Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Haskell The Songs Of Trees 20171123

Of books with david haskel. Before i introduce him i have a couple housekeeping items. If you havent silenced your cell phones, please do so now. This session needs to end at 3 50 because we are recording live on cspan. We will then head to the plaza and the signing tent you will have an opportunity to meet david and have him sign your book. We cannot linger in this room because of the live broadcast. Thank you for your assistance with this. David haskel is professor of biology at the university of the south in his army. He received his phd in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University and his work integrates scientific literary and contemplative studies of the natural world. His 2012 book the forest unseen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the pen eo wilson literary science writing award. He is here today to share his newest work with the songs of the trees. Please join me in welcoming david haskel. [applause] thank you for that very kind introduction. Id like to thank the southern festival of books, the library here, rocks the flight has gone away but library of the year. Extraordinary space and beautiful space here and not just in its physical presence and beauty but the beauty of what the library provides and also thankful tv for carrying a number of sessions here today live and sharing the exciting things happening here in nashville with the rest of the world for those of you that are connected to cspan. I am going to share a few short readings for my book, the songs of trees. First, i will set things up and explain what this book is about and how you came to be and as i go through i will be sharing some excerpts from some of the longer chapters and then i would be delighted to take any questions or comments. I cant linger after words up in the tent and i will be happy to sign or deface books in any way that you would like or grammy in the hallways of the festival here. So, the songs of trees examines the lives of 12 different trees around the world and these are trees on the face of it in different places in the amazon rain forest, jerusalem and the west bank and in manhattan and the Mountain Cove here in tennessee and a fossil tree that is being done for 30 million years up in the mountains of colorado and each tree my practice was to show up at the tree again and again over many years and try to Pay Attention literally to listen to the tree and to open my senses and for that engagement over many years of interaction with each tree try to discern some of the stories. The stories are president in the sound and in the texture of the tree and in my conversations with people whose lives were slightly bound up the life of the treat. Each story is very different and the story in the amazon will be different from the story in tennessee or on them outside in japan or on a horticultural collection in washington dc. These are all very different places and yet, under the surface there are commonalities here. The trees have there been to a certain set of relationships with other species and with soil and people in those relationships take different forms but the fundamental nature of the relationship remains the same. I tried to the particular duties through the differences that i was seeing to see beyond into the unifying questions. One of those was that we are always part of the stories, even in places where we imagine ourselves not to belong. Deep in the forest or in a place where human presence seem to be slight and if there at all. But it turns out we are wrapped up in the stories, partly through deep connections with trees and you go back over thousand of years in many parts of the world. Of course, through the very vigorous flapping of our industrial lives we leave all sorts of things in the atmosphere and we changed the soil and bring new species to one place to remove species for another and the human presence and you dont see a person in the forest and the effect of people of course is that and influence it seems quite beneficial but is in fact nurturing to the vitality of life and other times the presence can be one that is printing off and causing diminishment in the vitality of life and the complexity of connections within the community. The unifying theme is that we are part of the stories and what ive tried to do in the different parts of the world is understand how the stories manifest. Now, this is something that takes us all the way back to our origin as a species as homo sapiens. It turns out to this very day together people around the campfire and kindle a campfire, Blood Pressure drops and our stories and chapter turns from the everyday to the realm of the imagination. From the realm of the possible and the realm of the mythical and those who are not evident on the surface and this can even be replicated in the lab with just the sound of crackling can fire is enough to reduce our Blood Pressure and change the texture of our minds. In a relationship with trees right from the very getgo and when the human species invented fire or brought fire under humanities control and i had been there all along through lightning and other sources of didnt involve the human hand and so when we brought fire within the circle of human agency and human control that was the origin of human culture. Human culture is not just about the chitchat of everyday matters but about imagining the future and imagining relationships and that happened because we were in relationships with trees. Beyond that what elses it is not music. Music city, usa. The minute you get to the airport you are reminded of it and what are we hearing when we hear music. We are here in human creativity and the stories that lead the mutual cold genre and where they might go in the future and where they take place now. We also hear by really work and were hearing the ecological peculiarity of that species so a song of a tree is in fact the song we would hear in Country Music or in the goldberg variation on that sounding board and one of the short chapters of the book i visited and he was in with his fingers to the wood and tapped it and understand that this particular piece of wood would make a magnificent violin and this one wouldnt and why is that because these trees grew in a particular place with the wood growth was finegrained and wasnt influenced too much by the wind and these other trees that make such not beautiful as underwood grew on a different side of the mountain so we are hearing the story of a particular tree even though its been translated and transmuted in many ways through human art and beautiful ways but we are hearing this flow of the College Entry lives and human lives in music and so we are connecting to more than just peoples minds but werent connecting in some ways to the story of the forest. What elses human culture made from . The book. What is a book made from . Sheets of cellulose whether those sheets come from mostly trees but there are other ways of producing through linen and rag collecting and through mashed up hemp and other forms of paper but mostly now as we connect to another port of human consciousness across space and time when we pick up someones book and read their words they may have been dead for hundreds of years and lived on a different continent and yet their consciousness reignites and comes into being again in our heads with an extraordinary abundance of life. Life invented all sorts of cool things like coral reefs and trees and bears and Solar Systems and books that connect us and connect that most mysterious partner, the consciousness objective experience in a way that transcends what we traditionally understand as the limit space and time and thats what happened in relationship to trees. My argument and again to that is these stories echo back through the century through the melania and back millions of years into the deep stories of who we are as a species and understanding that we might be moving forward because we live in a time of great and rapid environment of change in understanding the nature of these relationships is important. We like to read from a chapter here and opening chapter in the amazon report. This is a place of great sensory overload. Every time i went to amazon this was in east when ecuador my ears were filled with the sound every minute there was more than a lifetime to comprehend. The smells walking through the forest from one meat to the other from the smells are changing and the visual senses and so forth. Very rich place. That richness led me into a couple of insights into how the forest holds together and there are multiple realities here. I will read and share some of that narrative and talk a bit about the role of relationships in the lives of trees. The sounds of the western hemisphere and the strands that connect life around so tight and packed so densely that the air drums with vibratory energy night and day and amid this intensity the nature of life network reveal themselves in extreme ways and at first this nature seems to be vigorous and frightening conflict, war cries and limitations ring loud and the rules for humans at the tree or walking in the muddy trail, if you slip or need to study yourself dont grab the nearest branch. Tree bark here is an armory of spikes and needles and if you grasp a smooth stem to park the waiting ants and snakes will deliver the lesson. Your laceration will fester in this area a super bacterial and fungal sports and one doesnt need to reach out to find danger. A bullet and drops from the vegetation into the gap between my shirt collar and landing with a quiet [inaudible]. Those antibodies have deliberately sampled the induced insect pain and the aunt greeted my neck with a jab from the venomous abdominal stinger and the pain was like a strike on the bell cast from the purest notes, clear, metallic, single toned and i never knew how my notes could ring until the moment i was lifted and struck by small arms fire by tree. My left hand was distinct sweeping away before it dropped i scuffled my index finger with my mandibles slicing two groups is a bit down and like the sting of purity this pain was a shriek of fire in confusion and as it iran across my hand a cacophony of panic i soaked the hand and sweat for the next hour my arm was incapacitated and my left muscles were bruised and i was late and muffled by drugs and the bite and staying were reduced to a hot line. As loud as the word interesting but not nearly so deafening. This was my initiation into one reality of the forest. I felt none of the roads indescribable innocence and benevolence in this network of relationships. The trees around me, the leaves on the trees around for me suffer multiple lines of attack bacterial and bungee bore through cuticles are briefing pores, insects nod and one of the best studied species the anger half the weight of young leaves is composed of poison and a costly and defensive investment. All the leaves have sloughed poison but even they have a preferred weight invested in chemical defense, a reflection of the ubiquity of pathogens and the nips and tears and 1 acre of force here in the amazon may contain 60000 species of insects, a billion individuals, half of which do nothing but eat plants and breathe. Fungal and bacterial diversity and abundance are uncounted but likewise fast. All this conflict would seem to force life into a [inaudible] mode and individuals must fight it out with the inverse enemy and endless looping strain of conflict. The struggle is indeed intense but instead of a separating life into atoms and into individuals the darwinian war has created a furnace that burns away the individual, melting barriers and welding networks as a strong as they are diverse. One of the guiding themes to this book is the individual turns out to be an illusion. A tree seems to be such a magnificent example of individuality and especially if its an oak tree of entering individuality and strength and it is enduring it is strong and whether that comes from a network of relationships and you take away the bacteria that live inside the lease that because it cant defend itself from pathogens or protect itself from drought and if the relationships between the route and the fungal partners connect medication partners that halo the root and effect medication is taken away the tree dies. An oak tree is indeed strong and magnificent creature but that strength emerges from relationship and it is not just a network creature but a creature that is made from networks. That is true for us also. Were learning about the human microphone and the little probiotic that is basically bacteria with four times the price you can make it yourself at home and the truth embedded in a lot of the layers of commercial pr and advertising and that is the gut Health Depends not just on human cells but on the cells of all the other creatures that live within. Those gut creatures and skin creatures and the bacteria that accompany us through our life are essential to our physiological genetic function and even that place where we imagine ourselves to be most alone our consciousness, our subjective individual experience the world that emerges in the community too. Because of your gut changes the texture of your mind changes and you become happier or more depressed or more anxious. Quality of individuality is a product of the community. Thoughts in our heads like imagine a bear and imagine an oak leaf and all those images and those that flashed into the heartbeat are a subjective experience and they emerge not from one neuron for an acorn that says acorn but from an everchanging network of communication among nerve cells that chapter changes multiple times a second and the thought itself emerges as a property of a network and emerges from a relationship just as a tree emerges from a relationship. I continue in the amazon continue parallels between ecology and the cultural of some of the people who know this forced the best, some of the indians who lived in the amazons for hundreds if not thousands of years. The culture of Human Society is in the region reveal some of the network and the [inaudible] have lived in the western amazon for thousands of years and much of his time as hunters and gatherers and gardeners and life and the forces produced no linnaean taxonomy of plants but instead plant species have multiple names. Plants are described as their ecological relationships or uses within their human culture, rather than by individual monikers. In the apologist laura writes that when pressed by interviewers the war on the could not bring themselves to give into individual names to what we westerners call tree species without describing such as the competition of surrounding vegetation or human culture. Society no equivalence of a million dwelling case or living by the labor of my hands alone. In their own words they live like one. Individuality economy and mastery are highly valued but these are expressed in the context of relationship and communities. Any take woods to live in selfreliance or to write books about one square meter of forest are considered only ill. [laughter] or angry and destined for death. While individual names or product of the group leaving one group or another until the death of the old name, the acquisition of new personhood and the impossibility of return to be lost in the forest and to be lost at night is a fitful event for the [inaudible] and even those with the deepest experience of the forest when they do become lost they find a large tree the same tree that i studied in the amazon and turn it into a subwoofer, pounding on the buttress roots of the tree vibrates the trunk of a botanical to call for family and a cry to reknit the bonds that keep you alive in the trees great height allows it to follow in a way that shouting can never achieve and hearing the pulsing youll hear people come in the signal is particularly helper lost children and their families know where the large tree grows at the sound of alerts and guides hunters and warriors use the tree to signal news of kill and perhaps no coincidence that the savo is the tree of life in the creation story and that the tree is a hub for so many creatures and save lives by maintaining and reconnecting lifegiving threads of relationship. This dissolution of individuality into relationships is how the savo in Adult Community survive the rigors of the forest. The art of war is so supremely welldeveloped and survival paradoxically involves the surrender, giving up the self in a union with allies so the society understands the nature of these relationships presumably through the westerners live by living in the challenging and we are just now starting to discern some of those patterns for a few decades of research into ecology and evolution of this forest. Now, these relationships are threatened and what else is happening in this amazon forest . It turns out its the most diverse place we know of on the surface of the planet, the western amazon. It will shine out like a hotspot. You draw a map of varied Petroleum Reserves are like fossil fuels are right underneath that forest and underneath the National Park and ethnic reserves and this is an old drastic shoreline that has left fossil riches and ecuador, of course, would like to develop some of those resources to help the economy so there is an interesting and very difficult conversions of values happening in the forest and people who lived there for many, many years, longer than many of us in the western culture can imagine. Western culture is a rather recent flowering compared to some of the understands of the forest that are president in the amazon. That western culture arrived and we are addicted to fossil fuel so Oil Prospecting is moving into these regions. It is now two hours after sunset. We are so deep in the forest that the skies should be a dome of blackness and black white dust. The people gathered here are days travel by roads and river from the nearest town. Other than flashlights there is no electricity except for a brief evening run the generator yet, the sky is smeared by lights from two horizons. Gas flares and diesel fuels electric lights from oil drilling camps just over 5 kilometers away our towns with billions of black and dimming the stars and the stir of leaves in evening breeze quiet rumble from generations and compresses wash through the trees and the resistance to Uncontrolled Development in this region is coming from the forest itself. Protesters march on the capital, nonprofits and academics release studies and press releases activist outrage crackles on the internet and foreigners opine about how ecuador should manage its affairs. What distinguishes the struggle from so many others is what lies and communities of people who are participants and listeners within the ecology of the worlds most diverse forest and from these communities comes the philosophy of living whose words have rooted themselves in political discourse and the countrys constitution. Here are some of the thoughts from some activists that i interviewed. They say trees have music in them. Rivers are alive and they sing. We learned our own human songs and people think were crazy for saying the trees sing but it is not us were crazy but those people who belittle us. Politics is this to show that trees and rivers have music, songs in life. To turn the socalled National Parks into Living Forest where people belong. To delineate our land with garden and filling them with flowering musical trees and this is not empty land but we have known tree songs for a long time living with the millions of beans in the forest. Our politics is this to show that trees and rivers have music, songs in life. So, if you go to the [inaudible] community invaded by colonists and explorers he and his as a defense against the many assaults on this community the translate and politicize what they understand publishing academic journals and political tracks they reject the idea of linear progress from underdeveloped to developed measured by the accumulation of wealth. Instead good and harmonious life should be the goal and mission of every human effort, such a life emerges into ongoing reciprocity and stared already within the huma human community. Western development they say destroys these relationships imposing itself by blood and fire and so now the constitution of ecuador gives Forest Rights and gives rivers and including the right to evolve and to explore biological creativity into the future, unprecedented to my knowledge and across constitutional law certainly our own constitution doesnt recognize those rights and how that will play out in the struggle over what happens in the amazon we dont know. The course and ecuador have been politicized and people in any judges who stand up for the forest in the rivers often find themselves out of a job very soon. But the Legal Framework is president there. One of the things i take from the study of the forest in amazon all sorts of fascinating ecological stories in the forest. But they left the forest and entered our debates and about how to live well on this earth as nations to meet our needs for wood in fuel and clean water and cultural survival for many of these communities by listening to one another and by paradoxically and seemingly crazily listening to trees. They were insistent that that had to be part of the process moving forward. Let me move to another part of the world, a more familiar part of the world and that is right here in tennessee on the mountain slope. This is a reading from the tree that is dead. Its an ash tree. A great big ash tree that fell over and ive been waiting a long time for the moment when i would see one of these right after itself and when i saw this happen i knew, okay, as long as im around on this earth i will keep coming back to that tree again and again to watch it and to use its life out into the rest of the forest and see what happens. There is another creature making use of the great whole torn in the canopy when the tree fell down, and it is sunlight, welded into digestible form. Is an incredible hub of life full of diverse city. I sat on this mountainside over thousands of hours and still blown away, shocked by how much life comes into being around this tree. I will read the introduction to this chapter and give one or two example and move to the end. This is a reflection on this tree and the process of death and dk for trees which is different than it is for animals, particularly animals with access to smarts. Green ash in tennessee, there is life after death but it is not eternal. Death doesnt end along the nature of trees as they wrap away dead logs, branches and roots, they become a focal points for thousands of relationships and the other species in the forest. Find food or home along the recumbent bodies of fallen trees. In the tropics, soft wooded trees file their bodies in smokeless blazes of bacteria and fungi. Their logs seldom last longer than a decade. The process of decay takes much longer in the acid cold of a near arctic bog. There, the river of its afterlife in spoonfuls fed to patient bacteria over millennia, between these extremes, the tropics and the polls, the midlatitudes, a downed tree in the temperate forest might live in death as long as it stood in life, before a being that catalyzes and regulates conversations in and around its body, death and the act of management of these connections, root cells no longer send signal to the dna of bacteria, leaves and the chemical chatter with insects and fungi receive no more messages from their hosts but a tree never fully control these connections. In life the tree was only one part of its network. Death does not end it. In tennessee, springtime brings collisions between walls of arctic air and bubbles of warm moisture from the gulf of mexico. Wind is an issue. Any weakness and roots, on one such wind bruised day, on a mountainside, came in a giant green ash tree immediately after it fell, the rest of the chapter relates particular instances over several years of observation, the insects showed up in the first few minutes of afterlife. Much. A dry splinter of sounds, scrabbling, flaps punctuate their writing as they are on the leaf litter, they break apart and fly back to the tree wings, in black and yellow with tendril, fearless as i approach, protecting them. Insects are beaten, the color of their bodies, confident behavior and the sound of their wings are hoarded like. Only for one day. Day mate and they tell their eggs into the ashes, this dull snap, the wind filled 3. It loses the scent of tannic acids, sour and opaque with with of brown sugar. Hours after the fall only the tank of bruised bark remains. And freshly downed trees, nursery. And all spring and summer with a jaded mouse, the larvae swallow the fine sawdust parsing it to gets populated by symbiotic microbes. The beatles could not feed. I bend my ear to the log and here rasps under the spongey barker. What continues, stories of rattlesnakes and wild flyers, but the shrub sizes going in, a special packet of fungi they so inspired, farmed along for food and take off to find the next log in the bobcats, with a walkway and deposit little seeds, i took some of those seeds that turn into pigeon grapes, a reminder of passenger pigeons and they are gone and they do the work of billions of birds and every single case creatures have their lives only through relationship. If a particular relationship is broken, life is ended for him. The other this tree has taught me the notion of a relationship of life through the network is not the metaphor, a pretty way of describing oneness in benevolent oneness in the universe. It is a lived reality that the tree is experiencing. It was a very physical, earthy grounded reality. A couple reviewers looked at this and this is the ecology. How soil works. You can superimpose spirituality on this and it is present but these are descriptions of plants and animals in this physical, biological realm and their lives are made with relationships. You can spin all kinds of stories and layers of interpretation, some probably true and others different. All these descriptions are rooted in studies of the forest and scientific literature. A chickadee, a being full of memory, conversation and connection, a network of life, loses a hub of intelligence and life. For those closely linked to the deceased, the loss is acute. And ecological analog of grief falls in the forest, the other creatures that depend on living trees, death ends the relationship with life. The living trees, all find a new living tree or they will themselves die. Much of the understanding of the forest dwells embedded in these relationships also passes away. The trees particular knowledge of the nature of light and wind and Living Communities gain a lifetime of interaction in one location in the forest. All that knowledge dissolves. Yet by catalyzing new life in and around their bodies trees bring new connections and new life. The Creative Process is not didactic, it doesnt pass on what is new, recreating a new version of itself, professor like but around and inside the tree, death brings about thousands of interactions. Each one exploring ecological opportunity. From this unmanaged, uncontrolled multitude the next forest emerge is composed of new knowledge embedded in new relationships. Like a lightning rod the dead tree draws into its body the potential that surrounds it focusing and intensifying what was diffuse and unlike lightning, the surge doesnt flow into the ground and disappear. Instead, life feeds on the closeness of connections in the dead tree, increasing in vigor and diversity. Our human language does a poor job recognizing this afterlife of trees, the words we use, rotten, decomposition, deadwood. These are slack words, so vital a process. Rot is a detonation of possibility. Decomposition is renewed composition by Living Communities. Smelters for new life, deadwood, and effervescent creativity, regenerating as itself, degenerate into the network. Even in death these trees reveal something about their processes of network connection, what life is made from and we see ourselves in that. In these decomposing trees, the Human Interest is legion. I will conclude with an assignment for you. That is to pick a tree in your neighborhood or where you work or someplace you visit regularly and conduct an experiment, show up for that tree again and again over the next few weeks but nothing but enthusiastic openness of the senses. Bring a notebook and smell and attend, what is the quality of life and how is it different from last time i was here . What is the soundscape telling me about this place . What does this tree feel like, what is the texture of the soil . Leave behind suppositions, i am going to learn something or i am going to find enlightenment here, the sacrament or some interesting tension they can weave into a short story, no. Just show up and Pay Attention to that tree, listen and follow that out where they go and the last part of the assignment is to tell the stories back into the human community, weaving awareness of trees, the reality that was the ecological work, back through the propaganda and layers of electronic manipulation and interpretation we are surrounded with and buried under. We need to penetrate fat, renew the system and that is partly composed of sensory awareness, awake to the lies of the creatures in the present moment. I will close with that assignment and thank you for your attention. [applause] we have time for questions. Either shout the question, i will repeat it or there is a microphone here. Use the microphone here and you can be on tv. Our viewers on tv, the nature of the question. Do not be shy. I would prefer not to be on tv but when you mention tree and enlightenment, i think about the body tree in india, that was supposedly the place where buddha achieved the experience of his enlightenment. I wonder if you have ever been there and what your idea of enlightenment and the body tree is. I have not been there, my sitting on the tree, i have not found a world religion. I will say what scientists are learning late in the day which is trees are extraordinarily complex beings with multiple layers of interconnection and humans are tied into those in many layers is represented in the religious, philosophical traditions and literature going back thousands of years, i am not aware of a major tradition, does not have a tree at the center. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, the 3 of enlightenment, one of the chapters in the book, all three of the abraham and religions, central, christ means anointed. You dont get anointed with canola oil. That is not a symbol, or a metaphor. Without the olive tree there could be no life in that part of the world, for several thousands of years, very arid and people reliving only because this tree produced nutrient rich food from the land. The symbolism in many ways pointing us to truth but also getting in the way. The olive tree is a symbol of peace and the temple and so forth, not seeing the tree for what it is. And before humans ever notice olive trees, we can make our lives what i tried to do is honor those symbols, about them but also listen for the stories beyond that, ecological reality. I do think the story of enlightenment under the tree in some ways there is the cross, the other part of the story. Nailing something to wood so that they die, that becomes a symbol of transcending the death and so forth. There again, would is tightly tied up with the central notion of fracture and beauty being present at the same moment. The enlightenment is to wake up to the fact desires and suffering are part of the community we are born into and that is very ecological. That was a rather rambling answer. With Global Warming in mind, you talk of interconnectedness quite eloquently. Do you one of the main problems of the human race is we have shut ourselves off from nature and if we reconnect it could help solve the problem . A good question. I would say we have in many ways forgotten the nature of those connections so we are still deeply connected but we have lost in many ways awareness of that partly because the structure of our society hides it. Is the author of this book, can i find out which forest produced this paper even though i know my editor said no, i cannot. As a consumer of a book, when we go to the market or we buy a house constructed of complex materials, can we see the consequences of those actions . Often we cant, consequences are on the other side of the world. I would say it is not so much cutting ourselves off from that but cutting ourselves off from awareness of how interconnected we are and that is one of the things the crises show us. When something goes wrong, the water supply fails or fire or drought or hurricanes hit a particular area we are reminded it is not just us and our relationship with other creatures including physical systems of the earth are part of what we need to move forward. One of my regrets about the present political moment is some of these questions have become very politicized, they should not be. We should agree we need to be in Good Relationship with others, other humans and other species. There are all sorts of philosophies how to pull that off. Some we would label conservative, some liberal and we should have a healthy debate rather than debating are we in relationship, are there physical patterns to the changing of the world . Those questions, the time has passed for many of those questions and we are at a time we should be engaging vigorous debate hearing Different Solutions and visions for what the future might hold. The case has narrowed because only some portions of the political spectrum are represented at the table and that is a loss for everybody because we are missing political wisdom and ecological wisdom. In a book called sweetgrass the author talks about the relationship of trees via their roots. I have never heard of that. Can you comment on that . It is a magnificent book. The author wrote gathering maas. A fabulous writer. I recommend it to all. She indeed writes about the relationships of people to roots and people to each other and her life and work as a scientist and so forth. We see the above grounds part of the tree. Most of the trees below ground, for some the aboveground part is a small level speeding appendage collecting sunlight and most of the action is below ground and those roots, a root in my mind is not a plant structure. It is a Community Structure because it is filled with fungi that go to the rest of the soil and increase the surface area by 100 or 1000 times and gather water, bacteria communicating at the genetic levels inside that route. To understand the tree, understand the relationship between roots and other species. We are at the earliest stages of Scientific Investigations because it is a hard place to study. You take the route out of its environment, it stops functioning because these relationships that happen at the micro level, diffusing over the width of a bacterial cell, very hard for great lumbering creatures like us to actually get into the lab and study and synthesize the knowledge to come up with a comprehensive vision how it works but this rootedness, grounded this, these are symbols of growth understanding we need to get our heads, put your head in the stands is a way of seeing further and looking up aboveground. That is a little bit of a stretch. It is time for one more question and then i will be delighted to move on from here. In your years in studying decomposition of trees or the life of these trees have you noticed a change in those processes due to pesticides, or things we are doing. Plastics and invasive species. The largest forest in the world, the processing cycle, we have changed the nature of rainfall coming into that forest and i describe that in the second chapter, the process of decomposition has changed on the global scale. Consequences for all of us but it is part of the earth. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] welcome to the last session of the day, pleased to have you here. My name is doctor ben stickle and i am professor of the Justice Administration at Middleton University outside nashville, tennessee. The southern festival of books, we will kind of do