Magic and Magnetoreception

 

Yesterday I spoke with Ethan Tapper for an upcoming episode of The Passing Through Podcast. He's the author of an award-winning book called How To Love A Forest. The book he wrote, published in September of 2024, spans a five year period in Vermont where he works and lives as a forester. He learned animal tracking and bushcraft, and was a wilderness guide before studying earth science and dendrology and botany to get his degree in forestry. I only recently discovered his work through some videos I'd seen on Instagram where he was talking about a phenomenon called magnetoreception, or, the ability of certain animals to detect and interact with the earth's magnetic field. Ethan has a unique ability to re-enchant a world that, for many, has become the dead backdrop on which we live out our monotonous, meaningless lives. The earth is not a cold dead place. It's a magical, mysterious, and largely unknowable expanse where we inhale gaseous molecules of sunlight that we call oxygen—a gift given from plant alchemy that's straight out of science fiction. We live in a world where trees literally offer water to the skies so clouds can return the rains. If these things aren't magic, I'm not sure what is.

Leading up to the conversation I was chewing on certain themes explored in the book. A central question is the question of action, which Ethan poses as, "I asked myself if a better world would be built by inaction or by relationship and responsibility. I asked myself, 'What is the cost of doing nothing?'” For me, this stirred a deep process. One that maybe a lot of us wrestle with. I used to see the world as something that needed saving. I’d be protesting, marching, learning about permaculture, aggressively sharing social media clips, reading books, signing petitions, attending talks, my partner Asia and I joined Extinction Rebellion and attended clandestine meetings plotting the toppling of big oil...I even quit my job to live in a van and travel around the continent to visit permaculture sites and regenerative farms and eco-communities to get involved and help heal the land…but now, I’m not so sure about it. Does the world really need us to save it, or is this some human hubris stemming from our own self-importance and narcissism? 

And are we really motivated to save the earth or are we only interested in saving ourselves? 

The issue I have now with the savior narrative is that we think that we know what’s best for the world or an ecosystem or a forest, without even fully understanding these things, without ever consulting the forest or the many hundreds of non-human persons who live there. We tend not to ask the land what it wants. There’s a sort of arrogance to that. But not only that, there’s this meddling, interventionist aspect that has its roots in imperialism and conquest and scientific-materialism and coloniality and, ultimately, control. The earth is a literal force of nature. It’s the closest thing we know to a God. 252 million years ago an extinction event called The Great Dying killed off roughly 90% of life on this planet. Completely wiped it out. 

And yet, here we are. Life finds a way.

This is the sixth mass extinction event (that we know of) in the earth’s history. And I ask myself whether what’s best for the earth is for us to "save it," or rather to transition toward a more radical post-activism—to hospice this system and let what is become compost for what’s to come. I have this image of a group of people running around in late autumn trying to stop the trees from losing their leaves as a picture of a deranged and misguided sort of heroism. Isn't that basically what we're doing when we fight the natural cycles of birth and death, growth and decay within an ecology?

And yet, at the same time, the other wolf inside me howls. I deeply believe that there are practices and tools we have as humans to steward the land and work in respectful relationship with it to promote mutual flourishing and healing. I can feel this in the bedrock of my being. Indigenous peoples all over the world had been managing their landscapes and building relationship with the land—demonstrating what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls practical reverence. It is in our power to be good kin to all of our plant and river and forest and stone brothers and sisters around us. We have the capacity to nurture, to be good caretakers. And I believe we have a duty to do so not out of self-preservation, but out of love and respect. And we need to do that work, because there is so much of it to be done—by us as individuals, through sweeping systemic and legal reforms, paradigm shifts in our collective narratives, overhauls to predatory and extractive economic models and incentive structures, addressing global equity and justice, food sovereignty, energy distribution, education. The list goes on. So as you can see, this question haunted me throughout the book.

Even after my conversation with Ethan it still lingers. Paradoxically, both things seem true at the same time. The earth will survive without us and we have a responsibility to revere it, to embrace an ethic of care, to nurture relationships and reduce harm where we can. 

Another thing that's been on my mind since reading the book is the idea that most of the forests we know today, with few exceptions, are not vibrant healthy forests. They are forests in recovery. So much has been lost. This loss was accelerated in the 1800's due to rapid industrialization, mechanization and urbanization fueling massive, unprecedented ecological degradation. Paired with colonialism, resource extraction, the introduction of invasive species (ecological colonialism), genocide, ecocide and species extinction, some scholars call this period The Age of Extermination. I think a lot of us, myself included, struggle to get a sense of scope of this loss because it’s difficult to see what’s not there. It’s hard to see an absence of this magnitude. Loggers, with the advent of the chainsaw, accelerated habitat loss by greedily taking all of the best, strongest, healthiest trees and leaving the rest.

The North American landscape, a few hundreds years ago, had flocks of billions of (now extinct) passenger pigeons, a deluge of beaver dams, tens of millions of bison, wolves and caribou and elk in healthy populations across their range. Today, the organisms that are left are living in forest habitats that are ghosts of what they once were. Creatures of the forest spent millennia adapting to lush, diverse, thriving forests, and now their health and their survival is imperiled due to the rapid onset and severity of the degradation we've caused. Their ecosystems—our ecosystems—have been robbed of a richness we can’t even fathom. There's a sadness I feel now when I walk through the forests knowing that they're still reeling from the shock, still trying to stabilize. 

And this brings me back to the question of action. Our track record for taking wise action isn't what I'd call great. We reintroduced deer to these devastated forests not realizing that without the proper proportion of predators, such as wolves, the deer populations would balloon and swell and knock the struggling forests even further off balance. Deer browsing now erodes soil, damages root networks, and causes a proliferation of the tree species deer don't eat, like beech. Left unchecked, deer can even cause a phenomenon called forest disintegration, where forest regeneration halts completely. So what action do we take now? Will reducing the deer populations cause another unpredictable downstream effect that destabilizes the forest even more? Is doing nothing and letting the forest have its process irresponsible, adding insult to injury? There doesn't seem to be an easy answer, at least on human timescales.

These systems move and grow and breathe and live and die in deep time. Go back 20,000 years and these forests were crushed, bulldozed and buried by giant, icy glaciers. During other periods they were burned by indigenous fire, natural fires, choked by droughts, and drowned by floods—dancing between birth and death, always in a state of change and becoming. If we move further along in time, eventually this whole solar system blinks out of existence and dies. 

Life is both tenacious and fragile. 

For this lesson, acorns are good teachers. And each oak is a miracle. Acorns, in order to become stately, majestic oaks, face a seemingly unsurmountable onslaught of opposition. As they grow on the branch, an average of 50–90% will be parasitized by acorn weevils, or lost to other pests and environmental factors. Of the chosen few that do reach sprouting maturity, almost every one of these will be eaten by hungry forest creatures or—you guessed it—parasites. Sneaky squirrels will cache away droves of acorns and bury them like hidden treasure in rotting tree stumps, under elegant beds of moss, beneath an inconspicuous bush, in the hollow of a fallen log, or any other variety of subterranean places free from prying eyes. Lurking competitor squirrels will pilfer and plunder these little treasure chests and rob their brethren blind. Most acorns will be dug out of hiding and devoured before they have a chance to root. Can an acorn get a fucking break? For some time it was believed that the acorns that sprouted were the ones which had been forgotten by the rodents who planted them, but now scientists suspect this isn't the case. It turns out acorns sprout when the squirrels who stashed them get killed by predators. So this means that hawks, owls, eagles, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, weasels, raccoons, and even snakes, are as important to the life of an oak as the small nut-stashing squirrel. The relationship between all of these creatures as they play out their lives, produces the oak. And all of these creatures are intimately connected to and dependent on still larger forces that sustain them; forces like the rain, and clouds, the sun and moon, the earth's magnetic field, rivers and creeks and streams and the soil microorganisms and minerals that create the world above and below the ground. It's all connected. The actions of one squirrel or one weasel or the light of one full moon can have profound and far reaching impacts on the web.

All of that is to say that, what we do now matters. Together we have tremendous impact and power if we act responsibly, with humility and compassion. We are a planet of 8.3 billion stewards and solutions, if we choose to be in service. We are indebted to these systems that sustain us. We exist through relationship with them. Maybe that service will look different to different people; some will push systemic reform and some will hospice, some will protest and some will hold grief circles, some will take up arms and others will advance peace, some will conserve and others will destroy. Our gifts and unique socioecological niches are as diverse and sprawling as an ancient forest, and we're all in it together. To quote Ethan:

“I watch the cars travel the twin lanes of the highway, gone in five seconds. Inside each are people living complex lives: seeking happiness, purpose, and freedom. I wonder what this world would become if they could see, just for five seconds, that we are branches on the same tree, trees in the same forest. I wonder what this world would become if we realized that freedom does not belong to us—that it is borrowed from this living world, borrowed from those without freedom, borrowed from the world of the future. I wonder if we could learn to seek individual freedom within collective freedom, individual liberation within collective liberation, individual prosperity within collective prosperity. I imagine, in this epoch of loneliness, what would happen if we reached toward freedom together.”