The Topology of Tree Time

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The Topology of Tree Time
• Elizabeth Grennan Browning (bio)

Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees. New York: Basic Books, 2022. vii + 432 pp. Bibliography, notes, and indexes. $35.00.

Aristotle reasoned in 350 BCE: “since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the now, and the now is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time.” His accounting of the structure of time was directly opposed to Plato’s; Aristotle singled Plato out as the sole philosopher who had argued for “the creation of time, saying that it is simultaneous with the world, and that the world came into being.”¹ Such an ancient debate begs the perpetual question: what is the topology of time, and why does this matter for the telling of history?

Aristotle turned to plants to help understand the nature of existence across time: “[W]e must discover the reason why trees are of an enduring constitution….Plants continually renew themselves and hence last for a long time. New shoots continually come and the others grow old, and with the roots the same thing happens….Thus it continues, one part dying and the other growing, and hence also it lives a long time.”² Trees’ simultaneity of life and death spun into longevity has long inspired wonder about the nature of time and how humans experience it.

Historians are in the business of creating timelines and delineating periodization—mapping important junctures where inflections of change and causality appear clearly, if only for a moment. These are linear topologies: in theory, the timeline extends both forward and backward, without end. Although, for the historians’ specialized training, this pure linear model is truncated, with a periodized beginning, middle, and end, allowing us to chart the evolution of social, political, economic, and environmental developments. Whether Aristotle’s argument holds up or not, historians rarely turn our gaze from the middle of our curated timelines to contemplate his core point—a refutation of the notion that there could be a beginning or end of time. As much as we push against the dangers of teleology, historians are wedded to the straight line in conceptualizing the passage of time: more often than not, [End Page 313] time’s continual sequencing is the unquestioned disciplinary foundation upon which we go about our work.

In trying to make sense of the myriad abstractions of time, what can we learn from the oldest known living thing on Earth? Providing a masterful and lyrical account of the modern science of tree time, Jared Farmer’s Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees illuminates how our conceptualization of time is irrevocably tied to the natural world, and how our relationship with trees can help us imagine the ethics of resilient futures. Farmer offers a primer on how environmental historians should approach the precipice between the past and the future, and how we might address the impending sense of grief and existential dread that permeates this space in light of our ever-expanding knowledge about our changing climate and related intricacies of social and political change.

I begin where Farmer ends, his benediction addressed to Pinus longaeva (Great Basin bristlecone pine): “May there never be older living things in the world, precisely known. May there always be timeful beings on Earth, with and without our knowing” (p. 360). Farmer’s parting words—which he acknowledges are a “forced ending” to his multifaceted (yet still unavoidably linear) narrative—invite the reader to discern the interspecies ethics stemming from the book’s vital questions about (as Donna Haraway phrased it) “staying with the trouble” of learning how humans and trees can live together and die together on a warming planet.³ This benediction evokes Farmer’s broader goals for Elderflora: understanding the relationship between the scientific and the sacred; exploring the role that storytelling, memory, and nationalism play in framing this dynamic; and ultimately determining how to live ethically in a changing climate, when accruing more knowledge does not inevitably lead to a more just world for...