The roundtable on “Forest Ecology and Engagement” at the 2024 International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science produced the three papers that follow: each engaging and thought-provoking but all the more so when read together.Footnote ¹ They are cross-disciplinary catnip for a natural scientist.

Most explicitly working along a science-literature axis, Kaye describes literary engagement with a research station of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, the increasingly famous H. J. Andrews station.Footnote ² Thanks to the success of Richard Powers’ The Overstory, its equally successful real-life version (Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard), and the cultural dominance of American myth-making in the anglophone world, the Andrews station is on its way to becoming ecology’s Siccar Point or Helgoland.Footnote ³ There is, however, a wider and deeper story of American experimental forests that has not yet entangled fact and fiction and earlier engagements between literature and forestry, about one of which Kaye has already written engagingly.Footnote ⁴

From the broad sweep of the arc of the Simard narrative (in fact or fiction), it is tempting, but misleading, to read linearly from destructive science to respectfully reflective literature. Kaye recognises that such a reading would undermine the creative interplay that grounds a “forest ethics.”Footnote ⁵ Kaye finds beautiful descriptions of writerly groping towards language(s) of the land in the Long-term ecological reflections project he investigates. This groping should not neglect to double back to equivalent, and equally tentative, scientific speculation in epigenetic “memory,” semiochemicals, and especially long-standing intersections between ecology and information theory (see Ulanowicz for a useful review of 20th-century work in this area).Footnote ⁶

Kaye astutely draws out the varied ways of attending to nature, from the “bric-a-brac of [scientific] inquiry” to the more direct interaction between senses and poetic sensibility. Attention is becoming core to our understanding of how humans, non-humans, and machines draw meaning and agency from the information stream served up to, or enveloping, them.Footnote ⁷

Kaye’s own attention to the language of forestry—the “thrifty” young forests and old-growth “cellulose cemeteries”—connects strongly to the “analogical impulse” of concern to Dobrzynski and Smith, an impulse that is not always obvious from the science side.Footnote ⁸ Not obvious partly because the whole concept of metaphor is deeper than—harder than—those outside of literary studies generally appreciate. Certainly, the rhetorical movement between “formal” and “harmonic” analogy is entirely unacknowledged in ecology, and the generative potential of metaphor often missed or mistrusted. To Dobrzynski and Smith’s mycorrhizal analogy, I would add “entanglement,” which they use fruitfully themselves and which is enjoying a moment of currency in the ecological vocabulary, as a quietly unobtrusive resistance to reductionism. Dobrzynski and Smith’s fractal “mises en abyme” is another startling metaphorical intersection; once one’s ears attune, it becomes dizzying and exhilarating how common are our modes of thought.Footnote ⁹ Dobrzynski and Smith’s conclusion, paraphrasing George Box, that all metaphors are wrong, but some are useful, winningly deflates reductionist self-importance and echoes Ronald Duncan’s panoramic insight that “perhaps imagination is a part of our technology?”Footnote ¹⁰

Building community (between people and even between species) is an important aspect of the mycological analogy for Dobrzynski and Smith, which provides an irresistibly tempting connection to Johnson’s project “for expanding Shakespeare’s heritage reach beyond England.”Footnote ¹¹ How a little bit of Shakespeare’s world comes to mushroom in Perthshire is interesting in itself, but Johnson is rightly more concerned with “what it takes to make, move, or destroy a wood,” with human and non-human agency considered, especially what it feels like to be left behind like the discarded boughs of Birnam Wood on Dunsinane hill. Foregrounding the human elements of fabrication and destruction position Johnson ideally to engage with social and natural science. That engagement is directed here to improving the teaching of literature in the United Kingdom but also holds a mirror to school science teaching that might offer ways of averting “plant awareness disparity” (i.e. underappreciation of flora and the processes of vegetal life).Footnote ¹²

Johnson’s concluding description of an act of translocation, dispersing Birnam oak seedlings across the United Kingdom as a restorative act balancing the play’s destructive use of the forest, is again suggestive of lively cultural connections “popping up” like fungal fruiting bodies to allow thinking not just about Shakespeare but also about the tricky ecological issue of human assistance to species movement in response to our very rapidly changing climate.Footnote ¹³

Together, the articles here do the hard work of (re)connecting science and the humanities, as do the activities of the Three Societies more generally. It is churlish to ask for more than this considerable effort, but I would point to the importance of artisanal making as a third pole of environmental ethics and sustainability. The comings together convened by the Andrew Raven Trust offer one example of this wider collaborative effort to work sustainability out via all the aspects of attention embodied in artisanal making, academic thinking, place, and lived experience.Footnote ¹⁴