Op-Ed Contributor The Shifting Mandala By ANNA HITCHCOCK RACING through our school lobby on the way to recess, my sixth-grade classmates and I stopped short. Usually, we would barrel onto the street for our 20 minutes of sunlight, but a Buddhist monk dressed in brilliant saffron robes caught our attention. He was creating a mandala. In this ancient art form developed by Tibetan Buddhist monks, millions of grains of multicolored sand are painstakingly poured into complex patterns. After hours of work, the sand painting is only one square meter yet symbolically portrays our entire universe in its shifting complexities. Three years later, I thought of the mandala when I began an internship with Ellen Pehek, a principal research ecologist in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. For months, I helped her measure the diameter of trees in Inwood Hill Park as part of a study on the effects that invasive plant species — threatening, nonnative ones — have on forest health. Tough and resistant, invasive plants spread easily and suppress native species. Now numbering about 1,000 species in the United States, they are estimated to be taking over public lands at 4,600 acres a day, according to the Plant Conservation Alliance, a public-private partnership created to protect native plants. Each tree that I measured was part of a 1,000-square-foot plot selected as an indicator of the health of the wider park. By showing which species pose a threat, Ms. Pehek is helping to refine the city’s fight against invasive plants. Through my internship, I found myself part of an ecological mandala, each tree akin to a grain of colored sand. The biologist David G. Haskell of Sewanee, the University of the South, recently applied the concept of a mandala to his study of a Tennessee forest. He observed a single square meter of forest floor many times each week for a year, noticing intricacies in the way that nature’s systems overlapped. In his book “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature,” he notes how larger birds like woodpeckers and titmice will join a flock of chickadees in winter. More birds means more eyes to keep watch for hawks. By opening his mind to the lessons of the mandala, Mr. Haskell developed a scientific technique that enabled him to examine closely, yet see broadly, the forest that surrounded him. At the end of a mandala’s creation, its grains of sand are poured into running water to demonstrate the ephemeral nature of life. In this way, not only can a mandala teach the concept of interconnectedness — how you can understand an entire forest by studying a square meter of ground — but it also can serve as an example of impermanence. At the heart of impermanence is change, sometimes in forms that we don’t expect. In our intensifying battle against invasive species, some still advocate ridding our country of these plants. The threat is serious, but the true impact of invasive species is not yet known and total warfare in this arena has proved in the past to be a costly mistake. Just as the sands of a mandala shift, distorting the once perfect pattern, plant species will drift across nations, swept across an ocean by the wind, dropped onto the soil by a bird, or carried by our own movements. In our enthusiasm for preserving native plants, we sometimes forget that movement is inevitable on this planet, so total eradication of invasive plants is impossible. A study led by Dov Sax of Brown University and Steven D. Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that amid competition from invasives, biodiversity can actually increase in two centuries. Another study led by the biologist Tiffany Knight of Washington University in St. Louis has shown that invasives may jeopardize the diversity of a plant community on a small scale, but less so on a larger scale. We know enough about invasives to take only cautious steps, not leaping bounds, toward fighting them. As we strive to protect native plants, we should remember that seemingly simple actions can have consequences we don’t foresee. As we were walking through Van Cortlandt Park this summer, Ms. Pehek told me of a nearby field, invaded by plants like multiflora rose, bush honeysuckles, porcelain-berry and Japanese honeysuckle. It had recently been sprayed. However, beneath a layer of seemingly hostile plants, native flora like Solomon’s seal, false Solomon’s seal and other herbaceous forest perennials had been thriving. These, too, could have been harmed by the spraying. William Blake, in his poem “Auguries of Innocence,” observed that we can “see a world in a grain of sand.” But sometimes, we also need to step back and take a broader perspective. The mandala helped me pull back from the rough bark of a single tree and see the big picture. As I continue to do research, I will keep in mind that the mandala’s shifting and colorful sands can help us put ecology’s complex issues in perspective. Anna Hitchcock is a senior at the Dalton School.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 04:06:27 +0000
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