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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I’m sorry to bring up that dreaded question, but the good news is that The Colors of Nature finally answers it. The question begs the obligatory human perspective, where “one” implies one of a particular Homo sapiens sapiens, who then reports it back to their community and establishes a witnessed truth of the treefall. But, that implication is selfish. For one human perspective there are uncountable perspectives joining it – The sun, the other trees, the brush, and the fungus, not to even begin on the animalia.
Where I initially expected a human-centered narrative of witness that acknowledges simultaneous chronicling of nature, The Colors of Nature offered steep challenge. Having just closed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a gorgeous collection of simultaneous growing, opening The Colors of Nature to several diverse perspectives in orbit of witnessing extended and enriched my understanding of the more-than-human. The Colors of Nature delivers an intersectional history of human narratives and more-than-human witnesses.
Ofelia Zepeda offers unexpected perspectives upon the circumstance of her birth in her poem, “Birth Witness”. “They are silent witnesses,” she accounts of the stars, sun, and pollen that attended her birth (Lauret and Savoy 16). Upon this is the foundation of this discussion: How do the actions of silent witnesses record our shared history? The honoring of the silent witness shares themes with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Honorable Harvest. “I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am,” Kimmerer writes of photosynthetic beings and the collective generational knowledge of seeds (Kimmerer 222). The attending pollen at Zepeda’s birth, as well carrying the generational knowledge of their predecessors, serves as her birth witness, gated only by the human-centered perspective of witness by the woman asking after evidence of “minor things” like Zepeda’s birth (Lauret and Savoy 17).
The first section of The Colors of Nature, appropriately entitled Witness, offers perspectives from multiple authors on the concept of mutual presence and observation with, of, and alongside nature. These perspectives, each aligned with specific individual histories of colonization, slavery, encampment, and culture loss, may at first appear to lack an explicit connection to nature. However, Zepeda’s poem creates the framework of recognition of silent witnesses in the following essays. The sun becomes the primary witness in Fred Arroyo’s “Working in a Region of Lost Names”. Throughout the essay, Arroyo admits to not recalling the names of the people he farmed with. But, he remembers the farmers through the sun’s relationships with them. He names a worker Juan. “[In] the right circle of sunlight,” he comments, “his skin glows and tints his hair with red and gold” (Lauret and Savoy 50). His recollections of Juan working with him are also based on the sun. “I’ll always remember watching him,” he recalls, “…the sun brilliant against his arms folded on his chest” (Lauret and Savoy 50). This shared witnessing of Juan between Arroyo and the sun creates an intersectional narrative of Juan that is enriched by the other. The image and memory of Juan is created by the sun, and the connection between Arroyo and Juan is made relatable to human audiences through Arroyo’s commentary on the sun’s witnessing.
James Galvin’s The Meadow also offers an intersectional narrative, upon which intersection meet humans and nature. The highlight of one of the principal characters, Lyle, is that “He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in” (Galvin 4). This sentence itself could practically encapsulate Lyle living on the intersection of nature as a witness of the human history. With multiple characters living in the same area, it’s as if Sheep Creek witnesses App, Roy, and Lyle. Multiple lives overlapping in a century become one coherent story in the perspective of Sheep Creek. I found a similar telling in Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s “Crossing Boundaries”. Houston visits Manzanar, where once stood the Japanese internment camp where she lived as a child. With her child, she connects with Richard Stewart, a Paiute man, who lives the trauma of the land being taken away from his people via colonization (Lauret and Savoy 35). If observed from the perspectives of Houston and Stewart, they live separate stories that overlap in places, but if understood with Manzanar as the primary witness, their lives exist on the same plane of reference. The land as witness weaves a thread of unity between two adjacent narratives of loss and displacement. Manzanar and Sheep Creek are both the history holders and tellers that create consistency between the different peoples who have lived on them.
Nature being the history holder creates a duality of history for the humans on it: The history of human conflict and the personal history with nature. Camille T. Dungy’s “Tales From a Black Girl on Fire” lays out the dualized history of wildfire and lynching risk as a Black woman in America. Dungy experiences a fear of fire as she witnesses a bonfire surrounded by unfamiliar men (Lauret and Savoy 29). She describes that “the wood was innocent and still acted out a role” in her fear (Lauret and Savoy 30). Then, she addresses the reader and begins to warn of wildfires from unwise flame usage. “You’ve been taught not to play with fire,” she repeats, layering on the narrative of Southern Californian wildfires (Lauret and Savoy 31). Through fire, Dungy experiences both her life as a Black American and a resident of fire country. The land holds both of these histories, and it’s on the land that these histories intersect; Fire is a witness both to the accidental and the intentional damages done by humans in Dungy’s life. Similarly, Great Salt Lakes bears witness to both the internal struggle of Terry Tempest Williams’s grief in her memoir, Refuge, and the external struggle of the rising lakeshore that threatens to flood out lakeside residences. Williams’s management of her grief through her deep personal connection to the migratory bird refuge and her experience of the lake pumping into the desert are connected by Great Salt Lake itself as a witness to her life in its multitudes.
So we come back to our question of the treefall. The Colors of Nature answers a question with a question. Does a treefall make a sound with no one to hear it? Well, who’s listening? How do we value the silent witnesses? In Zepeda’s poem, the stars and the sun are given no value in determining her birth, yet the sun in Arroyo’s memory defines the people he once knew. For Houston, a single location creates a common narrative of grief and displacement between her and Stewart, and for Dungy, fire stands as witness to the complexity of her fear. This then begs the question of how we listen to the silent witnesses. Perhaps there are no words to process and no narratives as we know them to pass along, but the silent witnesses of nature are actors in their own right, and by carrying and sharing our history carry the right to be recognized.
Sources Cited
Deming, Alison H., and Lauret E. Savoy. The colors of nature : culture, identity, and the natural world. Minneapolis, Minn: Milkweed Editions, 2011. Print.
Kimmerer, Robin W. Braiding sweetgrass. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Print.
Galvin, James. The meadow. New York: H. Holt, 1992. Print.
Williams, Terry T. Refuge : an unnatural history of family and place. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.