Easter Convocation

Professor of Biology David Haskell shared the below remarks at the Easter Convocation on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025.

Full text of Professor Haskell's remarks:

Thank you, Vice-Chancellor Pearigen, for that very kind introduction. It’s an honor to speak at the opening convocation and, especially, to follow last year’s brilliant talk about feeding the fires of creativity and curiosity by Professor Stephanie McCarter.

We’re gathered today to open the semester and to celebrate the achievements of students who are about to be inducted into the Order of the Gown. I know I speak on behalf of all the faculty and staff of the University in offering hearty congratulations. Bravo, and thank you for the many ways that your work elevates and enlivens our community. I hope you’ll take time to celebrate, offer thanks to those who supported you along the way, and think about how you might help others on their academic paths. I hope, also, that your achievement will send you back to the classroom and the wider community with a renewed sense of enthusiasm for challenging yourself to encounter, delight in, and wrestle with worlds and ideas that might at first seem strange or challenging. By diving into these experiences, we grow.

Today, I offer a few invitations to expand your curiosity and experience of the more-than-human world. Insects, plants, birds—these are our neighbors, our kin, part of the community of life that sustains us, yet we too often circle our attention inward into the stories of our own species, ignoring the community of the living Earth. Our own stories are important, of course, but they exist and are best understood in the wider context of all life. Look at the stained glass here in this building, each window illuminating the concerns and biases of its time, but all telling stories of humans, with animals and plants present as decoration or allegory, not for their own sakes. The same is true of much of the curriculum, not just here, but across higher ed. Sewanee does a far better job than most in offering classes and other experiences that open our senses, imaginations, and intellects to the marvels and brokenness of the living Earth. But here, as elsewhere, it is possible to graduate without being able to identify the common trees on campus, appreciate the music of birdsong, or understand the rhythms of life in the forests, fields, and waterways of the region. This removal from the living Earth makes it much harder for us to be good kin and neighbors. We also cut ourselves off from the many joys of belonging.

So, a few suggestions about finding some of that joy. All of these suggestions start with opening your senses. Sensuality is a form of knowing. The examples that I share are all creatures that you can experience right here in central campus, and whose lives reveal interesting stories. These are all seasonal treats, and I’ll start with those we can look forward to in future and work my way to some that you could experience today.

First, bugs! The late-summer chorus of katydids and cicadas is one of the signature sounds of the South. At night the katydids sing by their thousands. Individually they sound raspy. Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha, “katy did, she didn’t.” Together, they synchronize and the whole mountain vibrates. In Shakerag Hollow, their sound is louder than the noise of a busy state highway. We’re hearing sunlight refracted through the prism of life into sound. Katydids feed on nothing but trees. So, we hear sunlight turned into leaves, turned into katydid sound, finally manifesting as human consciousness. This is also true for the cicadas whose buzz and whine fill summer and early autumn days. They eat plant sap and turn it into song. These are the sounds of productive forests, of the vitality of the good green Earth. To listen to and celebrate them is to find delight in the soundscapes of home.

Insects were the first animals to sing on Earth, starting about 275 million years ago. And so, listening to their chorus gives us a direct sensory experience of the early Earth. For insects, we don’t need a dinosaur movie, we live in one. We also, indirectly, owe those ancient insects our language and music. Back then, our ancestors had recently crawled onto land from the oceans and had terrible hearing in air. Mostly they could hear only low-pitched sounds that rumbled through the ground. Then, the world filled with singing katydids and other insects. For our ancestors, these were protein snacks, conveniently advertising their location with trilling sound. Soon after, our ancestors evolved ear drums and other features of the ear that helped them to hear and catch the insects. So, our ability to hear higher-pitched sounds in air—like the ones we use in human language and music—is partly a result of the first singing insects.

So, this summer and fall, take time to listen to the glorious choruses of insects, and remember that you’re hearing sunlight, the vigor of trees, and even the ancient roots of human hearing. Remember, too, that things that seem disconnected—insect song and human hearing—are in fact linked through bonds of causality and contingency. 
Here’s another marvel to watch out for on campus, one that will appear after spring break, especially in April. Look for tiny white flowers carpeting the parts of campus that get mowed but have no herbicide sprayed or sprinkled on them. The area around the EQB monument on University Ave over towards the Fowler Center is one good place to find them.

These flowers are called spring beauty wildflowers. Here on central campus, the spring beauty flowers grow by the thousands, but each one is only the size of the fingernail on your pinkie finger. So, to see their beauty, you have to crouch down. Or better still, lie down and peer close. When else do you get to literally prostrate yourself among thousands of blooms? When you see them up close, you’ll notice two things. First, they’re gorgeous—marble-white petals encircling tiny stalks covered in pink pollen. After a long winter, this really is a feast for the eyes and the soul.

The second thing you’ll see, especially if you visit on a sunny day, is that these flowers are popular with the insects. Bees and other pollinators love them. Unlike many other early spring flowers, spring beauty wildflowers offer lots of nectar. They’re like the free soda fountain of the woods, and the bees know it. You’ll see lots of different kinds of insects visiting the flowers, but one in particular is very common, a small black bee with a slight haze of silver hairs, often dusted with pink pollen. What a great celebration of spring! This bee feeds exclusively on spring beauty flowers. The bee times its emergence from underground burrows to coincide with when the spring beauty flowers are blooming. The female bees provision tiny burrows with nectar and pollen, then lay their eggs. After that, the adult bees die. The young feed on the provisions, then wait until the next spring.

This specialized relationship is just one of thousands of ways that flowering plants support animal life. We live among unseen interlocking synchronicities and mutualisms. This is the very foundation of life. Life is quite literally made from relationship. Individuality emerges always and only from interconnection. This is true for humans, too. We get almost all our food ultimately from flowering plants, with a little help from ocean algae that support fishes. “All flesh is grass” as the prophet Isaiah reminds us. In fact, just three species of plant—wheat, corn, and rice—provide at least 60 percent of all our food. So, we’re not so different from a specialized species of bee feeding on wildflowers. We, too, depend on the fruitfulness of a very small number of flowering plants.

In the coming days, I invite you to listen for another marvel here on the mountain, the sounds of birds. In particular, listen for sandhill cranes and white-throated sparrows. The cranes are large birds that breed in the upper Midwest. They come down here to overwinter, feeding in local wetlands and farm fields. They fly over the mountain in Vs. As they fly, they call, gar-oo gar-oo, a sound that carries for miles. Each crane carries a trumpet in its chest, a coiled windpipe that acts as a resonance chamber. Using this unique structure, they call to keep the flock together, to stay in touch with their kin and buddies. This is a sound that has rung across the North American landscape—from the East Coast to the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest—for at least 10 million years. So, on foggy nights as you walk out of the front door of the library or in the bright noontime winter sunshine as you wander to McClurg, keep your ears open for the glories of American wetlands, taken to the wing.

Next time you’re near Stirling’s Coffee House, listen for an entirely different kind of bird sound, the whistles of the white-throated sparrow. These streaky-brown birds have snowy bibs and a little tuft of yellow over their eyes. They like to sulk in the underbrush. Unlike the crane whose voice evolved to carry for long distances, these birds sing a simple whistled tune that cuts through the dense thickets where they live. “Old Sam Peabody,” they whistle. These sparrows are here only during the winter and by spring break they’ll be winging north to their breeding grounds. At this time of year, you can hear goofy young birds practicing their songs, not quite getting it right as they use their memories of songs they heard last summer to refine their own, maturing song.

The acoustic details of every bird song fit their environment. Birds of the underbrush or forest like white-throated sparrows sing simple melodies. Those of the prairie don’t have to worry about reverb from trees and can get away with more virtuosic performances. On rocky shores, gulls and terns cry with high-pitched loud calls to be heard above the waves. Listen to birdsong and ask: How does this sound fit into its home? Now, do the same for human music. Composers and musicians are well aware of the acoustics of the spaces in which they perform. Traditional European choral music sounds great in reverberant spaces like large churches. Thank you, University Choir, for the beauty that you create in this space. Rock-and-roll sounds best heard amplified from a stage. Violins, concert flutes, and modern pianos perfectly fit the acoustics of 19th-century concert halls. Billie Eilish whispers directly into our ears through earbuds. Like the birds, our own music emerges through relationship with the materiality of the world around us. Music, like life, is made from relationship and interconnection.

As we pay attention to the sounds of insects and birds, and watch the seasonal rhythms of wildflowers and other plants, our senses come home. We gain a compass that orients us to the place where we live. We also realize that our own lives are part of a larger story, one older than our own species. In a time when many of us feel alienated or disconnected, these connections remind us that we do, in fact, belong in this world. We are not wayfaring strangers passing through, but members of the living Earth community.

By paying attention to the living world, we also gain a connection that exists beyond manipulations of electronic algorithms. We take our news directly from the source. There is no fake news or post-truth in the song of a bird or the opening of a flower.

By paying attention today, we also give the future a gift. We live on a planet convulsed by change. Springtime now comes two weeks earlier than when I was a kid. North America has lost one third of its birds in that same time. Depending on where you live, some insect populations are in severe decline. Over 40 percent of all amphibians are threatened with extinction. Fireflies are gone over much of their former range. Yet, some birds—like the sandhill crane—have bounced back from former losses. In many parts of North America, rivers are cleaner than they were. You can swim where formerly only raw effluent ran. In places where we’ve taken care of the land, places like some parts of the Sewanee Domain, plant communities are thriving. 
How do we get to a living world where thriving outweighs loss? Scientific data alone is insufficient. Data is impersonal and seldom moves us. We are sensory, social beings and are motivated by lived experience and by stories from those whom we love. I’ve read hundreds of technical papers on bird conservation, but none mean as much to me as the stories my grandfather told me about the birds he heard and the fish he caught in his youth. Through him, I have living memories that date back nearly a century. You can do the same for your kids, grandkids, friends, and neighbors, just by paying attention today.

Luckily for us, we live and work in a wonderful place to develop, with the help of others, this practice of attention. This companionship is available not only in the excellent classes offered at the University, but in the enthusiasm and experience of the many people here on the mountain who love and seek to know life’s community.

Joyful connection to the lives of animals, plants, and other living beings not only lifts our spirits and enlivens our days in the present, it gives us stories worth telling in the future. In conclusion, my invitations to you: Revel in the strange and ancient sounds of insects, lie down and marvel at the flowers, celebrate bird song, and find other people to share the beauty and brokenness of all that you discover.