Handbook of Nature Study

"Gentler in literary tone, but not in lived experience. In the US at the time, infant mortality rates were close to 10% for the first year of life and nearly 1% of births killed the mother. TB was endemic. So people understood that “nature” was, as Tennyson put it, “careless of the single life”, often quite dark. Comstock’s book is important because she changed the course of education in the US, making the case for what we’d now call “environmental education” both through her writing and her advocacy for educational reform. She justified this work to her readers and funders (in agriculture schools) by noting that increased urbanization was drawing people away from relationship with the land. Alongside her instruction about particulars was an imperative to teachers and students: be curious, open your mind and senses to the many lives of other species around you. “Contact with the ecological community was, for generations, forced on people by slavery, share-cropping and poverty… Race and class deserve more attention as we discuss ‘nature’” Comstock writes with great precision of observation and respect for science while using personification of her subjects as a narrative technique. It’s hard to pull this off successfully. To modern ears her work is dated, especially on matters of gender and race, but, like Jean-Henri Fabre, she set the bar high for subsequent writers. To this day, there’s a temptation to either jump so far into anthropomorphism that we lose sight of the actual lives of the creatures we’re studying, or to erect walls of objectivity that deny our bodily and emotional kinship with other species. Twigs appear static, literally “wooden”. But they’re dynamic, wood is a lively substance. Growing twigs have a pulsing 24-hour rhythm, narrowing during the day as water moves through them, then swelling at night. I use the metaphor of our own heart and arteries to draw the reader’s imagination into this odd property of twigs. I hope that familiar words from the world of humans are a bridge to understanding the unexpected, sometimes strange world of plant life. The metaphor works only if it helps us understand the life of the plant, in this case the slow and — for our ears and eyes — unseen, unheard pulsing that surrounds us in the forest."