Ancient knowledge meets science in Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
In Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, botanist, biochemist, biologist, and poet Diana Beresford-Kroeger challenges us all to explore the deep connections that forests offer us. Here’s a scientist who listens to trees and in this book she opens up her life and experience in brief, lively chapters—her childhood, her personal arboretum where she nurtures rare and endangered species, navigating the contradictions and commonalities in old wisdom and new science.
A passage comparing chlorophyll with hemoglobin allows even the scientifically timid access to the nature of molecules:
Chlorophyll and hemoglobin…each labour under the restraint of… quantum mechanics. Both these smart molecules dangle an atom of metal at their sweet spot like bait in a trap. In the plants’ case, it is magnesium; in the animals’ case, it is iron. These two metals are unusual in the same way: they can afford to lose one electron in a quantum leap. This tiny subatomic action has a colossal effect on life. If not for that quantum jump, neither hemoglobin nor chlorophyll would work.
Beresford-Kroeger is in love with the elegance of science and the power of story and that love runs through the book. But there’s no fluffy spirituality involved. She writes about her Irish grandfather’s younger sister:
Nellie did not attend church. She excused herself from such prayers. She was suspended in her beliefs between the ancient world and the “new.” She could see that the people around her were leaving behind the best of themselves, writing off wisdom built over thousands of years as valueless, and she did not like what she knew was coming down the road for the human family. So she walked me out to the hedges and the sides of the road, where the camomile flowers grew. She told me the chickens needed camomile to keep them healthy. She crushed the leaves and the little white daisy flowers and allowed me to smell the pungent scent the crushing produced.
She herself passes such experiences on, when she speaks to schoolchildren:
We walked a trail packed with ancient treasures of the botanical past. When I mentioned that the mosses we encountered were once the size of trees, it fired the imaginations of the children. They went back to the school and told the other classes about the “bush lady.” The result was a sit-in strike that lasted until the entire student body was taken on the dinosaur walk.
And she’s funny and opinionated, as in this comment referring to the common human folly of taking trees from one space and planting them indiscriminately in another:
When we plant the wrong tree in the wrong place, we are hoping and praying for a donkey to win the Kentucky Derby. It won't – not now or ever.
Above all, Our Green Heart reminds us that our futures are intertwined with the vitality of forests and of the natural world, and that by failing to heal the planet, we’re writing ourselves a death warrant.
