From Chapter One of The Lost Continent of the Biological Mind
‘In the Mind of the Fungal Nexus’
Tree of Life
Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. – Yoda.
In a United Kingdom High Court ruling in 2009, relating to a dispute concerning a tree preservation order imposed in 2005 on woodland in Kent, the judge, Mr Justice Cranston declared in an astonishing act of legislative rebellion:
There is no statutory definition of a tree…I conclude that with tree preservation orders there are no limitations in terms of size for what is to be treated as a tree. In other words, saplings are trees.
He went so far as to state that preservation orders extend to all trees, ‘even if not in existence at the time.’
In Tasmania tall tress over 85 metres are not logged, but the same protection doesn’t hold for any old tree. In fact often the older trees are not actually the tallest, because the top has dropped, they are so old they can’t keep it up any more. It is these older trees however that have developed the richest interactions with other species of both flora and fauna; lichen, moss, fungi, insects, lizards, frogs and birds inhabit its obscure crannies. The hollowed out trunk of a tree becomes a perfectly sheltered habitat. The older bark separates from the trunk creating cosy crevices, small pools of water form that are a niche abode for all sorts of little creatures, including larger birds and animals, such as the threatened Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle and the spotted quoll. Tall trees are certainly important. But not as stand alone examples. Because of their age, they are more sensitive to changing conditions. Like any elderly person, they too require family members and neighbours in close proximity, both large and small to protect them from weather changes and to allow the creatures living in them free flow of movement from one tree to another. And yet, like elderly people today isolated from their community and hidden away into old-peoples homes, tall trees are treated as solitary specimens, extracted from the forest at large, exposed like a statue in a museum.
Ironically, time and again, despite everything, the cliché is reinforced: size does matter.
The 2013 Giant Tree Policy stated the following:
Forestry Tasmania will seek to identify, manage and protect giant trees in Tasmania’s Permanent Timber Production Zone. Giant Trees are defined as trees that are at least 85 metres tall or at least 280 cubic metres estimated stem volume. Based on current known examples, trees of this volume are generally at least 5m in diameter at chest height.
Under this policy, Forestry Tasmania will:
Protect currently known Giant Trees;
Periodically remeasure known Giant Trees;
Undertake surveys to identify any Giant Trees within coupes in the Three Year Plan that have the potential to contain these trees;
Maintain a register of all Giant Trees recorded in Tasmania;
Promote with other forest managers a state wide tourism strategy for Giant Tree appreciation on all tenures and participate in its implementation.
Tasmanian Oak is the common name used to refer to the timber of up to eight different species of tall Eucalyptus that are all marketed collectively. The three main species, E. regnans, E. obliqua and E. delegatensis are all hardwoods that are highly favoured for floorboards, furniture, veneer and plywood. Although these three species are not only found within Tasmania, regnans and obliqua are generally more successful down on the island. The problem is their sourcing. Although they are used in plantations (particularly in New Zealand where there is high rainfall- just ask the New Zealanders what they think of this!) anyone buying these products must exercise extreme caution in order to evade the use of trees that have been logged from old growth forests in Tasmania. That is harder than it sounds, as so often old growth forests are logged, or partially logged and then the tract is used for plantations. It might be advertised as plantation sourced, but that’s only because the old-growth was logged last decade and replanted as plantation. Prompting the question, when is a plantation not a plantation, when is a forest not a forest? Is it possible to see the wood from the trees?
Eucalyptus regnans is the second tallest tree in the world, second only to the insanely huge American Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). That said, it has been suggested that E. regnans could possibly reach if not exceed the Redwood given its history of being logged before it attains full maturity. The tallest American Redwood has been measured at 115.5 metres, while in 1881 the surveyor George Cornthwaite measured a regnans that had been felled in Victoria at 114.3 metres. Another, found in Victoria in the early 1870s, the Ferguson Tree, was claimed to be the tallest discovered, at 132.6 though this record is disputed as unreliable. Yet, there can be no doubt that such heights are plausible, given that in 1888 Al Carder offered a 100 pound reward for anyone that discovered a tree measuring more than 122 metres, implying that the current observed record was 122. That the reward was never claimed suggests, however, that such trees were not common. While the American redwoods take thousands of years to reach their height, the Eucalypt lives fast and dies young, with a lifespan of 350-400 years. Tasmania has at least 140 trees taller than 85 metres. On the island these giants are known on a first name basis, under such grandiloquent titles as Centurion, Damocles, El Grande, Gandalf’s Staff, Icarus Dream and Medusa.
Known more commonly as Mountain Ash E. regnans prefers high rainfall areas on deep, fertile soils. In Tasmania it can be found in the northeast and the Huon and Derwent Valleys. The most controversial and sensitive areas of its growth are in the highly logged Styx and Florentine Valleys as well as in the Tarkine area. But it occurs throughout the North of Tasmania, and, as old growth is logged and plantations crop up, its presence, or at least the presence of its fellow pseudonyms is on the increase along with the fast growing E. nitens and E. globulus, taking precedence over the other rainforest trees native to high rainfall areas.
As the sequoia is coniferous, E. regnans is, then, the tallest flowering hardwood in the world and, absurdly given its monstrosity, develops out of a tiny seed no bigger than the following full stop. Its seeds are pyramidal, its buds obovoid, fruit obconical. Its flowers are white. Not that you’d see them, unless, of course, you were practising your skills on the trapeze. Its bark is rough and is shed in long ribbons, often up to ten metres in length. Underneath, the trunk is smooth and white, but up the top it becomes bright green when it is wet. According to the poetic license of Murray Bail the term ‘tall timber’ is used locally ‘to render male flesh abstract’. And truly, there is something about the regnans that is somehow intensely masculine. As if whatever is so tall, so upright can’t help representing the hyperbole of phallic protrusion. But more than merely phallic, the tree signifies the hierarchy, regnans, the ruling monarch, the king or emperor reigning over all, isolated in his grandeur, sticking out all on his own above the mass of forest below.
In unpretentious contrast is the communal E. obliqua, common name, Messmate. E. obliqua, also bearing the trade name Tasmanian Oak, nonetheless has its claim to fame. The first Eucalypt species described and named, it was among the specimens collected in 1777 by collector David Nelson at Adventure Bay in Bruny Island, south of Tasmania, during Captain James Cook’s third Pacific expedition with the HM Ships Resolution and Discovery. It was subsequently described by the botanist Charles Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle in 1788. L’Heritier used the Linnean system of nomenclature that was as yet still in its infancy and he corresponded with the English botanist Joseph Banks, to whose expansive library of botany L’Heritier’s was said to be second in the world. It was L’Heritier who coined the generic term ‘Eucalyptus’, combining the two Greek words eu and kalyptos, meaning ‘well’ and ‘covered’, in reference to the prudishly hidden reproductive structures, covered by an operculum during the development of the flower bud until the pressure of the emerging stamens causes this casing to be shed. Interestingly, the publication of this name occurred at the same time as the first official European settlement of Australia, reinforcing the hierarchy in which the first step in claiming ownership coincides with the act of naming. That the European invasion of Australia coincided with the rise of the current binomial taxonomic system is highly significant given the state’s near obsession with legislation, regulation and order.
Language is a gift. It permits us to perform something akin to group telepathy, to commune with others and reflect upon our shared existence. This very special ability to describe and praise the world around us is sabotaged when language is used for the express purposes of manipulation and control, not only of nature but of other humans as well. Words can be a matter of knowledge without content, or worse a modality for the expression of domination. Why is a tree called a tree? We can have knowledge of a tree, but any identity between signified and signifier, according to the Biblical tradition is in the mind of Adam alone, his authority however descends from on high. Unequivocal naming is a simultaneously naïve and overweening human project, truly Babelian. Naming has the ability to become man’s despotic weapon pointed at and subjugating the world around him. Man assumes a similar position of supremacy, and authority, one rung down the ladder from God, but still above the objects of his naming game. This is the proper arche, or principle of ownership, the phallologocentric orientation of Western Culture; man and word as the possessor of all things. Perhaps for this reason there is a complex mystical tradition known as the theory of signatures that seeks to bring words and things into a more spiritual connection within the mind of man, to alleviate or counter the tradition of linguistic hegemony and bring to the fore the Other, whether that be a kind of native soul within us all, an originary alien presence, the trace of the divine or whatever.
To name something affects both the namer and the thing named, as Walter Benjamin states. In the biblical tradition it is man’s (women only come into the story later) way of reinforcing his mastery. ‘All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things.’ The Judeo-Christian tradition is a massive authority to come up against, and by the prerogative of His word made flesh, through us God says ‘in the beginning was the word’ and ‘He named’, blasting into later thought not only the creative omnipotence of language as the beginning, and the resolution of what is created in names, but also the assumption of the act of the signatory authority. It is named and it is written, God called him Adam, placing his word in the position of linguistic omnipotence and raising Adam as lieutenant to this naming game. This tyranny of language, which is also over language, is passed on to man: ‘As man should name all kinds of living creatures, so should they be called.’ Man, on behalf of God, names the creatures and the natural world, mastering them in name and dominating over them, woman included. First he calls her woman, then, he names her Eve, adjunct to man and distinguished personally, her name does not belong to her as author, she is always split between the two denominations endowed by another. She is never whole, never one, as Jacques Lacan stresses. Woman and nature thus hold a similar position in the hierarchy of naming, object to man’s nominal authority, justifying later practises which simultaneously make woman and nature objects for study and use, as well as attributing to them both a boundless and anarchic spirit, in that they are both, from the very first, one step removed from the authority and logos of creation.
This act of naming was transferred into the enlightenment project of taxonomy, with naming as creation, as ordering, naming as power. While Christianity gave Adam the rights of naming, today the right to a name and nationality, given as a human right, is also an aggressively exclusionary, or nowadays even aggressively inclusionary, device. Taxonomic systems, with nomenclature as its strongest cladus, have as their aim the transformation of what is chaotic in nature into a system of apprehension and control, something that man can grasp in his hands and get his tongue around: the creation of a schematic hierarchy. Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Le Mot et Les Choses) stresses the role of taxonomy in creating systems of power.
The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.
In the taxonomic system plants are named and put into relation with one another in the negative, by their differences, which then excludes some from one genus, and where there are similarities in the absence of certain difference they are included. This also means that they are put out of relation where no similarity in genus exists despite other similarities and essential symbioses. Taxonomy severs and divides the relations of nature transforming the world according to a code entirely manufactured by humans; alphabetical, species based, hierarchically organised into the phylogenetic tree of life. In our minds we are able to peel the moss off the rock, lift the leaves from the ground, consider each item as an independent unit, where no such independence exists up until the point of physically extracting them from life and the relationships that make them what they are. As Masanobu Fukuoka stated, ‘intending to understand ten things, you actually do not understand even one. If you know a hundred flowers you do not “know” a single one.’ A wilderness is the totality of its forms and species. It is by beginning with our linguistic and mental abstractions that we allow ourselves to carve up the land in a more than linguistic way, chopping down the trees, razing the scrub, draining the swamp, digging deep into the soil and piling up rocks.
In this sense I can’t help but feel sympathy for poor regnans, cursed to live at the top. If names do affect the nature of things, this tree must suffer severe castration complex; cut off from the others, cut off at its top, as the king separated off from the common chop, while nonetheless upon reduction in height becoming once again part of the plebeian mass and then as likely to face the chop as any. Add to that its denominational quandary, bearing not only the name that marks it as the taxonomic high-point of reference, but also its common, trade name, with personal names for the giants. Naming the tall trees means further separating them off from the others, marking them as exceptional and making them exceptions, those that are named are therefore saved. So that naming is saving; the grace of having a name, bestowing grace through name giving. From this perspective, the ‘Giant Tree Policy’ is Forestry Tasmania’s divine intervention into the forest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very next year after L’Heritier’s historically consequential and far-reaching act of authoritative nomenclature, the French Revolution broke out, resulting in the ‘reign of terror’ which saw a profusion of tops lopped off and lead to the ultimate execution of the reigning monarch.
However, the exclusionary policy of the giant trees did not end there. In the 2016 Forestry Management Plan, the Giant Tree Policy was revised:
Tasmania’s giant trees are among the largest hardwoods in the world and are of national and international significance. Giant trees are not protected by legislation in Tasmania or covered specifically by the Forest Practices Code. However, Forestry Tasmania recognises the cultural value of these trees…
Although no longer protected exclusively on account of height, giant trees are now recognised on another level, that of culture, though that only protects them so far. How do we prove a tree has cultural significance? Must we sit around it holding hands on a frequent basis chanting hymns to the glory of its height, the density of its wood, the profundity of its roots? Do the indigenous population have to get together and assign cultural value to each tree independently in order for them to be recognised as worth saving? How many books have to be written about a tree for it to be considered ‘cultural’? If I write a poem about all the trees in the Tarkine, score it, have it sung in the Sydney Opera House, does that mean they all become objects of cultural and national significance? What feats of the imagination are necessary to make these woods culturally sanctioned works of natural genius?
There is, however, an inherent quality of regnans that could justify each and every tree’s cultural worth: a chemical compound present in E. regans proves to be of exceptional and unexpected cultural value. In the 1960s the Australian Department of Defence developed a technique for the preparation of mescaline from Eucalypt lignin. Dried Eucalyptus regnans sawdust was used in the process, which when oxidised, according to the chemistry shorthand of the Vaults of Erowid,
with nitrobenzene and alkali @ 150C yielded 4% of syringaldehyde. Methylation @ 0-5C for 1hr with Me2SO4, then heated at 70C for 1 hr gave 56% 3,4,5, trimethoxybenzaldehyde. Converted to the cyanohydrin (ie +KCN+weak acid – jm) then reduced with Pd black to mescaline.’
Mescaline (3,4,5-Trimethoxyphenethylamine) is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound normally found in peyote cactus and san pedro. Dried peyote might be hard to come by in Australia, but lordy me there are a lot of E. regnans in Tassie! Albeit with a process that requires more than your standard kitchen, this mescaline high can be obtained from any regnans, regardless of height. The experience of mescaline is noted for its lurid patterns and vivid colours, and often serious stomach upset. The resulting overall yield according to the defence department experimentation was 1 percent mescaline from E. regnans, while experimentation with E. obliqua resulted in 0.7 percent. The quantity of mescaline that derives from a small amount of sawdust is, to say the least, surprising. One kilo of sawdust is equivalent to twenty doses. And it was very cheap to make, given that most of the chemicals were commercially available. I wonder what the department of defence planned to do with such potentially immense quantities of mescaline?
Although mescaline has a spiritual and religious history dating back thousands of years, its use today is, along with other psychoactive plants, prohibited internationally as of the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. In Australia, according to the poisons standard 2020 (repealed), mescaline was classified as a schedule 9 substance, which means it requires ‘special precautions during manufacture, handling or use. These poisons should be available only to specialised or authorised users who have the skills necessary to handle them safely.’ Obviously a job for the military. This experimentation with alternative sources of mescaline by the Australian defence force took place during the period when, in the United States, the seriously shady psychological experimentation with hallucinogens undertaken by the CIA and known as project MKUltra was under way. First experimented with in Germany in the 1940s as a ‘truth drug’ in a military context, the United States military consequently also tested mescaline and its synthesized derivatives as drugs for behaviour manipulation, with ‘speech inducing’ effects in an interrogation setting. The CIA run project into hallucinogens, including lysergic acid (LSD) overseen by Allen Dulles has since gained infamy, chiefly on account of the use made of patients (such as in the New York State Psychiatric Institute) to test the drugs without informed consent, and resulting in the deaths and other damages incurred by those patients. Given Australia’s close ties with the US, was the gum tree project undertaken in collusion with the CIA’s MKUltra? Who knows. In any case, we’ve ticked the culture box, and can add to that the box of military history as well as political and medical history.
How many trees in an old-growth forest have such psychoactive compounds residing within bark and leaves with the potential to awaken the mind’s eye or manipulate our speech? Even the prolific wattle, and in particular the common Acacia maidenii, contains significant quantities of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) if you ingest it along with monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) such as the Banisteriopsis caapi, used in the production of ayahuasca. That said, as the amateur though highly rigorous chemists of the Vaults of Erowid clarify, the results of such experimentation are not always pleasant – such as being ‘instantly blown apart as if by a large brick through the head’, the ‘effects were totally overwhelming, like being thrown out of the universe’. Don’t try this at home, kids. Try it at a military grade facility funded by your parents’ taxes!
Should every gum and every wattle be protected because of their potential mind-bending affinity with the human psyche? What other Australian plants have such powers as yet unbeknownst to us?