The Wild Trees by Richard Preston

 

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is another book I picked up a the Green Valley Book Fair, the same place I found Why Birds Sing.  Preston's book is an adventure through the world's oldest and tallest forests, with a big focus on the exploration of giant and coastal redwoods in California (two different species tree).  The narrative spans 20 years beginning in 1987 with Steve Sillet and Michael Taylor, unknown to each other at the time, but each finding the redwoods an irresistable wildnerness in need of exploration.  Taylor had a drive to find the biggest trees.  Sillet had a drive to climb them.  The book ends in 2006 with Sillet and Taylor, now close friends, finding and climbing the world's tallest tree, Hyperion, at just shy of 380 feet high.

 

The majority of the redwood forests have not been public land for very long.  It was only in 1978 that the government bought up most of the land on which the redwoods grow.  Ironically, it was this push to buy the forests and add it to national park lands that caused a lot of clearcuts.  The legislation for aquiring the land would allow the companies to take out any trees laying on the ground.  In response, the companies made sure that as many as possible were laying on the ground.  I'm not sure who learned a lesson there.  Probably no one.  Interspersed throughout the book, historical facts like this are thrown in as relevant to the exploration of the forests we still have.  Thankfully, the author does not drone on and beat a dead environmentalist horse at points like this.  The history is effectively given as a backdrop, not a sob story, actually adding to the book in a meaningful way without making detours into a fantasy wish-list of "what might have been" that journalists almost always fall into.

 

It was amazing to me how much of the redwood forests were and are still unexplored, beyond incomplete and inaccurate surveys by lumber companies.  This facet to the narrative is what I felt I could relate to and a part of the book I really enjoyed.  A lot of my weekends are spent hiking in Virginia's national forests, wilderness areas, and Shenandoah National Park.  Just recently I spent a Saturday afternoon trying to find a trail in St. Mary's Wilderness Area that the map said existed, but the real world refused to show me.  The adventures of Taylor in his search for the tallest trees put me right back into that wilderness area.  I could easily imagine Taylor crawling through all of that brush and trackless land, as the author's description was as close to my own experience in the wilderness as a second hand account could be.

 

The book is also about exploring the canopy of these tall trees.  Sillet became a pioneer of giant tree climbing, learning from others and coming up with his own techniques.  He would climb, study, and even sleep in hammocks at the top of the world's tallest trees.  The adventure in the sky was just as fun or more so to read as the adventure on the ground, sometimes keeping the pages turning like a crafted novel.  This section is from a September evening in 1994 when Sillet and a small climbing team were sleeping in a redwood named Telperion during a rain storm:

 

Steve Sillet couldn't get the Dyerville Giant out of his mind: that pancake of roots tipped up into the air, that crater forty feet across.  He was also concious of the fact that there were very few standing dead redwoods anywhere in the groves.  No rotting skeletons of redwoods standing upright.  The floor of the redwood forest was a maze of fallen trunks.  Now, in Telperion, the meaning of it became very clear: redwoods fall while they're still alive.

 

A heart stopping realization when your hammock is in the top a tree swaying to its breaking point in wind so loud you couldn't hear the guy next to you talking without yelling.

 

These sections of the narrative and the discoveries made in the canopy are what really kept me interested in the book.  The descriptions of what is actually up there in the tops of trees was so interesting that it has had me wondering for several days how I could get up into some of the trees in the forests here:  gardens of ferns, lichen, and moss; soil deep enough for colonies of earthworms, non-flying insects, and salamanders; bonzai-like trees growing in the crooks of branches creating mini-forests within a single top.  Of course, the top of a single redwood can be a huge place to explore:

 

"Adventure Tree is never exactly my first choice for a tree to climb," Antoine commented, as she got her stuff together in the garage. "My first experience climbing that tree was kind of scary."  I asked her what had been scary about Adventure.  "I got lost in it."

 

Some of what I learned just from this book has even made my local hikes more interesting.  I've been able to identify some of the strange lichen I was stomping through as something that originated in the tops of the trees, taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and returning it as fertilizer to the soil as the tree shed braches or as wind and wildlife knocked it from its perch.

 

This book contains many good stories, adventures, and even useful information.  However, the first two-thirds is also filled with grating soap opera type disfunction.  The adventure and exploration is often broken up by the personal life of the explorers.  Most of this I could really have done without.  I got pretty tired of reading about how this guy or that guy didn't have a clue about how his personal life was collapsing and the daytime tv style arguments and bad decisions they would make.  I realize the information is important to getting to know the people he is describing and why they do what they do, but I found the writing in these sections to be extremely poor to the point of almost skipping entire pages from boredom.  The only good thing about the writing and descriptions of these guys' personal lives is that these sections are completely forgettable.  That way they don't hurt much when you think back over what you've read.

 

Though badly written, there is one good lesson to learn from what is told about these guys.  When you dedicate your hightest priorities, affection, and even worship, to something incapable of returning that love (in this case trees), your life will rot from the inside out.  The lives of these two men suffer greatly until they find an actual person to whom they decide to give some of the attention they had always given to the trees.

 

In the end, I think I can better appreciate the forests I have here because of this book.  They seem more interesting in their details and pull the beauty of the wilderness higher into the sky.  Together with my recent fascination with birds, this book has made areas I've hiked in for 10 years a place with new mysteries to explore.

 

Author: Richard Preston

Title: The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (Paperback)

Genre: Science, Nature

Year: 2007, paperback 2008

 

These are some great photos of trees and people described in the book, a National Geographic video of measuring the world's tallest tree that features the people in this book, from Hulu an episode of National Geographic Explorer on the redwoods featuring some of the people in this book, and an October 2009 edition of National Geographic Magazine featuring redwoods.

 

 

 

Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg

Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg was one of the most engaging science books I've read. It can easily be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys the sound of birds whether they have head for science or not. There is a wide variety of material here, all of which gives you a better appreciation for the noise different species of birds make. Some of it seems musical to human ears and some does not, but regardless there is a lot to learn about the pattern and "lyric" (my term) that each bird uses. Rothenberg, with a combination of history, interviews, and personal experience, does a nice job of showing how science so far has only scratched the surface of what is going on in those little bird heads. I challenge you to read just the preface of this book and then see if you can put it back down without at least wishing you had the pocket money to bring it home.

The author is both philosopher and musician. He is a professor of philosophy and music at NJIT and plays the jazz clarinet. The writing of this book began with his attempt to interact and play music with birds at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The preface says that this encounter changed his "sense of how music emerges out of nature." His pursuit of the question of why birds sing incorporates a review of scientific observations, but he is not beyond challenging scientists to look beyond the base purposes of territory, food and mate. He relates one story where he was interviewed along side a bird song researcher who was put off by Rothenberg's assertion that bird song was more than a simple routine. To many scientists nature is just a complicated machine and bird song is just a kind of business transaction with females. Rothenberg says, "Nature is not a business." There is without doubt great benefit in the scientific method, but Rothenberg seems to lament that most scientists do not seem brave enough to reach for beauty as a reality instead of just a human mental construct. So do I, which may explain why I enjoyed all of this book.

Chapter one relates some of the author's experiences in the National Aviary that led to his pursuit of why birds sing. It is real enough in its descriptions that I have wanted to visit the place myself since I read it. Each bird is an individual and Rothenberg finds it easier play along with some more than others. The second chapter begins with the beginning of bird song research. At its beginning, bird song research was more poetry than science. The first records of people paying attention to the sound of birds is in poems and art, but even ancient philosophers like Aristotle took time to write about how birds learn to sing. As we move through the next chapters we move through stages of research and the knowledge revealed by those studies. We see how bird song transcriptions began with mnemonics (the spotted towhee's "chup-chup-zee" or the white throated sparrow's "old sam peabody, peabody, peabody"), then by the Enlightenment moved to detailed musical transcriptions only to later move back to mnemonics, then on to modern sonograms. Along the way we get insights into the lives of bird researchers and their desire to understand and relate to the birds they studied.

There are interesting historical tidbits and stories thrown in as well. For example, the European Starling was brought to the USA by a man in the 1800s who wanted to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to the New World. He released less than 200 of the birds into Central Park. It was such an invasive species that now one-third of the world's population of starlings is in America. Don't feel bad about shooting a few. I remember the great lengths that people went to rid the Texas A&M campus of the black smelly pests. I have seen them on many occasions fighting on my porch over bird food. However, they are actually very interesting birds in their song. It is not so musical, but very complex. They are also mimics, that can learn new songs and sounds throughout their whole lives. I'm sure you've seen them. They're the only black birds with yellow beaks in North America.

There is one extremely interesting little bird called the European Marsh Warbler that migrates from Northern Europe to Eastern Africa and back. His entire journey can be reconstructed by the song he sings. This bird imitates almost every other bird he encounters along his entire flight path, weaving all of the sounds into his own song.

If I'm not careful I'm going to get carried away here with interesting stories and lessons learned from this book.

His search for an answer does not come to a conclusion in the last chapter. In his words, "Can any explanation for beauty be satisfactory?" It was not his stated reason for writing, but Rothenberg does a good job of showing why looking for purpose in nature is always worthwhile, even if we have to employ an aesthetic means of understanding that modern science seems to shun. It may challenge your world view, but when one allows for purpose beyond survival and procreation the world becomes a place that allows for meaning in life instead of just being a place that we can breathe. Rothenberg thinks that science just hasn't gotten around to asking the kind of questions that will provide answers beyond function, but thinks that it will eventually. From my own observations of scientific trends, I am not so optimistic on this point as the author. Scientific observation reveals great purpose in all that we see and hear, but it will never touch the reasons why that purpose exists. I can only hope that Rothenberg will inspire other scientists to look beyond what bird song is used for and into what the bird is actually singing.

The paperback version that I bought also came with an audio CD of Rothenberg's attempts to play music with different birds.  Some are with real bird song, others are with recorded bird song that has been slowed down or modified in some other way.  Some tracks are better than others, but it is interesting to listen to as long as your CD player isn't set to repeat.

Last year Rothenberg wrote another book along the same lines called Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, apparently looking at whale song and his attempt to play music with those great animals as well. I look forward to finding it on sale somewhere. But who knows... after enjoying Why Birds Sing so much, I may actually pay full price.

Author: David Rothenberg

Title: Why Birds Sing - a journey into the mystery of bird song (paperback with audio CD)

Genre: Science, Nature

Year: 2005, paperback 2006

www.whybirdssing.com

www.thousandmilesong.com

Does "God made it that way" put an end to the question "why?"

In reading a book on bird song, I came across the statement that believing God created bird song was ultimately unfulfilling because it puts and end to the question "why do birds sing?". The statement bothered me so much that I almost didn't finish reading the book (which would have been a mistake... its quite good). How could this philosopher/scientist/author really believe that was a logical and rational thing to say? Where would he get that idea in the first place?

As I thought about it further, I realized that he probably got that idea from Christians. It is likely a common response when the purpose for something seen in nature is not immediately obvious. "Why is that there?" "I don't know. Because God made it that way!" But is that really the answer to the question?

I think the author is right. That answer is unfulfilling. His line of reasoning was this: "The traditional view is that biological diversity is evidence of a supreme being offering us the gift of a beautiful nature as proof of his existence - reason has never had much to do with faith." If you want to believe in God you should let God exist through evolution because nature is all the more amazing the more we learn how it works. Standing pat with God as the answer puts and end to the question "why."

The inference here is that if you believe God made it, you have no interest in looking deeper into how something works. Beauty equals some kind of proof of God's existence and nothing more. When Christians answer the question "why?" with a completely non-explanatory "God made it that way" we do our own faith, and even our own idea of who God is, a huge disservice. If we really believe that is the final and complete answer we have mistaken what God has actually done in revealing Himself through creation. That answer is correct and accurate, but it is not the end of asking why.

Romans 1:19-20 says that God has revealed His divine nature in creation. If we are to know God at all, He must reveal Himself to us. God's creation is meant to be understood and it is able to teach us about Himself. Again, Romans 1:25 shows that creation is able to teach us truth about God.

Our God is a purposeful God. Jeremiah 10:12 tells us that God's wisdom and understanding went into creation. The world around us was planned and ordered, not haphazard and shallow (and not random!). Psalm 147:4 says that God determines the number of the stars and gives them names. He invests Himself in His creation. Psalm 19:1-2 points out that nature displays knowledge. God has revealed more than simply His presence in creation.

This belief in a purposeful God is the only guarantee that an answer to "why?" even exists. It is only an assumption of some threads of evolution that every trait is selected on for thousands of years. The fact that we find so many deeper and meaningful answers by scientific inquiry is a testament to God. When we look for why something exists in nature we find a logical reason and a purpose.

God cannot be both purposeful and arbitrary; not someone who continually asks us to follow all of His commands and believe all of His promises and trust Him with the eternal significance of our souls. God is unified in His attributes. He is always loving, always just, holy, merciful, wise, faithful, etc. in all of His actions and decisions. 2 Timothy 2:13 says that Jesus, through whom all was made that was made (John 1:1-18), cannot deny Himself at any point. If He is being arbitrary, He is not being purposeful and would be violating one of His own attributes. God is not like a human being that is at one instant wise and at another foolish, or at one instant faithful and at another unfaithful.

When we accept and affirm simplistic, non-explanatory answers to the question of why something exists in creation, we attribute an arbitrary and capricious nature to a purposeful God. God gives us creation as a way to learn more about Him, not as something to dismiss as too mysterious or unknowable. We cannot know everything about God or understand all that God knows and is (Psalm 139:17-18), but we can know something and we can understand something and we can know that to be true (Jeremiah 9:23-24, John 17:3).

True discoveries of science will never conflict with scripture or with the God revealed there. We may disagree with conclusions arrived at by some scientists, but there is never a reason to abandon scientific observation. There will always be something of worth to be learned from studying God's creation, even its smallest details. We should never give the impression that we don't believe there is a reason for what we see around us. We should never try and stop anyone from asking the question "why?".