The Natural World: Three Reviews on Nature" by Liz Tascio

The Natural World: three reviews on Nature

Liz Tascio The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding Wild Things, with my Kids, by Richard Smyth, Icon Books, 2023.

On vacation in Oregon last summer, my family and I took a hike at Cape Meares to see the famous Octopus Tree. “It has eight legs that reach up to the sky,” I coaxed our kids, who, though they are good little hikers, were by this time wary of walking just a little farther to see something their parents said would be interesting.

But the tree was incredible; even the kids thought so. About 250 years old and 50 feet in circumference, the Sitka spruce has multiple trunks veering out and up like fingers on a massive hand, making a big open palm in its middle. It might have been shaped by indigenous people who bent its young branches to form a cradle for ceremonies decades in the future.

Now the giant is protected by a fence and signage, and we all stood and looked in awe. “I wish I could climb it,” my son said.

Then he ran back down the path to look instead for a good stick.

Yes, it would have been awesome to climb that weird, wild old tree, to stand in the palm of it and look down, and up. But the fence. And the sign. If all of us tourists started climbing it, that tree wouldn’t stand a chance.

But Richard Smyth, a naturalist and also the father of young children, knows how my kid feels.

“I can’t not pick up a toad if I find one,” Smyth writes in his memoir. “It’s compact and complete and still and it will as a rule

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sit fairly stoically in the cupped palm of your hand for a minute or so before it decides it has somewhere else to be. I don’t know what exactly I’m looking to learn by picking up the toad. I’m not going to advance herpetological knowledge in any meaningful way; I just somehow feel that until I’ve held it I haven’t really seen it.”

And off we go, into this gorgeous book about touching, holding, teaching, mourning, and gasping in joy and love at the texture and variety of the world we live in. A diminishing world, Smyth insists, not sugarcoating—a world that is definitely and rapidly losing its richness. But a world he is still in absolute awe of, just the same.

Smyth tracks his own love of animals and insects and the natural world to his childhood, starting with books whose individual bird illustrations he vividly recalls, then moving out into the world itself, where he collected eggs and bugs and feathers and once while still very young got stung by a honeybee he picked up—“I don’t remember exactly what I was doing or trying to do with the honeybee, but it was probably not in the honeybee’s best interest.”

He writes about introducing his children to the creeks and forests and birds he came to know as a child—but with this darkness underneath: “Weren’t they richer, rockpools, wasn’t the seashore busier, when I was a kid?”—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he like many of us went outside a lot more, “because in so many ways, through those hard months, it was all we had.”

The book rocks along, a delightful, detailed burst of famous naturalists and pop songs about animals and colorful Victorian displays of dead hummingbirds and arguments for the value of ugly creatures, and the gut-level appeal of the gross. Kids get this last thing instinctively, he writes:

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“They want to see, they want to smell, they want to touch; they want to grab it and take it home. So do I. Sometimes I do; sometimes I find other ways (mostly I write about it—that’s what so much writing is, just a grabbing and taking home).

Do you want to see a spider? Do you want to see a rat? Do you want to see a dead jellyfish? YES! YES! YES! Do you want to see a warthog? Do you want to see a lappet-faced vulture? Are you mad? Bring them to us.”

As I read, I wanted to make a list of every book, every botanist, every scientist, every cartoon and record Smyth mentions. I wanted to stay in this book for a long time, right next to Smyth on the beach as he shows his kids “a hermit crab in a winkle shell, little claws rowing at the air,” while they say, “put it on my hand Daddy can you put it on my hand.”

The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape, by Katie Holten, Tin House, 2023.

In 2015 the Irish activist and artist Katie Holten published a limited-edition art book called About Trees, in a typeface she created: She replaced each of the 26 letters of the alphabet with a tree drawing.

Now, with an introduction by poet Ross Gay, the book is reborn as The Language of Trees, an anthology of writing from climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and Overstory author Richard Powers to Jorge Luis Borges, Zadie Smith, and Radiohead. In ten curated sections—such as “Leaves & Trunks,” “Family Trees,” and “Tree Time”—you’ll see authors’ original writings next to inscrutable pages thickly marked with small black trees. Holten calls the font a “rewilding tool.” (It’s free to download; you can write your own essay or poem in Trees.)

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Of course, the font is nearly impossible to “read,” even when you have the key in front of you, but that’s part of the point. Holten is asking us to see a literal connection between the natural world and our language. And while this experiment was a tough one for me to immerse myself in, I did love the reminder the scrawled, distinctive trees gave me over and over that writing is our way of trying to understand the world we live in—words are collections of symbols we use to communicate, always imperfectly and incompletely. Holten is giving us a visual reminder: We desperately need to do something about the climate. Here, let’s start with trees.

The Nature Book: A Novel, by Tom Comitta, Coffee House Press, 2023.

Tom Comitta wrote none of this novel. Instead, he constructed it. Every phrase, every sentence comes from existing literature, and there are no humans in it. Comitta describes it as an archive of how writers have looked at nature and conceived of it, and as a record of the planet over a few hundred years, with writers in the role of naturalists: “The Nature Book is also a story of our ecological past,” he writes in the preface. “The natural world described by Austen and Dickens is different from that of Plath and Baldwin and still farther from the early works of DeLillo and Atwood. It’s even more removed from the time of this writing, when climate change is devastating the planet.”

I checked the source list (more than 300 novels!) before I started reading, thinking of writers whose nature descriptions I loved: Zora Neale Hurston is here, and (yes!) Arundhati Roy. Willa Cather, almost required. Chinua Achebe—here, good.

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Reading The Nature Book provides multiple joys: Because Comitta selected excellent books and went so precisely about his weaving, the language is gorgeous. Because he gave himself the challenge of leaving out people entirely, we get the thrill of watching him create tension and plot with changes of seasons, the comings and goings of storms, the emergencies experienced by badgers and deer, the quiet dread of water drying up and insects going quiet. Comitta uses footnotes to include passages that are wildly different tonally from the chapters they are in, and those voices interrupt and color a bit and then drop away, delightfully. And, if you want to search small pieces of text, you can puzzle out the sources—you might even recognize them on your own.

Comitta proves to be a talented and patient storyteller. The surprise of this book is how well it succeeds as a novel without any human beings mucking about in it.

And yet, of course, we are in this novel. This book is our thoughts, our language, our metaphors trying to make sense of our lives, trying to see how we fit as part of nature, too.