A mind-expanding exploration of how trees have shaped the world

NATURE
The Genius Of Trees
Harriet Rix
Bodley Head, $36.99

Anthropomorphism has long been a contentious issue in science writing, even in culture more generally. Who, after all, needs the ongoing complexity of the universe’s creation assigned to a human-like figure called a ‘God’? Given that as a species we are decidedly narrative animals, it seems many of us do, if only to better cope with the gaping mysteries of existence itself.

These days such anthropomorphic renditions of non-human biological processes are, in some quarters of science writing, regaining qualified traction, perhaps due to a perceived need to communicate urgent research findings in a time of ecological crisis. This trend is also encouraged as science rediscovers lost affinities in the profound knowledge of indigenous cultures, many of whom practice complex earth-knowledges through storytelling that often dramatises biological processes in personified form.

Harriet Rix’s debut, The Genius Of Trees, while very much the work of a tree scientist, biochemist and a historian and philosopher of science, is a good example of a book that benefits from the increased scope being afforded to the importance of storytelling in science. The book is an intricately researched and technically knowledgeable account of how the earth came to have the “tree-wrought atmosphere” we currently inhabit. It explains how trees have shaped our whole biota: soil, air, water, fire, animals, humans, the lot. And nestled at the heart of this complex story is an enlivening characterisation of how a molecule of CO2 resembles an insect made up of a body, or thorax, of carbon, with two little wings of oxygen fluttering on either side.

Rix’s compelling characterisation of the role of CO2 in photosynthesis rescues it from where it has of late been languishing in jargon and spin. She describes how when each molecule of CO2 enters the pores, or stomata, on the leaf surfaces of trees, its two oxygen “wings”, constantly vibrating and pulling away from each other, finally drop their carbon body, depositing it into the tree, leaving them then to come together in a kind of apotheosis that springs them back into the atmosphere as pure oxygen gas.

This microscopic fable is one of many such narratorial gems in Rix’s book, gems which are encased in traditional scientific descriptions of how trees have evolved from algae washed up at the edge of ancient seas through to the gymnosperms and angiosperms we know today. In striking a balance between information, technical analysis, descriptive imagery, metaphor, and narration, Rix translates her own extensive scientific literacy with a light, even an imaginative touch. It’s perhaps no surprise then that she also frequently betrays her literary interests, at one point referencing Henry James, Marcel Proust, Clarice Lispector and Jane Austen in the space of a few pages.

Notwithstanding Rix’s rather scanty engagement with our own remarkable continent of trees (she admits to actively disliking eucalypts) a key feature of The Genius of Trees is how wide-ranging it is in both time and space, casting back nearly 400 million years to the first generation of plant life on dry land and visiting significant treescapes in many diverse regions of the world. The book’s arborcentric accounts of the role ultraviolet vision plays in pollination, and how the all-pervasive agency of trees make them our “earth-architects”, are fascinating, although occasionally the individual intentionality Rix ascribes to tree species misses something important about how the very being of trees, and any possible teleological cadence of their existence, might differ from ours. She is of course aware of this danger, as is evident in her discussion of the criticism levelled at Suzanne Simard by dendrologists for her now legendary characterisation of the ‘mother tree’, and yet so built in to our human storytelling tropes are concepts such as linear time, or hope, that occasionally she attributes these qualities to trees herself.

Such instances return us to questions around anthropocentrism and scientific storytelling. What role, for instance, does the imagination play in the evolution of our biocultural landscapes? If emotive verbs or visual similes fail are we left with only dry formulae or uncharismatic statistics, or is it always the case that important research findings will need to be translated into image and narrative if they are to engage a non science-trained reader like myself.

Rix reminds us too, that we share 30 per cent of our genetic code with trees. It’s possible then that any relatability we can muster with the “meta-organism” of treescapes might be almost as instructive as the crisp delineation of our differences.

While we humans are more mobile than trees, and while we breathe out carbon dioxide rather than Rix’s vivid wings of oxygen, The Genius Of Trees nevertheless shows us how trees are perhaps our most powerful “influencers” of all, from the earliest days when we climbed through their canopies and slept among their branches, to the here and now where carbon storage and the kiss of those wings of oxygen remain crucial to keeping us alive.

Gregory Day’s most recent book is Southsightedness (Transit Lounge).

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