The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
David George Haskell

Viking Adult
March 15, 2012 / ISBN 978-0670023370
Earth Sciences
Amazon

Reviewed by Beth E. McKenzie

While I was at university, I had a roommate studying Geological Engineering. One of her class projects was to map the geological features of one square mile from a USGS topographical map. We crawled all over the assigned plot every weekend and several afternoons that spring, striding between landmarks, measuring the strike and dip of the creek bank, marking down fence lines and telephone poles, pastures and homes. I saw my first trout on one of those trips; a frightening beast, no wonder we eat them.

Dr. Haskell provides us with a series of peeks over the course of a year into an isolated corner of an old growth Tennessee forest near the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau. He established his laboratory by walking "haphazardly through the forest and stopping when I found a suitable rock on which to sit". He thinks of the study area as a mandala (the whole forest as seen through a one-meter circle of land) and was inspired toward this project by the art of Tibetan sand painting, whereby monks create a symbolic mandala from colored sand in part as a ritual of concentration and to demonstrate the transient nature of the works of man. From each of the recorded sessions at the mandala we get an essay about some feature of the forest and the philosophy that comes with introspection and meditation. I particularly enjoyed the times when the Professor is startled by a conundrum, like when he debates whether the cuteness of the raccoon family is an appropriate consideration for a naturalist, or whether a wayward golf ball in the mandala is trash or treasure. I loved the bugs and the goo and the smells, the katydid song and the wind bending the trees.

I do not believe that I am trivializing Dr. Haskell's work when I say this would be an interesting experiment to try in your own woods or schoolyard through the seasons. The laboratory you establish may not be as complex or pristine, but with study, it will give up some of its secrets, and maybe it can help you understand a few of your own.