Two articles caught my attention last week, reporting on people who at first glance could not be more different. The first appeared in the New York Times, The Social Life of Forests, and (re)introduced Suzanne Simard, a scientist who looks at forest ecosystems. You might have encountered her if you followed my earlier recommendation to read Richard Power’s The Overstory, one of my favorite books of recent years. She was the model for one of the prominent characters in the novel.
The second was a book review in Jacobin Magazine, familiarizing me with William Morris and his conceptions of art and politics, How William Morris became a Socialist.
What could a contemporary professor of forest ecology and a 19th century artist and writer known prominently for his wall paper designs possibly have in common? Lots, I tell you!
Both devoted their lives to exploring new directions in their respective fields, Simard as a researcher who ventures daringly (and brilliantly) far from the main stream science at times, Morris as an artist who is now known as a founding father of the British Arts and Craft movement which upended the trend towards industrialization and mass production in the Great Britain of the 1800s.
Both can be counted as ardent environmentalists.
And, importantly for my spontaneous linking the two in my mind after reading these pieces, both make us see, keenly, the interconnectedness of things in nature as much as in our social, political, and economic lives. Interconnectedness can be a boon, when all pieces work together for maximum achievement, and it can be a bust, if some random (or not so random) interruption paralyzes the system as a whole.
The NYT article is an easy read, and reveals some astonishing scientific findings in everyday language. (It also reinforces things we have learned form another book about the secret life of trees, which is reviewed here.) Among other things,
“….Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors.”
Underground fungal networks that improve the overall health of the forest system by re-directing needed resources are, of course, affected by indiscriminate logging, or other forms of environmental degradation. William Morris thought the same to be true for art when the benefits it bestows on a given society are endangered. Environmental degradation, either in the literal sense of destroying the beauty and health of nature, or in the figurative sense of our lives being accosted by industrialization and labor exploitation, was the main culprit in his view when it came to the disappearance of art in everyday life.
If you have the time and interest, here is a prescient lecture that Morris gave on the relationship between destroying the earth, undermining its beauty and the pernicious effects of wage labor, all of which alienates humans from their creative capacities. In general, he believed that “art was man’s expression in his joy of labor,” art encompassing not just the intellectual achievements of a chosen few, but the daily beautification of one’s environment that across centuries was part of society’s existence.
He implored us “to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colors of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend to the aspect of the externals of our life.” That could be accomplished by a medieval potter’s careful decorations, a glass blower’s feel for form, a cottage gardener’s lush color schemes up to the hand-pressed paper, hand-printed and colored designs of Morris’ famous tapestries. The very ideas of combining the higher arts with applied art eventually found their homes in the German Bauhaus in the 1920s and its contemporary Russian twin, Vkhutemas, the most fascinating art school you have never heard of. The workshops had artistic and industrial faculties; the art faculty taught courses in graphics, sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught courses in printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking.
By no means did Morris imply that industrialization and machine production were the causal agent in the disappearance of daily creativity. It was the fact that only capital, not laborers benefitted from the automization and speed of production, workers receiving no increased leisure time to use for creative activities to make up for the increasingly non-creative work serving the machines. His writings on socialist models to remedy the unfairness were astoundingly clear-sighted and pragmatic.
He was also quite the character, which, as you all know by now, always excites me. A rich Bourgeois drawn to Ruskin and Marx, an artist and successful business man who marries a working class girl who happens to be his painting model, leaves him for his best friend and then they all manage to establish a menage à trois, a risk taker who late in life shifts gear from designing pretty things (if you like flowery wall paper) to establishing a printing press – it’s all pretty fascinating. Details here.
For a final bit of reading on new claims about the ultimate biological interconnectedness, the Gaia Hypothesis, go here. Would love to know what either Simard or Morris or for that matter Darwin would have thought about this view of an evolving planet.
Photographs of Pacific Northwest forests from this spring. Wallpaper has to wait….
And here are Silent Woods by Dvorak.
