetic modification of crops right, technically and politically: not for abandoning it as intrinsically immoral simply because it is unnatural.

The question is not what is natural. It is what is right. Reaching a judgment about that means balancing a lot of different issues and interests: the freedom a company should have to pursue profit within the law; the fear of harm to health or the environment; the altruistic wish to develop technologies that genuinely help developing nations; the self-interest that leads people to want cheaper or better food. Balancing these things is hard political work. But it is possible, and democracies have shown themselves in the long run to be pretty good at it. Democratic efforts to such ends, however, are not helped by a counterproductive nostalgia. Being unhelpful is not against the law, nor should it be. But the fact that Charles gets a platform on such matters purely because of the situation he was born into is still offensive. The bouncy-bottomed Natural Law Party may stand for a lot of tosh, but at least it stands for elections. That puts it one up on the prince.

Prince Charles picture from Smileykt on a creative commons licence; yogic fliers copyright apparently unknown.

In a flattering post that takes up the ideas I went into here, Back40 draws our attention to Sick of nature, an essay on nature writing and its problems by the author David Gessner (his website) in which he lets off considerable, amusing and thought provoking steam about his craft/calling/curse/whatever

I AM SICK of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. It’s been almost four years now, four years of sitting quietly in my study and sipping tea and contemplating the migratory patterns of the semipalmated plover. Four years of writing essays praised as “quiet” by quiet magazines. Four years of having neighborhood children ask their fathers why the man down the street comes to the post office dressed in his pajamas (”Doesn’t he work, Daddy?”) or having those same fathers wonder why, when the man actually does dress, he dons the eccentric costume of an English bird watcher, complete with binoculars. And finally, four years of being constrained by the gentle straightjacket of the nature-writing genre; that is, four years of writing about the world without being able to use the earthier names for excrement (while talking a lot of scat).

Worse still, it’s been four years of living within a literary form that, for all its wonder and beauty, can be a little like going to Sunday School. A strange Sunday School where I alternate between sitting in the pews (reading nature) and standing at the pulpit (writing nature). And not only do I preach from my pulpit, I preach to the converted. After all, who reads nature books?

Gessner goes on to discuss Thoreau’s Walden and Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (which should have been a bigger influence on Mapping Mars than it was) with an insightful eye and a great turn of phrase, before concluding thus:

The best writing in this genre is not really “nature writing” anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about “Walden” 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There’s something to celebrate.

Meanwhile at Back40 our host, who works the land for a living, talks about the local and global.

Though I am in fact rooted in particular land, fully engaged in a specific place, it is global in Oliver’s sense. I have long seen it this way too. It isn’t only the carbon but also the nitrates, synthesized in electrical storms and that falls in rain, and other minerals that fall from the dusty skies, carried across the Pacific from China on high altitude wind currents, as well as the things I put on that land - everything from Dutch grass seeds to British cattle genes via New Zealand. Even the weeds are immigrants from every continent - as am I.

I prize a vision of natural systems that explicitly acknowledges all of this in dynamic relationship. To truly see it you need to somehow split your focus to include the micro and macro, the very far and the very near, the past, present and future, all at once. It’s hard to do, but worth the effort I think.

That last bit is my point exactly.

Picture of Walden Pond plaque from Mary Ellen Goodwin, picture of David Gessner from his site, all rights presumably reserved.

An interesting piece about climbing trees in Saturday’s Guardian review by Robert Macfarlane, whose Wild Places I am greatly looking forward to. It prompts further thoughts about how Eating the Sun fits in to (or complements, perhaps) the new crop of British nature writing which Macfarlane both illuminates as leading light and serves as cheerleader, and which made up a big chunk of The Independent’s Top Ten Nature Books list

He writes:

The past few months have seen a flourishing of first-person narratives in search of some version of “nature”. To borrow an ecological metaphor, it has been a “mast year” for nature writing. To the books already mentioned could be added Mark Cocker’s hymn to localism, Crow Country, and Jules Pretty’s elegantly forceful The Earth Only Endures. All these volumes differ markedly in tone, but all share a passionate engagement with “the land”, in Aldo Leopold’s rich sense of that word.

This British nature writing resurgence - and it is emphatically a resurgence, not the emergence of a new form - is only one aspect of the wider back-to-nature movement under way in Britain. No great claims should be made for the effects of this literature. It is not planet-saving, nor does it substitute for the hard work of field science and conservation. But it does annotate, and perhaps stimulate, our increasing desire for what Pretty calls “reconnection with nature”.

I see some of myself and my purpose in that: Eating the Sun is definitely “in search of some version of ‘nature’”, and it is more of a first-person narrative than I necessarily expected it to be. But it does not share “a passionate engagement with ‘the land’”. Indeed rather the reverse. One of its original aims, which I think is probably fulfilled to some extent, but perhaps not as explicitly as it might have been, was to celebrate air as the basis of life — which it is for plants and thus, indirectly, for us. One aspect of this is to encourage an appreciation that the air is universal where the land is particular — the carbon taken in by trees in Brazil has come in part from your lungs and mine, the carbon taken in by the rose on my terrace has come from all the lungs of the world, not to mention coals that have sat buried for a million centuries.

One of my reasons for writing about photosyntheses was specifically this — that it was a way to talk about the living earth that did not have to be a way of talking about specific places (though there are specific places in the book, some of which I love deeply). I find ideologies of land and rootedness worrying intellectually and hard to partake in emotionally; I suspect them of being innately regressive and conservative. One of the great opportunities of the current carbon/climate crisis is to create what might be called an ideology of air — of valuing and caring for something common to all and intrinsically global, and of creating a passionate engagement with the open sky and the endless sun.

And a corollary of that stance further distances me from the tradition that Macfarlane is celebrating and reinvigorating. I have no back-to-nature yearnings. I see the golden age of humanity’s relationship with the natural world lying ahead of us, in large part because I greatly prize the role of understanding in that relationship, and I value scientific understanding very highly. Much though I admire the tradition that Macfarlane sees reemerging, I feel my writing to be drawn out of the future more than out of the past.

Yet at the same time I share a delight in the detail of what is, and at my best an attentiveness to it, which seems to be of a piece with that which he celebrates. And I look forward to his book even more.

Well Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet was officially published in the UK on Monday (available at a good price through Amazon.co.uk), and by wonderful chance got its first press outing just two days later. The Independent ran a feature on the 10 best nature books, listing

Heat by George Monbiot

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey

Eating the Sun by Oliver Morton

In the Beat of a Heart by John Whitfield

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge

The Creation by E O Wilson

Wildwood by Roger Deakin

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

An Ocean of Air by Gabrielle Walker

Which is all in all extremely nice, as well as exalted, company to be in. I have the pleasure of working with two of the others — Gabrielle and John — from time to time as an editor a Nature, and have been a fan and friend of Colin Tudge’s for a couple of decades (though see him only scandalously rarely). I haven’t yet read the Mabey and Macfarlane books, though I mean to, but I greatly enjoyed the serialisation of Mabey’s Nature Cure on Radio 4 when I was writing Eating the Sun. I’m reading the Deakin now and like it immensely.

I think I’ll have more to say, in time, about the different attitudes to nature in Mabey, Macfarlane and Deakin, and others such, and in my own work. There’s a contrast there which interest me. (Update: some of this has now been said.)

The little accompanying blurb in the Indy (the whole feature seems to have no home online) says

“Morton’s book explains how biologists discovered photosynthesis, and, by doing so, gained a new understanding of Earth’s history. A surprisingly fascinating read.”

Updated after publication to add a few links, and to take the capital off “nature” — for some reason capitalising it now seems second something-or-other to me…