What can thousand-year-old trees teach us about living sustainably? If we want to be sustained by this planet indefinitely, we need to stop trying to suck it dry.
Doug Larson is an award winning scientist, author, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Guelph. He is an expert on deforestation and regularly contributes to The Guardian and other publications. His books include Cliff Ecology: Pattern and Process in Cliff Ecosystems, The Urban Cliff Revolution: New Findings on the Origins and Evolution of Human Habitats, Storyteller Guitar, and The Dogma At My Homework.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We admire your intellectual humility and curiosity and wonder about the natural world. You’ve said before that you found the ancient forest to be your greatest teacher
DOUG LARSON
I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.
I think like a scientist and my interest in stunted trees probably goes back to my upbringing. I had a difficult childhood with a father who insisted that he was right about everything all the time. And in my early years as a scientist, I was trying to find some system that would not argue back to me. I loved working with organisms that were themselves repressed by nature. It's a wonderful thing to stand like Gulliver on top of an entire ecosystem that's only three inches tall. And ask yourself, am I any happier than it? And I wasn't. And I found that tremendously thrilling to have a different perspective.
Doug Larson’s Music
The first guitar I built, I took it to a friend who has a guitar business. And he looked at it and he said this instrument has the approximate shape of a guitar, but it's not a guitar. It's a piece of junk. And he was right. So, what I found is that it's thrilling, as an artist or as a scientist, to pursue something, even if you don't achieve the thing that you're pursuing but it's the attempt that expresses the humanity.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you think about the future, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
LARSON
There is no reason for doom and gloom in our species. Evolution has produced the most amazing organism that is capable of almost instantaneous change for the better. And I didn't know that when I was a kid, but I think I sensed it. I think I sensed that all these other 20 million species knew something we didn't know. And that was: there's always hope if you let it out of the bag. We're always willing to say that we're right to other people, but the joy comes from realizing that the truth eventually comes out. And it's by the inexorable floating of science to the surface, by people who are willing to say they're wrong. They think it's a sign of weakness, and in my view, it's the ultimate sign of strength in a politician to say, "Yeah, I was wrong last week. I was wrong last month. I was wrong last year." We're always looking for better ideas, and so if you've got one, let us know. Politicians think it's a sign of weakness to change their minds. And I think, are you kidding? Evolution is selecting for people to change their minds all the time. That's what works in nature. Evolution is the process by which things that are better replace things which aren't.
