The Tree of Life: D.H. Lawrence, Peter Wohleben and Richard Powers

Abstract

Although Lawrence was clearly a forerunner of ecological awareness, he predated the conscious crisis of planetary destruction and the ecocritical turn retains an ambiguity as to whether it refers to a thematic concern or a distinctive mode of reading and writing. The same ambiguity lurks in Martin Heidegger’s use of Friedrich Hölderlin’s auratic formula “Poetically man dwells upon the earth.” I consider the possible shift between Lawrence’s time and the present on the question of poetic dwelling by comparing Lawrence’s writing on trees in Fantasia of the Unconscious with Peter Wohleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) and Richard Powers The Overstory (2018).