The story of how the Earth, and human beings, have been shaped more than we know by these forces of nature
W
hen was the last time you stopped to say thank you to a tree? Perhaps it’s something we should do more often. After all, we owe them everything, from the air we breathe to the soil beneath our feet, and far less obvious things too. We have trees to thank for the swirl of our fingerprints, our posture, and possibly even our dreams.
In her new book, British tree science consultant Harriet Rix presents trees as an awesome force of nature, a force that has, over time, “woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety”. How have trees done this? And can they really be said to possess “genius”?
If you think of life first emerging from the sea, hundreds of millions of years ago, you might picture something like the Tiktaalik, a human-sized floppy-footed fish that hauled itself out of the shallows some time in the Late Devonian. But the evolutionary eureka moment arguably came long before that, when one lucky green alga washed up on the Cambrian shore and managed to survive the deadly UV light on land.
