The Alchemy of Forests

Ecosystems are spiraling cascades of energy transformations, and in this sense forests are no exception. Trees and other plants, the forest’s primary producers, transform solar energy through elegant pathways into chemical energy. Carbon dioxide from the air and water are transmuted into lignin, cellulose, and the other building blocks of plant biomass.

It is in this way that sunlight becomes acorn, becomes deer bone and flesh, becomes coyote, feces, and humus. The heartwood of Chestnut oak turns to fungal mycelium and emerges as the brilliant orange of the Omphalotus mushroom, feeding beetles and birds, and onward to soil, holding the roots of the oak’s kin and releasing to them the calcium, phosphorus, and nitrogen once held in the bodies of their ancestors.

With each transformative iteration the forest consolidates into emergent forms, working against entropy by holding the sun’s energy in the bodies of its inhabitants and the richness of its soil.

In the 1988 Science article Self Organization, Transformity, and Information, pioneering ecologist H.T. Odum wrote:

 “The by-product materials released from each unit recycle back into the production process. These patterns emerge after the feedbacks have amplified (and thus selected) those pathways that are mutually reinforcing. In a forest hierarchy, for example, sunlight is concentrated by leaves, which converge their products to twigs and limbs and these to trunks, litter, and animals. In turn, the trunks, litter, and animals feed their support and materials back to limbs and these to the leaves. The connections between units of the systems in some cases are visible, such as roots in the soil, but most of the pathways of interaction are invisible and intermittent, as when bees pollinate flowers or animals communicate. Consumer units are useful because they feedback reinforcing materials, service, and information.”

As Odum tells us, the emergent properties of forests are not limited to the myriad bodies of their inhabitants. They include the subtle exchanges of sound and movement, color and feel. They are the smell of leaf litter after rain, the call of a Barred owl, or a glimpse of a Pileated woodpecker taking flight and disappearing through the canopy.

In this way, the transformations within ourselves imparted by the forest – the feelings of awe, fear, sublimity, and contentedness, to name but a few, are as much a part of the forest as the deer rub or the red of a spicebush berry. They tell us things and we change, we choose and we act.

This blog is dedicated to the transformative nature of forests. It is about how forests work and the ways in which we come to know them.