New book recommendation from Bill Gates: "The Language of Trees"
"Tree Talk" is the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning work. As the highest international award in the media field, the Pulitzer Prize is known as the "Nobel Prize of journalism." The views in this book satirize the United States' natural policies. Although praised by Obama, Bill Gates and others, they are still labeled as extreme by many people. "Tree Talk" is the twelfth work of Richard Bowles, an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This book also won the short list of the Booker Prize and the short list of the Faulkner Award. It is the 2019 American Amazon Literature Category The work’s sales and reputation are double champions. Let's take a look next, what does "Language of Trees" say?
“People are better able to understand things that are like themselves,” says field biologist Patricia Westford, one of the nine protagonists in The Language of Trees. Patricia discovered that trees are like people. They are social creatures that care for each other, can communicate, learn, and exchange goods and services. Although they do not have a brain, they are conscious. When a sugar maple is attacked by borers, it releases repellent to alert its neighbors, which in turn strengthens their own defenses. When the roots of two yellow fir trees meet underground, they join together, joining the vascular system, and when one tree becomes sick, the other takes care of it. When a tree is cut down, the surrounding trees weaken, as if in mourning. But Powers' discovery went beyond Dr. Patricia. His tree-themed novel includes many species in North American forests, but the first page mentions the names of 17 species of trees that speak, sing, experience pain, dream, remember the past, and predict the future. It turns out that the past and the future are actually mirror images. But neither has anything to do with humans.
Powers is one of the few American novelists who writes in the great tradition of realism. He dares to abandon himself. In the words of critic Peter Brooks, he is a "historian of contemporary society." He has the courage, intelligence, and stamina to explore our most complex social issues with originality, nuance, and a natural skepticism of dogma. At a time when literary convention prefers novelists to write only about personal experience, Powers's work has nothing to do with popularity, but a return to areas that have been avoided in an attempt to create a kind of authority. Powers once worked as a computer programmer and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an English major. He has written novels on topics including the history of photography, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, race and integration, the Holocaust, and neuroscience. , virtual reality, chemical engineering and genetic engineering. It is only a matter of time before we get involved in the existential crisis facing human civilization, which is the destruction of the natural environment on which we depend.
"What went wrong with mankind?" This is the core question explored in the novel "Tree Talk". In the book, it is posed through the mouth of Douglas Pavlicek, a man who A Vietnam War veteran who later became a radical environmental activist. Powers provides an answer with a cast of protagonists who are unquestionably qualified. Dougie participated in Stanford University's prison experiment during his college years, and therefore concluded that "the biggest flaw of the human species is that it is always unstoppable to mistake opinions for facts." Adam Appiah is a psychologist who studies the ways humans pretend to ignore major catastrophes, especially those that unfold gradually. Ray Brinkman, an intellectual property lawyer, asks whether trees can be said to have legal rights. When Nicholas Hull inherited a family art project, a generations-long commitment to take a monthly photo of the growing chestnut tree, he gradually learned to revere the impermanence of the world. The Hull family's chestnut tree photograph may have been inspired by a similar project conducted in Norwich, England, between 1914 and 1942, where Patricia Westford's discovery was made in collaboration with Canadian forest ecologist Susan Similar to Suzanne Simard, the 2015 bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees by German forester Peter Wohlleben, who shares her initials ) appears to be the basis for Patricia's work The Secret Forest.
Powers's overview narrative model provides an essential backbone for the novel's large number of protagonists and its time span across eras. The opening chapter traces the deeds of five generations of the Hull family and three generations of the Ma family, as well as the entire youth of the other main characters. Five of them later met and participated in a series of "operations" to save trees, with strategies modeled on Earth First (the organization itself was formed as a result of Edward Abbey's novel "The Destruction Gang") and the more radical liberation of the planet. Front organizations, such as forming human barricades, sit-ins under trees, vandalism, and arson.
At the end of the novel, eight of the nine protagonists have become determined fighters. Two went to federal prison, one died, one committed suicide, and two went into hiding. But they all passionately support the same view: The forest must be protected or nature will exact a revenge. The argumentation process is distributed among different characters in the book, but it remains consistent. The following reflections belong to different characters:
“There are trees here that predate the birth of Jesus.
We have cut down 97% of the ancient trees. Can't we find a way to preserve the remaining 3%? ”
“We did not create reality. We are just escaping. This has been the case so far, and the method is to rob natural capital and hide the costs of these actions. But the cost is emerging and we cannot repay it. "
"So simple," she said, "so obvious. Exponential growth within a finite system can lead to collapse. But people can't see it. ”
The towering pyramid of life is already crumbling, and the collapse has begun, although the speed is still very slow. The planet’s ecosystem has been defeated. The circulation of air and water is breaking. The tree of life will fall again and become It becomes a bare tree stump, only for invertebrates to survive, and finally reduced to a hard ground with only bacteria, unless humans...
Coral reefs die and wetlands dry up. Many things have not yet been discovered. Already gone. Much life is dying out at a rate a thousand times faster than the base extinction rate. An area of forest larger than most countries has been converted to farmland. Look at the life around you and delete what you see. Falling in half.
Each one is also Powers's reflection, and his authorial voice is consistent with the characters. When the huge old trees are felled, their voices are "like the impact of a cannonball." Hitting a cathedral”. The bulldozers hitting the trees were “the color of anger”. The police were expressionless and brutal, wiping the eyes of protesters with chemical-soaked swabs and beating others without a trace. In contrast, tree-sitter's life was peaceful and beautiful. After weeks of living in the branches of a redwood tree, Nicholas felt clearer, thought more deeply, and was refreshed—he no longer minded having to water it with his own feces as a base. Dietary Wild Huckleberries “Once a man has seen life in the canopy, who can remain on the ground? He clearly understood that there were no people.
The wildest passages are reserved for the trees. Powers writes of a character enchanted by the glow of the green world, and every one of his characters becomes addicted. Many have the power of visions. One sees a ghost of light, another sees a ghost, and another has a premonition - they all make urging sounds along with the threatened trees. Patricia arrives in Brazil. After the rainforest, it was almost like being addicted:
There are some trees with flowers and fruits growing directly on the trunks. The circumference of the trunk of the strange kapok tree can reach forty feet, and the branches are all kinds of strange, some are covered with spikes. Some are shiny, some are extremely smooth, but all grow on the same trunk. Myrtles are scattered throughout the forest, but they all bloom on the same day. The gift bag of Brazilian chestnuts is full of chestnuts. to tell the time of rain, to predict the weather. The seeds take on all kinds of strange shapes and colors. The pods are like daggers and scimitars. The roots are like sculptures, and the roots breathe air directly. Unsolved mystery. The amount of biomass per unit area is too large to be counted.
Such a fragile resistance could easily be overwhelmed, said a sceptic after Patricia gave expert testimony in court. The judge quickly responded. "I never thought," he marveled, as if he had taken off his robe and climbed into the nearest ponderosa pine tree, "that trees could summon animals and make them do things? Do they have memories? Do they feed and care for each other? " Of course Patricia and the rest of the activists are right. The great cycle of air and water is collapsing, the tree of life is falling, and many things are happening before they are discovered. Disappearing, humans cannot see it all. The price is showing, but we cannot repay it.
But why should these points be expressed in novels rather than in pamphlets, news reports or debate articles? Si answers this question in his book. Intellectual property lawyer Ray attributes the collapse of human civilization to the fault of fiction: "The world failed simply because it looked like an explosion between a few lost people. The conflict is so compelling that no novel can match it. ” Psychologist Adam smashes a fiction book against the wall because he’s tired of reading about “The Difficulties Pampered People Have in Interpersonal Interactions in Foreign Lands.” (To be fair, it sounds like a pretty bad book Novel. ) But Adam’s comment had nothing to do with literature: “The most eloquent argument in the world cannot change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story. "There's a term for stories written to change people's hearts and minds to support a cause. But that's not literature.
When Dougie saw the impact of logging clearing from the air above the Pacific Northwest, I thought to myself, “It looks like the flanks of a sick animal about to undergo surgery, with all the fur shaved off. This is true in all directions as far as the eye can see. If this was televised, logging would stop tomorrow." Would it? If more people understood what was at stake, would they stop using fossil fuels? Or as one character puts it, Will they "return to primitive life"? Is it just the lack of a strong public information campaign or a climate-themed "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that prevents mankind from receiving enlightenment? p>You might think that the flaws in this argument, if not discovered by the characters in the book, would be discovered by Powers himself. The climate problem is a human problem.
A species with a short history cannot be fully prepared for longer periods of time, nor will it be in the future, if doing so means sacrificing immediate convenience. No amount of bad news you hear is likely to change that. Countless bad news in the past have never done this. The idea that disinformation is to blame, or that it fails to capture people’s imaginations, is a self-defeating fantasy.
Part of this article was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. The author, Nathaniel Rich, is an American columnist and novelist. He has published three novels and a film review, and is also the author of " He has written columns and reviews for magazines such as The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Harper's. The article was translated by Chen Lei, the translator of the Chinese version of "Tree Language".