Some time ago I read an entertaining account of old trees, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer. When I look back I don’t remember many details, except my impression that the book was very much focused on the US, which is understandable, or rather something I have learned to expect. The names of the chapters give an idea of the scope of the critically and entertainingly written book: Prologue, Introduction, Venerable Species, Memento Mori, Monuments of Nature, Pacific Fires, Circles and Lines, Oldest Known, Latest Oldest, Time to Mourn, Epilogue.
 
The first corner I have turned, on page 113, deals with German forest policy in the 19th century: “… the contradiction between forestry and forest-mindedness was partially resolved through the protection of “remarkable trees”, the inverse of “normal trees”. While the forest engineers segregated timber into age cohorts, they marked extraordinary specimens on their cadastral maps and placed stones around them – relicts to be preserved in the midst of rationalisation.” (Farmer 2022, 113) Farmer mentions that ‘remarkable’ first meant “freak forms of growth” but would soon come to mean “the biggest, the oldest, the most historic – trees associated with kings, or Luther, or Goethe, and ideally situated near spas and hiking paths.” (ibid.) This was of course interesting to think about after completing a two-year project called Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees not that long ago.
 
There is much talk about dendrochronology, tree rings and the search for the oldest tree in the world, usually a pine, but I have turned my next corner only more than hundred pages later. That is because junipers, my current performing partners, are mentioned. “When piñons and junipers expire their deaths don’t attract the same media attention as do lone trees or tall trees.” Moreover: In Utah and other western US states, ranchers and land managers continue to ‘chain’ junipers – kill them by dragging a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers – thus encouraging the growth of annual grasses grazed by beef cattle.” (Farmer 2022, 270)
 
A familiar name pops up a little later, namely Pando, the huge aspen forest, which is actually one cloned individual, “a forest of one”, near Fishlake plateau in Utah. It is a candidate for the largest organism in the world, and supposed to be 80.000 years old. And in the same context there is a brief account of the Swedish spruce clone, Old Tjikko, which I have visited myself in 2019 and thought to be 11.000 years old, standing there since the ice-age. Farmer notes that a professor at Umeå University named the ancient clone Old Tjikko after his beloved departed dog and mentions the finding of a 9.550 year old piece of wood on the site as the only rather insubstantial evidence. He also mentions a book by a brooklyn-based photographer Rachel Sussman, The Oldest Living Thing in the World (2014), new to me. (Farmer 2022, 290-293) Farmer notes that “it’s current high ranking in Google searches for the oldest living thing is less about botany than the never ending search for symbols. The latest oldest is a mobile site where the modern fetish for the new and the novel meets the modern fetish for the ancient and the original.” (Farmer 2022, 293)
 
Well, what other ways of being remarkable could make more sense?
 
 
Farmer, Jared (2022) Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees Picador 2022
 
 
 

The book by Olivia Laing, The Lonely City from 2016 is perhaps not the first book one thinks of as a source for research notes, but it is as much about art as about the city of New York or loneliness, or rather a few artists like Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, the outsider artist Henry Darger, the singer Klaus Nomi and the internet entrepreneur Josh Harris. And with them their times, including the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP and so on. It was fascinating to read about a time I have witnessed myself, and remember parts of, like the sudden international fame of Klaus Nomi. My short visit to New York in the 1980’s when Nina von Svetlich and Anja Salmela, who later died of AIDS together with her husband, lived there in east village, and then some years later when Roi Vaara performed with Black Market International in Franklin Furnace, left only superficial impressions. Enough to enjoy the book, though, which is written in a personal confession style, but includes analysis of cultural politics, social media and queer resistance and is stimulating on many levels. What I remember best, perhaps, from the end of the book, is the idea of collage and stitching things together as a remedy for loneliness or isolation or the feeling of things falling apart. And also the general idea of art as a remedy for various ailments, like loneliness or isolation or racism and humiliation etc. Of course I started to wonder whether I am lonely, or perhaps so used to being alone that I do not recognise it as loneliness… The book, which is now translated to Finnish and was recommended to me by Eija-Liisa, is well worth reading in any case.
 
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City – Adventures in the art of being alone Canongate books, Edinburgh 2017.
 
 

This thought provoking book – The New Wild by Francis Pearce – is already 10 years old, published in 2015, but feels fresh and provocative. Written by a journalist, easy to read, it makes its points clearly. So called invasive species are not the bad guys but the good guys who help restore what humans have destroyed. The book consists in three parts: Alien Empires (On Green Mountain, New Worlds, All at sea, Welcome to America, Britain: A Nation Tied in Knotweed), Myths and Demons (Ecological cleansing, Myths of the Aliens, Myths of the Pristine, Nativism in the Garden of Eden), and The New Wild (Novel Ecosystems, Rebooting Conservation in the Urban Badlands, Call of the New Wild).
 
Here are a few quotes that made me turn the corner of the page:
 
“Conservationists, it seems, are dedicated to protecting the weak and vulnerable, the endangered and the abused. Nature generally promotes the strong and the wily, the resilient and versatile.” (Pearce 2015, 102)
 
“All this [rinderpest and the development of national parks in Africa] tells us three things. Firs, of course, it tells about the danger of alien diseases in communities with no immunity – though I doubt that anything on the remotely similar scale still awaits unsuspecting ecosystems today. Second, it tells us that nature is good at growing back. Third, it shows us that our attitudes about pristine nature are often founded on false perceptions. Most of what we regard today as virgin wilderness is far from untouched by humans.” (Pearce 2015, 133)
 
“Conventional conservation … operates ‘on the grossly mistaken belief that we can halt ongoing extinctions, [which] fuels our preoccupation with saving relics and ghosts’. What conservationists should really be doing… is ‘turning our attention to the new assemblages of organisms that are emerging’ as a result of our activities.” (Pearce 2015, 160)
 
“Traditional wild lands – the old-growth forests and other historic habitats – will in the future be the places most dependent on human intervention for their survival. In a world of climate change, where the old wild is hemmed in by human activity, these ecosystem islands will increasingly resemble museum pieces, time capsules, and experimental labs for scientists. They will not be wild in any true sense. On the other hand, the novel ecosystems, the make-do-and-mend places, will be the ones able to stand on their own two feet. They will be the new wild. (Pearce 2015, 186)
 
I am not so sure about old-growth forests being museums that need human maintenance, human protection from logging for sure, but the argument for looking at all the new collaborations and hybridisations taking place when species from all over the world meet in semi-urban areas or ‘badlands’ is convincing. The strange new ecosystems developing in places destroyed, disturbed or abandoned by humans – and between them -surely are a new wild.
 
 
Fred Pearce, The New Wild – Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation. Boston: Beacon Press 2015.