Do the Insects Under Your Bark Tickle You or Not?
21 June 2023 - Hubert Mansion
A child asks "his" tree if it will be his friend, since he has none. A young girl wants the oak tree in her family's garden to tell her if her mother was fooling around when she was her age, as it has seen her grow up. One boy would like an old beech to tell him "what the dinosaurs were like", another would like to know how the pyramids were built, and yet another very seriously asks a fir tree : "Do the insects under your bark tickle you or not?"
For several months now in Luxembourg, as part of the Forest and Me project, l’Université dans la Nature has been asking children and teenagers to write a letter to their favorite tree. An arguably somewhat new approach in a school setting. Encouraging young people to think of trees as people has always been denigrated by the world of education - and by science in particular - in the name of the fight against anthropomorphism - the enemy par excellence of the scientific spirit.
But science is only one approach to the living world. The sensitive approach is no less valid or useful for the health of the world than the search for scientific truth. The first defenders of nature in Europe, as in America, were in fact artists.
However, we have become so accustomed to separating the cognitive from the sensitive that those who are interested in one often exclude the other. The analytical are called cold, not to say frigid, and the others dismissed as poets, as if that were an insult. When it comes to a cognitive approach to nature, and in particular to scientific facts, some say they "don't need proof." They already know everything because they "feel it.” Others, on the contrary, are suspicious of what they feel, because it's not "objective." Yet both forget all these statements as soon as they fall in love: they feel and they want to know.
And they're right. Human nobility consists in unifying the sensible and the rational, without which our perception cannot be complete. That's why the obsessive fear of anthropomorphism poses no serious threat. These children who write to trees know full well that plants don't read: it's they who read themselves. They name what they feel. And these letters will in no way prevent them from studying the structure of bark or the process of photosynthesis. But, conversely, if these are the only things they know, how can they create a relationship with these living things? If a tree is no more than a machine for capturing fine particles, producing oxygen or reducing heat islands, they will soon be replaced by ecosystem technologies. And in the shadow of these new towers, what Buddha will find light? Which poet will find inspiration? Which democracy the palaver?
Hubert Mansion is the cofounder of l’Université dans la Nature.
Philosopher and writer, he is notably the author of Réconcilier, vers une identité environnementale (Nullius in Verba, 2023) and presents the series La nature et les mots (Youtube).
