Hope Jahren Quotes

She then turns to Clint. "That being said, if something happens to you, like you faint, we will kick you to the side and keep going.

Our tree's only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process.

Since then, I have realized that my tree had been a child once too. The embryo that became my tree sat on the ground for years, caught between the danger of waiting too long and the danger of leaving the seed too early.

You may think a mushroom is a fungus. This is exactly like believing that a penis is a man.

Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood...

the many, many times in my life when I have pleaded this question "Why?" to those in power come back to me, as does the fact that I have never, ever been given an answer that's good enough for me.

A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.

One-third of the Earth's land used to be covered in forest. Every ten years, we cut down about 1 percent of this total forest, never to be regrown.

My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.

My strongest memory of our garden is not how it smelled, or even looked, but how it sounded.

Along the way, we also managed to become adults without ceasing to be children.

The fifty-six hours of weekend that rolled out before us seemed endless. At sunrise we planned to declare ourselves the rightful inheritors of everything in the departmental refrigerator, but beyond that we had nothing scheduled. Maybe we would pick the lock to the machine shop and gawk at the huge saws, drills, and welding tools, treating it as our own personal museum. Maybe we would stage a private showing of The Seventh Seal using the projection system in the main auditorium. And maybe there was someone somewhere in the world who was happier than I was during that year, but on nights like that I certainly couldn't imagine it.

Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don't know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It has adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.

It seemed outrageous to hope that fertility, resources, time, desire, and love could all come together in the right way, and yet most women did eventually walk that path.

And so I lie in bed and feel what I don't need come out of me. A steady ooze of bloody, amorphous clots slides out of me for days and with it flows all the guilt and regret and fear that I have carried, and while I sleep, people stronger than I am silently take it all away and dispose of it properly.

The gamble is everything, and losing means death. The odds are more than a million to one against success.

it is a hard-hearted monkey indeed that remains unmoved during a good slathering of bacitracin, and

all of the want and suffering in the world-all of it-arises not from the earth's inability to produce but from our inability to share.

Good neighborhoods, rich with water, thick soil, and - most important - full sunlight, give rise to trees that reach their maximum potential. In contrast, trees in bad neighborhoods never achieve half of that height, never have much of a teenage growth spurt, but focus instead on just holding on, growing at less than half the rate of the more fortunate. During

We love each other because we can't help it. We don't work at it and we don't sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won't work, moving heaven and earth often won't make it work -- and similarly, there are some things that you just can't screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don't want to. I really don't want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him...

It's very liberating; I feel great. Long hair is so fucking foolish, I feel sorry for guys who have it," he said, expressing the total conviction one finds in those who have only recently been converted.

Dung beetles follow the Milky Way; the Cataglyphis desert ant dead-reckons by counting its paces; monarch butterflies, on their thousand-mile, multigenerational flight from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains, calculate due north using the position of the sun, which requires accounting for the time of day, the day of the year, and latitude; honeybees, newts, spiny lobsters, sea turtles, and many others read magnetic fields. - Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots

FOR TREES THAT LIVE in the snow, winter is a journey. Plants do not travel through

Every object in my lab - no matter how small or misshapen - exists for a reason, even if its purpose has not yet been found. My

The initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory, won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism. This unique intellectual agony shapes the character of the tree experimentalist and selects for those with a religious devotion to science. Patient, with overtones of masochism.

You're right." I played into his cynicism, but only halfheartedly. "We don't really believe that, do we?" "No, we don't," Bill admitted. "But tonight we do." I

My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act "nicely." I didn't know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention

That whole summer in Colorado was a data-gathering bust, but it taught me the most important thing I know about science: that experiments are not about getting the world to do what you want it to do. While tending to my wounds that fall, I shaped a new and better goal out of the debris of the disaster. I would study plants in a new way - not from the outside, but from the inside. I would figure out why they did what they did and try to understand their logic, which must serve me better than simply defaulting to my own, I decided. Every

Can you imagine throwing away all of your possessions once a year because you are secure in your expectation that you will be able to replace them in a matter of weeks?

Researchers generally love their calling to excess, and delight in nothing better than teaching others to love it also; as with all creatures driven by love, we can't help but breed.

We had long since established the habit of not speaking as we walked the two miles home; silent togetherness is what Scandinavian families do naturally, and it may be what they do best.

It turns out that there is no "right" or "wrong" way to grow into a hundred-year-old tree: there are only ways that work and ways that do not.

He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it.

It is easy to become besotted with a willow. The Rapunzel of the plant world, this tree appears as a graceful princess bowed down by her lush tresses, waiting on the riverbank for someone just like you to come along and keep her company.

Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn. All

My lab is a place where it matters if I get hurt.

Instead, I would take a long, lonely journey toward adulthood with the dogged faith of the pioneer who has realized that there is no promised land but still holds out hope that the destination will be someplace better than here. On

Bill was wrestling with his undercooked chicken. "Wow," I remarked while examining my own plate. "I don't think I can eat this."
"I know. It's gross," he conceded. "But it's free, so I scarf down seconds each night."
"As a dog returneth to his vomit," I said, while making the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.
"Amen," he agreed with his mouth full, and toasted me with his 7Up can.

I used to pray to be made stronger; now I pray to be made grateful. Every

No matter what you say while in the hospital, doctors won't laugh at your jokes.

after a man reaches ninety-five and hasn't died yet, the people around him become lulled into believing that he never will.

Every piece of wood in your house - from the windowsills to the furniture to the rafters - was once part of a living being, thriving in the open and pulsing with sap. If you look at these wooden objects across the grain, you might be able to trace out the boundaries of a couple of rings. The delicate shape of those lines tells you the story of a couple of years. If you know how to listen, each ring describes how the rain fell and the wind blew and the sun appeared every day at dawn.

I smile back at her. "I must be stronger than I look." "All women are," my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges. Clint

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to
be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that
waited.

Resurrection plants are usually tiny, no bigger than your fist. They are ugly and small and useless and special. When it rains, their leaves puff up but do not become green for forty-eight hours because it takes time for photosynthesis to start up. During those strange days of its reawakening the plant lives off of pure concentrated sugar, an intense sustained infusion of sweetness, a year's worth of sucrose coursing through its veins in just one day. This little plant has done the impossible: it has transcended the wilted brown of death. The miracle is not sustainable, of course, and within a day or two things will inevitably go back to normal. Such a crazy life takes its toll, and in the long term, even a resurrection plant withers and dies completely. But for a brief, glorious moment it knows something that no other plant has ever known: how to grow without being green.

discovery and mischief are two sides of the very same coin.

I suspected that they hadn't relocated to the coldest place on Earth and then taken up disemboweling pigs because things were going well in Europe, but it had never occurred to me to ask for the story. I

My three older brothers and I lived with our parents in a big brick house located south of Main Street, four blocks west of where my father had grown up in the 1920s, eight blocks east of where my mother had grown up in the 1930s, one hundred miles south of Minneapolis, and five miles north of the Iowa border. Our

We plowed through Chaucer, and I learned to assist her using the Middle English dictionary. One year we spent the winter painstakingly noting each instance of symbolism within Pilgrim's Progress on separate recipe cards, and I was delighted to see our pile grow to be thicker than the book itself. She set her hair in curlers while listening to records of Carl Sandburg's poems over and over, and instructed me on how to hear the words differently each time. After discovering Susan Sontag, she explained to me that even meaning itself is a constructed concept, and I learned how to nod and pretend to understand. My

There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.

At the end of a mass extinction, the tree of life has lost several branches-and yet, afterward, life does go on. Plants regreen the earth and animals repopulate the oceans; different species relentless forward march. There will be life on planet Earth after the sixth mass extinction, but we are not able to imagine it any better than the dinosaurs could have imagined a world dominated by mammals walking on two legs, driving bulldozers, and flying airplanes.

It's inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves. A

It wasn't until I was seventeen and moved away to college that I discovered how the world is mostly populated by strangers. When

I started out studying literature, but soon discovered that science was where I actually belonged. The contrast made it all the clearer: in science classes we did things instead of just sitting around talking about things. We worked with our hands and there were concrete and almost daily payoffs. Our laboratory experiments were predesigned to work perfectly and elegantly every time, and the more of them that you did, the bigger the machines and the more exotic were the chemicals that they let you use.

Working in a lab for twenty years has left me with two stories: the one that I have to write, and the one that I want to. Science is an institution

Nothing could alter the overwhelming sweetness of briefly holding a small secret that the universe had earmarked just for me.

That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.

Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given - indeed, it has turned out to be the only thing that ever could.

Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches.

Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren't getting the revolution we want: we're getting the one that we triggered. The

A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you're told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.

Tiny but determined, I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it's more than people want to see. Back

wanted to make him know that he had friends in this world tied to him by something stronger than blood, ties that could never fade or dissolve. That he would never be hungry or cold or motherless while I still drew breath. That he didn't need two hands, or a street address, or clean lungs, or social grace, or a happy disposition to be precious and irreplaceable. That no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self. Most

I learned that female professors and departmental secretaries are the natural enemies of the academic world, as I was privileged to overhear discussions of my sexual orientation and probable childhood traumas from ten to ten-thirty each morning through the paper-thin walls of the break room located adjacent to my office. By these means I learned that although I was in desperate need of a girdle, I was better off than one of the other female professors, who would never lose all that baby weight by working all of the time. As

The doctors, nurses, and I didn't cry because the bewildered husbands and stricken daughters were crying enough for all of us.

The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It's inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.

My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven't done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done. My uncalled parents, unpaid credit cards, unwashed dishes, and unshaved legs pale in comparison to the noble breakthrough under pursuit. My lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am.

The only way to do good soil science is to put a splitter and a lumper together in the soil pit and let them fight it out until they achieve something that they both know must be correct because neither of them feels satisfied. Left to her own devices, the lumper will dig for three hours, mark the horizons in ten minutes, and then go on her merry way. Left to his own devices, the splitter will dig a hole and crawl inside, never to be seen again. Thus splitters and lumpers are both productive only when forced into bickering collaboration, and though together they produce great maps, they rarely return from field trips still on speaking terms. Once

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was - in addition to being small and insufficient - special. I was not only a quirky bundle of genes, but I was also unique existentially, because of the tiny detail that I knew about Creation, because of what I had seen and then understood. Until I phoned someone, the concrete knowledge that opal was the mineral that fortified each seed on each hackberry tree was mine alone. Whether or not this was something worth knowing seemed another problem for another day. I stood and absorbed this revelation as my life turned a page, and my first scientific discovery shone, as even the cheapest plastic toy does when it is new. I

The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don't have an answer for that one. The

People slice up tree trunks, nail the pieces together into boxy shapes, and then go inside to sleep. Trees use the wood in their trunks for a different purpose - namely, they use it to fight with other plants. From dandelions to daffodils, from ferns to figs, from potatoes to pine trees - every plant growing on land is striving toward two prizes: light, which comes from above, and water, which comes from below. Any contest between two plants can be decided in one move, when the winner simultaneously reaches higher and digs deeper than the loser. Consider the tremendous advantage that wood confers to one of the contestants during such a battle: armed with a stiff-yet-flexible, strong-yet-light prop that separates - and connects - leaves and roots, trees have dominated the tournament for more than four hundred million years.

Eventually it will require more nutrients to maintain the branches and roots that do not grow quite far out enough to capture those nutrients. Once it exceeds the limitations of its environment, it loses all. And this is why you must trim a tree periodically in order to preserve it.

There are two ways to deal with a major setback: one is to pause, take a deep breath, clear your mind and go home, distract yourself for the evening, and come back fresh the next day to start over. The other is to immediately resubmerge, put your head under and dive to the bottom, work an hour longer than you did last night, and stay in the moment of what went wrong. While the first way is a good path toward adequacy, it is the second way that leads to important discoveries. One

And finally, for readers who find themselves wanting to know more about the living green that surrounds us, I recommend that they waste no time in getting ahold of P. A. Thomas's book Trees: Their Natural History (2000),

I hear my own voice shrieking out its bewilderment at finding so many imperfections within a world of limitless potential.

And because I know the transcendent value of loyalty, I've been to places that a person can't get to any other way.

The Bible is always short on details. Didn't Stephen's innate sense of self-preservation thwart his martyrdom at all?

Even if you consider yourself on the right side of environmental issues and a true believer in climate change, chances are that you are actively degrading the earth as much as, or more than, the people you argue with. An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness.

In order to accumulate all of the soil nutrients that thirty-five pounds of leaves require, our tree must first absorb and then evaporate at least eight thousand gallons of water from the soil. That's enough to fill a tanker truck. That's enough to keep twenty-five people alive for a year. That's enough to make you worry about when it is next going to rain. ***

After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant's yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.

I wanted to be studying plant growth, but science for war will always pay better than science for knowledge.

It was a new idea, my first real leaf. Just like every other audacious seedling in the world, I would make it up as I went along.

So how to combine a liter of fluid with active agents, customized according to the patient's weight and status, while keeping everything sterile? If this is for the ER or the ICU, we have about ten minutes to make it happen. Fortunately for the patient, there is a sleep-starved teenager apprenticed to a chain-smoking barmaid in the basement who is ready for action. ***

No writer in the world agonizes over words the way a scientist does. Terminology is everything:

We pored over the equipment and fixed what was broken, and my father taught me how to preemptively take things apart and study how they work, so that as they inevitably failed I'd be able to restore them. He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it. At

Once people begin to roll their eyes and gently tell you that you're crazy, laugh with gratification. When you're a scientist, it means that you're doing it right.

Can you imagine growing up in a culture where you can never ask anyone anything about themselves? Where "How are you?" is considered a personal question that one is not obligated to answer? Where you are trained to always wait for others to first mention what is troubling them, even as you are trained to never mention what is troubling you? It must be a survival skill left over from the old Viking days, when long silences were required to prevent unnecessary homicides during the long, dark winters when quarters were close and supplies were dwindling. While

Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can't possibly be what you are.

However much you love your job, it ain't gonna love you back.

It was kind of tragic, I reflected, that we all spent our lives working but never really got good at our work, or even finished it.

Then I catch myself and listlessly wonder again for which of my sins I am being punished. I am sick to death of this wound that will not close; of how my babyish heart mistakes any simple kindness from a woman for a breadcrumb trail leading to the soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother. I am tired of carrying this dull orphan-pain, for though it has lost its power to surprise, every season it still reaps its harvest of hurt.

I didn't foresee anything that might kill me that day, and not getting killed was my new bar for what constituted a good day.

Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you're supposed to be.

Everything about my life looked pretty well messed up compared with how adulthood had always been advertised to me. I

The Norwegian scientists have observed that among hundreds of genetically identical trees, grown from seedling to adult side by side in the forest, the trees that had been embryos under a cold climate invariably set their buds two to three weeks earlier than do their counterparts, anticipating a longer, colder winter.

I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on.

The leaves on our little maple, all taken together, weigh thirty-five pounds. Every ounce therein must be pulled from the air or mined from the soil - and quickly - over the course of a few short months. From the atmosphere, a plant gains carbon dioxide, which it will make into sugar and pith. Thirty-five pounds of maple leaves may not taste sweet to you and me, but they actually contain enough sucrose to make three pecan pies, which is the sweetest thing that I can think of right now. The pithy skeleton within the leaves contains enough cellulose to make almost three hundred sheets of paper, which is about the number that I used to print out the manuscript for this book. Our

Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won't take long. She'll look you in the eye and say one word: "Money.