Seeing a World in a Patch of Soil

By HUGH RAFFLES

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Robert Cable/Design Pics/Corbis

Moss covers a fallen tree in the woods of Tennessee.

The Forest Unseen:
A Year's Watch in Nature

By David George Haskell

Viking, 268 pages. $25.95

It's Jan. 21, 20 degrees below zero, and David George Haskell is standing naked in the middle of the woods in southeastern Tennessee. Mr. Haskell, a biologist at the University of the South, is three weeks into his yearlong vigil at a one-square-meter patch of ground he calls his "mandala," the Sanskrit word for a symbolic representation of the universe. As this name suggests, Mr. Haskell's mission is contemplative and expansive. His tiny patch of old-growth forest is a microcosm, and his intriguing project is to access its large truths and vast processes through quiet, focused observation. Fusing his professional training and expertise with something more directly experiential, he practices an intense listening freed of hypotheses and prejudgment, one he hopes will allow him to transcend the philosophical and emotional limits of scientific objectivity.

So on the morning of Jan. 21 at 20 below, he strips off his clothes to "experience the cold as the forest's animals do." As elation flips into panic, he is minutes from hypothermia. The episode, as recounted in Mr. Haskell's "The Forest Unseen," is charming, ridiculous and mildly frightening. A good part of the charm is that Mr. Haskell knows how silly he is being but still turns this painful and rather chastening experience into a fascinating discussion that brings together the physiology of shivering, the survival strategies of chickadees, the evolutionary downside of human technological prowess and a final lesson: "My nakedness in the cold wind has deepened my admiration for these others," he writes. "Astonishment is the only proper response."

"The Forest Unseen" comprises 45 short essays in which Mr. Haskell takes the reader through the seasonal changes in his small forest patch. Nature here is mostly very small, so he spends a good deal of the year lying on his stomach, peering through a hand-lens. The area is temperate woodland, and much of what the author sees will be broadly familiar to North American amateur naturalists. But under Mr. Haskell's magnifying glass it all seems new and often wondrous. Salamanders, snails and springtails. Fungi, lichen, leaves and turkey vultures. Wind, light and stone. Mosquitoes, moths and moss. Each essay combines intricate natural-history exploration, philosophical meditation and—just a tad too often—a concluding moral.

Mr. Haskell's observational powers are impressive, his descriptions evocative, his knowledge wide-ranging, and his conclusions thoughtful and generous. Very much a contemporary biologist in his familiarity with genetics and population ecology, he also has the voracious synthetic imagination of a 19th-century naturalist. Most important, Mr. Haskell is a sensitive writer, conjuring with careful precision the worlds he observes and delighting the reader with insightful turns of phrase (a bee larva reared on pollen becomes an adult with a "body built wholly out of flowers").

At times, reading Mr. Haskell's close descriptions of magnified life on the forest floor, I was reminded of Robert Hooke's "Micrographia," a 17th-century best seller with unprecedented copperplate engravings that made visible a universe of miniature animals, such as lice and flies, in detail never before seen or imagined. Hooke used the recent invention of microscopic lenses to reveal a reality entirely inaccessible to our unaided senses. Unsurprisingly, his images enthralled and unnerved readers.

Like Hooke's audience, we today have our blind spots, which Mr. Haskell seeks keenly to expose. But rather than shock readers into greater states of awareness, he wants to clarify "our moral vision" by bringing us into contact with places like his mandala, ordinary places made special by our concentrated attention, "oases of contemplation" that can "call us out of disorder." In this respect, the message of "The Forest Unseen" is that of many environmental accounts these days: Modern man has lost his way; he needs to slow down, find stillness and humility, rebuild his connection to nature, and learn again how to live in harmony with the world.

But the book is also a lot more than this. Mr. Haskell constantly surprises by taking the less obvious path. Discovering two golf balls sitting in his previously pristine mandala, he overcomes his immediate sense of outrage and reminds himself that people are part of nature and that "to truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness." He leaves the golf balls in the mandala and—ingenious and playful—takes off on an exploration of their nature.

Golf balls of the 18th and 19th centuries, he tells us, were made from wood, leather, feathers and tree resin—organic matter that would decay naturally. The one billion golf balls made annually today have a different destiny. In an inspired passage, Mr. Haskell describes how the two glaringly white balls in his mandala will gradually sink through the litter layer to meet the sandstone below. Slowly, extremely slowly, they will be ground up between boulders until pulverized, their atoms absorbed into sediment or magma. Golf balls, he realizes, don't form an end point in the cycle of materials. Instead, "they take mined oil and minerals into a new form, soar briefly, then return the atoms to their slow geological dance."

In case you were wondering, this isn't an argument for the unchecked pollution of old-growth forests. But it and other arresting moments in "The Forest Unseen" make us stop and reconsider something serious and important that we may be taking for granted. I won't spoil the book by revealing more, but among other examples Mr. Haskell provides compelling and novel ways to think about the unpopularity of white-tailed deer, the ecological relationship between coyotes and wolves, and the place of eggshells in our lives. At the heart of his book is a large argument about people's profound interconnection with nature, a cyclical relationship that operates at and through every scale, from the molecular to the cosmic. His is an encompassing and generous vision and, mandala-like, it reveals the universe in a patch of soil.