A force of nature: How a small fern pulled me into a long tradition of writers smitten with the natural world

Zoë Schlanger is a journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic. The excerpt below is from her new book

The azolla performs another miraculous trick still; some 100 million years ago, it evolved a specialized pocket in its body to house a packet of cyanobacterium that fixes nitrogen. The air around us is nearly 80 per cent nitrogen, and every life form, including ours, needs it to manufacture nucleic acids, the building blocks of all life. But in its atmospheric form, it’s entirely out of our reach. Nitrogen, nitrogen everywhere, and not a single molecule that we can use.

“… The tall corn, the strong sun, the old man, become one. This is one of those moments, indescribable, when there is a sense of intense reality, an almost preternatural reality – and then we are descending the trail to the gate, reboarding the bus, all in a sort of trance or daze, as if we had had a sudden vision of the sacred, but were now back in the secular, everyday world.”

As I read more books about plants and their enraptured naturalists after work and into the early morning, I began to find these moments sprinkled everywhere. In, Andrea Wulf‘s biography of the famous 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, I learned he’d had it too. Von Humboldt wondered aloud why being in the outdoors evoked something existential and true.

Dei Nitrogen Nature World Plant Moment Life Corn Form New York Botanical Garden Harper Harpercollins Publishers

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