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return to his home or office, and extensively research what he observed to learn more. The product is a series of reflexive, personal essays that are rich with biological information. What makes the book ethnobiological is that he placed himself as the human in the midst of his square-meter mandala. Truly the book is a lyrical piece that captures this human’s interactions with the biota around him. Although Haskell worked from the inspiring template of old growth Appalachian forest, my students and I established our own mandalas on campus, places that we would visit each week and, following Haskell’s approach, journal, learn, and reflect upon those places. We published our essays as blog posts, which made it possible for students to share their essays with friends and family members. As this experience was deeply personal, the students were engaged, and their writing was of higher quality than what I am used to encountering in my university classes. Haskell’s book is too rich to summarize in great detail; thus, I have chosen three examples—essays or sections thereof— that I found particularly inspiring. Logged on January 21st of his year’s watch in nature, “The Experiment” took place on an exceptionally cold winter day in southern Appalachia. This essay is one that stands out for me because Haskell decided to “experience the cold as the forest’s animals do” (p. 12) and thus disrobed down to his undergarments. In the 10 degree Fahrenheit cold Haskell chronicles the acute changes in his physiology, but what I recall most are his observations of Carolina chickadees. After discussing feathers as insulation, he writes (p. 14): I picked up The Forest Unseen in the spring of 2014 and immediately concluded that it would be a great book for my ethnobiology class. Moreover, it was not just a reading assignment, but it became the model upon which I base much of the course. The book is masterfully written by a truly fascinating biologist who allowed himself to become inductively enthralled by a postage stamp-sized piece of wilderness near his home. The book is premised on the author’s observations, in India, of the creation and destruction of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala. He saw the immediate linkage to ecology, that the world is ever-shifting and when we pay attention we witness emergent patterns, which become the basis for tremendously diverse biological and cultural expressions worldwide. Haskell decided to use the mandala as a metaphor, and he constructed his own ecological mandala in the southern Appalachian forest near his home in eastern Tennessee. He determined to visit his square-meter mandala multiple times a month and often many times a week for an entire year. He would sit still and meditatively observe; it was to be participant observation with the local biological world. In the end he fashioned an ethnography of that square-meter mandala, one that is enriching to read and truly beautiful to behold.

The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. By David George Haskell. 2013. Penguin Books, New York. 288 pp.