Saturday, May 05, 2018

Ecological aesthetics

We're not palms, able to jump among beaches through wave-bobbing and bird-winged seeds.

One of many breathtakingly poetic sentences in my new book crush, David George Haskells' The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors (Penguin, 2017). The chapter on the sabal palm (and on the rising seas and vanishing beaches and wetlands) continues

But as the ocean unsettles the old human order, we might attend to the trees, not to mimic them but to better understand life on the shore. Sabal palm has learned to thrive amid changeability. ...
The biblical parable can be reworked. The fool is not the person who builds on sand. The error is to believe that sand can be rock. (81)