Green Group discussion

Hello!

I recently read The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell. It was absolutely fantastic! An ecologist visits an old growth patch of forest in Tennessee, weekly, for an entire year. Each chapter is about a different organism or process taking place in the forest. Here are a few of my favorite quotes.

I hope you’ll share your thoughts!

Candice

“When an animal species exists over a large area, the individuals in the north are usually larger than those in the south. This is known as Bergmann’s rule, after the nineteenth-century anatomist who first described the relationship.“

“Stripped of my clever cultural adaptations to the cold, I’m revealed as a tropical ape, profoundly out of place in the winter forest. The chickadees’ insouciant mastery of this place is humbling.“

“Plants start their preparations several weeks ahead of the first freezes. They move DNA and other delicate structures to the centers of their cells, then wrap them in cushioning. The cells get fattier, and the chemical bonds in these fats change shape to make them fluid in cold temperatures. The membranes around cells become leaky and flexible. The transformed cells are padded and limber, able to absorb ice’s violence without harm.“

I made Candice a co-moderator and asked her to keep this folder going. I think she will do a great job. I hope the members will support her efforts.

Candice wrote: "“When an animal species exists over a large area, the individuals in the north are usually larger than those in the south. This is known as Bergmann’s rule, after the nineteenth-century anatomist w..."

Is there an answer to the question of why the animals existing over a large area are usually larger in the north than in the south?

Jimmy wrote: "Candice wrote: "“When an animal species exists over a large area, the individuals in the north are usually larger than those in the south. This is known as Bergmann’s rule, after the nineteenth-cen..."

I’ve read about the surface area to volume. It’s easier to stay warm as a larger animal, than a smaller one, because they hold heat better. It’s just an explanation of why Bergman’s Rule works.

Candice

Jimmy wrote: "I made Candice a co-moderator and asked her to keep this folder going. I think she will do a great job. I hope the members will support her efforts."


Thanks, Jimmy! I’m happy to share my reading efforts with the group. I hope you will all post your thoughts and book highlights here, too!

Candice

I ordered a copy. I like to check out what's in the dirt in the forest floor or in tide pools and beaches when the tide goes out.

Robert wrote: "I ordered a copy. I like to check out what's in the dirt in the forest floor or in tide pools and beaches when the tide goes out."

I think you will enjoy it. Please share your thoughts! 😊

Candice

I got the book. Just reading a few pages in, as soon as I hit the line that compared humans to lichens, I was impressed. I figure this book will do a good job of showing how life works.

It is full of fascinating insights. Enjoy! 😊

Candice

It was published in 2012. Probably written in the previous year or two. There is a line in the book describing winter conditions where he states that it is unusual for temperatures in the southern forests to be 20 degrees below freezing. I don't think that is true anymore.

Most writers paint a picture of life stuck on a background that represents the environment. He does a wonderful job of explaining how the plants and animals interact with the weather. He brings the weather right into their bodies in great detail but is also 100 percent understandable.

I have seen two other books like this.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by by Annie Dillard, and A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm by Edwin Way Teale.
Written in the early 70s in an environmentally conscious style, both stories are extremely well written, easy to understand and tell the story of the land from the land's point of view.

He makes an interesting observation about our view of forests. What we are looking at are chopped up, checkerboard layout style woodlands without large browsing populations. We see all the small plant growth in forests as being normal. His description of modern forested land is that of a symphony without violins.

Before 10,000 years ago the size of the browsers was enormous, up to the size of mastodons. The herds were also enormous. Then the large meaty animals were removed by man. There were still plenty of smaller browsers, such as deer, with reports at the start of colonial times saying deer and turkeys were plentiful and everywhere.

What this means is that the new growth of small plants was heavily checked by animals such as deer and other browsers, and even more so 10,000 years ago by the bigger browsers. Either there was a lot of young plant growth to go around, or the young plant growth was heavily trimmed and the forests were much more open than the patches of woodlands that still exist today.

What we assume to be normal, is actually an over abundance of small plant growth that never existed in a functional forest. It was created by man when all browsers were mostly eliminated. Deer had to be imported into his section of the country in the 40s because they had been hunted to complete disappearance. Without a complete and diversified population of animals living in a forest, the forests are dysfunctional.

In this case, small plants flourished beyond their normal range of growth. This might also mean that some of the animals and birds we assume were always in the forests, or were there before disappearing in the last 50 years, weren't there hundreds of years ago. They were in other areas, somewhere where small plants were plentiful. Wide open field lands are decimated long before forest lands are developed, its just easier to do. Forests are what is left of open and closed off wild spaces.

He didn't mention this, but this could also be a reason why forest fires are so heavily fueled by all the underbrush that wouldn't be there if the forests were filled with complete animal populations. Another case of people not doing the work of the animals that people removed from the planet, so those jobs that the animals did goes undone.

The modern predators for deer are now coyotes who have been misplaced by man, domestic dogs, and automobiles.

Welcome to the Moderation team, Candice!
I'm trying to catch up on my reading but due to college I have not been able to get through as many books as I would like. This looks like a good one if I can get hold of it.

I just read Now Is the Time for Trees: Make an Impact by Planting the Earth’s Most Valuable Resource
This book encourages tree planting, with emphasis on natives, and shows trees on mountainsides as well as in gardens. I would have liked more discussion of how this benefits wildlife, but the focus was on trees and how they can provide ecosystem services to humans.

With regard to the volume of an animal relating to the heat it can contain, this is a good book.

Why Elephants Have Big Ears: And Other Riddles from the Natural World

Here's a good one about the ecology of the north woods. The adaptations of different tiny or large creatures to hibernate or live through the cold are described.

What Should a Clever Moose Eat?: Natural History, Ecology, and the North Woods

Haskell sorts out the facts and figures that you knew and puts it all into perspective. Each paragraph is a mini essay that paints a clearly visible picture which gives the reader a much better understanding of how the natural world works.

He calls our restructuring of the land a chemical glacier event. I never thought about it that way. He describes glaciers as storms that last thousands of years. This connects all the various things various groups of people have been doing for the past couple of thousand years into one simple description. Quite simply, by harnessing artificial energy sources we have marshalled enough power to clear the land genetically the same way ice glaciers do.

When you google chemical glaciers, you find that Haskell's original meaning has been usurped by the articles about chemical reactions and physical interactions happening where the glacier meets the land, causing them to melt faster. It's actually called chemical weathering. Google confuses the two descriptions. It is unfortunate that the description has been changed into something is relatively meaningless to the average person.

There is no listing for Haskell's chemical glacier description. It would be interesting to see if Haskell's ideas could be put into google expressions that would be easy to find.

The description chemical glacier is the idea that people powered by external energy sources have cleared the land so completely as to turn everything upside down. Google's reshuffling of chemical glacier into chemical weathering takes the idea that direct action by people that has had the same impact as glaciers and makes it seem like the term is a description of indirect actions that have nothing to do with people.

Robert, I’m glad you are enjoying the book! I found it fascinating and recommended it to many people! Thanks for the two recommendations. It sounds like I would enjoy them as well.

Clare, thanks for the recommendations!

Happy spring!

Candice

He does an incredible job of explaining how all kinds of life in the forest from microbes to animals and plants all help each other to replenish life. He does all of this as well as including his personal beliefs and comments about our interactions with a minimum of words with superb efficiency that is a joy to read with every phrase packed with easy to understand meanings. no matter how complicated the science is.

I learned another new term, Puritan Life Police, their hallmark being monoculture creations from golf courses to modern day plantation operations to concrete plazas plastered with buildings.

Loren Eiseley, another outstanding naturalist and vivid writer, who also understood the inner connections we all miss, had a similar writing style and subjects, but he used more words to cover fewer items. He published several books, all worth reading.

Because everything passes through the forest floor one way or another, the reader ends up with too many different topics to mention all of them. Everything is highly detailed but in a simple way, utilizing the most beautiful use of language that provides instant knowledge and understanding of what happens in a 1 meter circle of soil on the forest floor.

Then comes the Rhizosphere section. The interaction between plants, fungi, and bacteria in the soil opens up far more questions than it answers simply because people don't know the answers. They didn't know them in 2012 and they still don't know them in 2022. There is more data, but putting it all together still eludes science.

A quote from a 2021 article, "complex interactions between geochemical and microbial processes within complex spatiotemporal gradients make the rhizosphere notoriously difficult to study."

https://www.future-science.com/doi/10...

David Haskell not only opens the door but also provides the big picture of the cooperation between the plants and the bacteria using simple and easy to understand details so that the fine details that still eludes scientists are not needed to get a basic understanding of what is happening.

The bottom line is that the interaction between plants and bacteria is what feeds both of them and anyone using plants for nourishment, and at the same time handles a multitude of of solid, liquid, and gas compounds that create a healthy environment for life. When we fertilize soil, we are bypassing this incredible arrangement and are attempting to provide nutrients directly to the plants. It would be like getting all your food intravenously. It works, but just barely.

In less than a handful of soil, there are billions of bacteria bodies, more than the global human population. We have only been able to find a small percentage of them that are directly involved with the plant soil interaction. The rest perform functions that go mostly unknown and could also be supporting the plant soil interaction and most likely a good number of them are needed. Of all this bacteria, only a very small fraction of them can be grown in laboratories, the rest die when removed from the soil and plants and other bacteria, and whatever else is in the soil that keeps them alive. In other words, to get one to study, you need all of them, which is a good size ball of dirt with a plant, or plants growing in it. There is very little that can be seen in any detail.

One advancement in science is the ability to put a ball of stuff in a grinder, then grind it down to a mass of genes. The next step is to reassemble the genes into individual organisms. This takes a very long time and relies on knowing what genes are in existing organisms so you can sort out what is composed of what. This is very time consuming and expensive and can't provide a complete listing because we don't know the genetic makeup of everything yet. Plus, in the soil analysis, the viral world adds another whole dimension that is even less well known.

I would say that the interaction between soil, plants, the microworld, and animals is identical to our interaction with the biogeochemical cycles that run the Earth, which means we have no idea what we are doing or how we are interacting with the Earth.

Robert, I’m so glad you enjoyed the book! The world is a fascinating place!

Great book. Yes, the Natural World is a very fascinating place.

The Wilderness Cure


This covers an entire year of living off foraged food in Scotland (mostly) and so we see fungi picking, leaf and flower picking and even seasons for living off birds' eggs and venison. Every time the author found a wild bird's nest, she allowed herself to eat one hen's egg, so as not to disturb the wild birds.
This points up the issue of removing a half dead or dead tree, which is still providing shelter to a host of species and nutrition to more.

Clare,

This sounds fascinating. We like to leave as much of the dead tree as possible. The woodpeckers approve!

Candice

Suggestions for further reading on this topic. I have just completed Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest


and I'm now reading
A Ghost of Caribou