For Emergence Magazine, Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and more recently, The Serviceberry, visits Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest to examine cedar trees in decay. In considering the many organisms that will colonize a single dead tree and help break it down, she reminds of how we—and all living things—are deeply interconnected.
The very air vibrates with its intake and exhale. There is a deeper sound, a certain hum beneath the silence. I’ve heard that the planet makes a sound, a vibrating chord in C♯ minor. Could it be the hum of life being made and unmade, composed and decomposed? If we listen very hard, can we hear the soaring sunlit chords of photosynthesis, the countermelody of decay? The quiet is so intense, it is as if I can hear the small suck of carbon dioxide entering a leaf, the prick as a fungal strand breaks through the wall of cedar tracheid.
More picks from Emergence Magazine
The Butchering
“It also showed me a kind of pedagogy that exists in our communities. There are no grades in these moments, only stories and sometimes another pair of hands to guide your way.”
Living in the Bones
“Heroes seek discovery, not permission. They also die.”
Beginning with Seeds: Restoration in the Wake of Wildfires
“Environmental scientist Lauren E. Oakes considers how learning what seeds to plant—literal and metaphorical—can help us restore both life and Earth in the wake of profound loss.”
