My brother Sean recently gave me a book, really an extended essay, called The Tree, written by John Fowles (who, more famously, wrote The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and other novels). Different people no doubt find different main messages in this book, but what I took from it is that seeing nature as something to be used has diminished our deep, primal feeling for the natural world. And, in Fowles’s eyes, “something to be used” means everything from chopping down forests for lumber to adding species to a bird life list to making our lives feel more meaningful through nature meditation.

Yes, it’s a pretty broad critical swath, and I won’t try to defend or finely dissect what Fowles says. But the book is beautifully dense and thought-provoking, and ideas and images from it have been rattling around in my head since reading it a few weeks ago.

Here, as one illustration of the kind of thing Fowles finds undesirable, is a wonderful passage about his first sighting of an unusual plant:

I came on my first Soldier Orchid, a species I had long wanted to encounter, but hitherto never seen outside a book. I fell on my knees before it in a way that all botanists will know. I identified, to be quite certain, with Professors Clapham, Tutin and Warburg in hand (the standard British Flora), I measured, I photographed, I worked out where I was on the map, for future reference. I was excited, very happy, one always remembers one’s ‘firsts’ of the rarer species. Yet five minutes after my wife had finally (other women are not the only form of adultery) torn me away, I suffered a strange feeling. I realized I had not actually seen the three plants in the little colony we had found. Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having-looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking.

Reading that passage, bells rang loudly in my head. I’ve often experienced something very similar, especially when seeing rare birds. First comes the almost reflexive, thought-free recognition of the bird, and then a hyper-consciousness and intellect take over—the dissection of the creature into its critical field marks (primary tips white, bill sharply bi-colored), an assessment of its rarity (when was the last time someone saw a Glaucous Gull in Reno?), even an imagining of the soon-to-be-written post on the Nevada Birds listserv. As with Fowles’s orchid encounter, these sightings take on a feeling of having already happened (and been reported) while the bird is still in front of me. At times, I’ve taken Fowles’ experience one step further—I’ve recognized that the cacophony inside my mind prevented me from really seeing the bird, and I’ve gone back and looked again, only to find that it’s not so easy to pull myself out of the trough of confirmation and cataloguing. (Or, when I’ve turned to look again, the bird has already flown off!)

Long-tailed Duck in Reno. I noted the long tail plumes, got photo documentation, and posted the sighting on NVBIRDS, but did I actually SEE the bird?

On the other hand, I don’t see this kind of thing in the black-and-white terms that Fowles presents, where “using” (viewed broadly as above) is bad, and the primal, functionless, and indescribable is good. I find myself perceiving and interacting with nature in different ways, some of which are surely intellectualized, exploitative (again, in Fowles’s broad sense), and easily described—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In walks I take up a canyon just outside of Reno, I almost invariably keep track of all the species of birds I see, and I usually register what plants are blooming too. Sometimes, I’ll sit and listen to the Black-throated Sparrows, trying to hear if a particular male comes up with different versions of his song, or I’ll veer off the trail to examine each blooming paintbrush, to see what plants the paintbrushes (which draw water and nutrients from the roots of other species) are parasitizing. Or I’ll see a Prairie Falcon perched on a distant outcrop, and ponder the fact (I guess I should say “apparent fact”) that falcons are not closely related to hawks and eagles, and have independently “converged” on the form and habits of a bird of prey.

These sorts of thoughts aren’t constant—at times I am “present” in the sense that Fowles describes—but I definitely never make it through an entire walk without some sort of cataloguing or other intellectualizing of nature entering my brain. Maybe these thinking habits reflect an obsessive personality, but it also seems to me that they resonate because of ancient human ways. As my friend Carol Yoon eloquently describes in her book Naming Nature, all human cultures share a powerful and adaptive urge to identify and put names on living things, and not just a few species, but many, many of them. We are certainly also wired to, at times, flip into a narrow search mode, when we’re looking for particular objects, living or otherwise—after all, before we were even human, we were hunters and gatherers. And we are surely also designed to report, to tell others about what we’ve found.

A desert parsley, Lomatium austiniae. I identified the plant, took a photo, and, you know, I think I SAW it too!

Maybe, now that I think of it, what I really take from Fowles’s book is not that one should always be striving to experience nature in a “present” and fundamentally indescribable way, but that one should not forget, in the welter of purposeful thought, that this other way is possible and sometimes desirable. I admit that, as I’ve learned more and more about the natural world from a scientific perspective, I’ve also found it harder to flip off the thinking switch. But, even if I could, I wouldn’t choose to leave that switch off most of the time.

One other thing occurs to me: Fowles’s description of his unsatisfying first cncounter with the Soldier Orchid made me smile with recognition. It seemed pathetic, silly, even idiotic. It also seemed very human.