She is a biochemist and author. Her main topic: trees. In the first online seminar by Media for Future, Harriet Rix (“The Genius of Trees: How trees mastered the elements and shaped the world”, Penguin Books) talked about how she writes about nature, how she tells the stories of trees and strikes the right balance between science and literature. For the British author, this means above all leaving nature as it is. Harriet Rix: “Trees are not humans, and there is no way to humanise trees. We should definitely identify with their value, but never force them into human categories.”
“What would you say is needed to write about trees, about trees, about nature, about climate? Is it precision? Is it wonder? Is it both?”, presenter Magdalena Scharf wanted to know from Harriet Rix. Her answer: “I find myself writing down the facts as they are and then thinking, OK, how can I transform this into a story which has cohesion and flow rather than all these different voices that are coming through from the scientific researchers? Because the world of science is so fragmented, because people are using different instruments to find out what they want to know. And they’re thinking about chemicals or they’re thinking about ecological large patterns of movements, or they’re thinking about mass numbers or physics. You get all these sort of little hints which are shining in in different directions and it can be really dazzling. It’s like the sort of facets on a diamond, you know, the light comes at you from all sorts of different directions and you can have real problems piercing it together in a way which isn’t sort of completely overwhelming for a reader.”
Artist Ásthildur B. Jónsdóttir, who lives in Iceland and Finland, talks about nature in a completely different way. “70% of Finland is covered with trees, but in Iceland only 2%”, she explained. She works with installations and creates sculptures. Through her work, she wants to draw attention to how human interaction can promote both the understanding and practice of well-being in relation to the integrity of nature. Her work reminds us that science can also have an artistic component. Ásthildur B. Jónsdóttir: “Art arouses curiosity. In a way, every answer that art gives is just a gateway to ten new questions.”
For one of her installations, she collaborated with a farmer who is attempting to reintroduce certain birds to Iceland. To this end, he is planting specific trees. What is the artist’s intention here? It is the idea that people should leave the land they take over in a better condition than they found it.
A question from the audience perfectly summed up the content of the discussion and the purpose of the “Media for Future” project: How complicated is it to translate scientific language into language that everyone can understand? Harriet Rix: “I think that translation is one of the really serious things and the sort of potting an image so that people can understand why it’s beautiful. Some of the great ecological historians or great scientists are not very good at making their images beautiful in a way that some other people would find them beautiful.”
So perhaps they need journalists for that.