Image courtesy the New York Times.
“You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare,†he says, “but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there’s such beauty there. And I think the same is true of nature.”
Those are the words of biologist David Haskell, who is featured in a lovely New York Times piece about his work and writings about nature. The article notes that Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is a voice in the field espousing the benefits of nature, but who does not eschew technology (he blogs (davidhaskell.wordpress.com) and tweets (@dghaskell).
“It is this kind of perception, halfway between metaphor and field note, that makes his voice a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist. He avoids terms like “nature deficit disorder†and refuses to scold the bug-fearing masses. His pitch is more old-fashioned, grounded in aesthetics as much as science. “
To read more about Haskell and his book, The Forest Unseen, where he spent a year visiting the same patch of forest land, click here.
