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| Photo by Jeffrey L. Bruce |
Written by
Ephrat Livni
I’m in a redwood forest in Santa Cruz, California, taking
dictation for the trees outside my cabin. They speak constantly, even if
quietly, communicating above- and underground using sound, scents, signals, and
vibes. They’re naturally networking, connected with everything that exists,
including you.
Biologists, ecologists, foresters, and naturalists
increasingly argue that trees speak, and that humans can learn to hear this
language.
Many people struggle with this concept because they can’t
perceive that trees are interconnected, argues biologist George David Haskell
in his 2017 book The Songs of Trees. Connection in a network, Haskell says,
necessitates communication and breeds languages; understanding that nature is a
network is the first step in hearing trees talk.
For the average global citizen, living far from the forest,
that probably seems abstract to the point of absurdity. Haskell points readers
to the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador for practical guidance. To the Waorani
people living there, nature’s networked character and the idea of communication
among all living things seems obvious. In fact, the relationships between trees
and other lifeforms are reflected in Waorani language.
In Waorani, things are described not only by their general
type, but also by the other beings surrounding them. So, for example, any one
ceibo tree isn’t a “ceibo tree” but is “the ivy-wrapped ceibo,” and another is
“the mossy ceibo with black mushrooms.” In fact, anthropologists trying to
classify and translate Waorani words into English struggle because, Haskell
writes, “when pressed by interviewers, Waorani ‘could not bring themselves’ to
give individual names for what Westerners call ‘tree species’ without
describing ecological context such as the composition of the surrounding
vegetation.”
Because they relate to the trees as live beings with
intimate ties to surrounding people and other creatures, the Waorani aren’t
alarmed by the notion that a tree might scream when cut, or surprised that
harming a tree should cause trouble for humans. The lesson city-dwellers should
take from the Waorani, Haskell says, is that “dogmas of separation fragment the
community of life; they wall humans in a lonely room. We must ask the question:
‘can we find an ethic of full earthly belonging?’”
Haskell points out that throughout literary and musical
history there are references to the songs of trees, and the way they speak:
whispering pines, falling branches, crackling leaves, the steady hum buzzing
through the forest. Human artists have always known on a fundamental level that
trees talk, even if they don’t quite say they have a “language.”
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| Photo by Jeffrey L. Bruce |
Redefining
communication
Tree language is a totally obvious concept to ecologist
Suzanne Simard, who has spent 30 years studying forests. In June 2016, she gave
a Ted Talk (which now has nearly 2.5 million views), called “How Trees Talk to
Each Other.”
Simard grew up in the forests of British Columbia in Canada,
studied forestry, and worked in the logging industry. She felt conflicted about
cutting down trees, and decided to return to school to study the science of
tree communication. Now, Simard teaches ecology at the University of British
Columbia-Vancouver and researches “below-ground fungal networks that connect
trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction,” she
says. As she explained to her Ted Talk audience:
I want to change the way you think about forests. You see,
underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways
that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave
as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of
intelligence.
Trees exchange chemicals with fungus, and send
seeds—essentially information packets—with wind, birds, bats, and other
visitors for delivery around the world. Simard specializes in the underground
relationships of trees. Her research shows that below the earth are vast
networks of roots working with fungi to move water, carbon, and nutrients among
trees of all species. These complex, symbiotic networks mimic human neural and
social networks. They even have mother trees at various centers, managing
information flow, and the interconnectedness helps a slew of live things fight
disease and survive together.
Simard argues that this exchange is communication, albeit in
a language alien to us. And there’s a lesson to be learned from how forests
relate, she says. There’s a lot of cooperation, rather than just competition
among and between species as was previously believed.
Peter Wohlleben came to a similar realization while working
his job managing an ancient birch forest in Germany. He told the Guardian he
started noticing trees had complex social lives after stumbling upon an old
stump still living after about 500 years, with no leaves. “Every living being
needs nutrition,” Wohlleben said. “The only explanation was that it was
supported by the neighbor trees via the roots with a sugar solution. As a
forester, I learned that trees are competitors that struggle against each
other, for light, for space, and there I saw that it’s just [the opposite].
Trees are very interested in keeping every member of this community alive.” He
believes that they, like humans, have family lives in addition to relationships
with other species. The discovery led him to write a book, The Hidden Life of
Trees.
By being aware of all living things’ inter-reliance, Simard
argues, humans can be wiser about maintaining mother trees who pass on wisdom
from one tree generation to the next. She believes it could lead to a more
sustainable commercial-wood industry: in a forest, a mother tree is connected
to hundreds of other trees, sending excess carbon through delicate networks to
seeds below ground, ensuring much greater seedling survival rates.
Foreign language
studies
Seedling survival is important to human beings because we
need trees. “The contributions of forests to the well-being of humankind are
extraordinarily vast and far-reaching,” according to the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization 2016 report on world forests (pdf).
Forests are key to combating rural poverty, ensuring food
security, providing livelihoods, supplying clean air and water, maintaining
biodiversity, and mitigating climate change, the FAO says. The agency reports
that progress is being made toward better worldwide forest conservation but
more must be done, given the importance of forests to human survival.
Most scientists—and trees—would no doubt agree that
conservation is key. Haskell believes that ecologically friendly policies would
naturally become a priority for people if we’d recognize that trees are masters
of connection and communication, managing complex networks that include us. He
calls trees “biology’s philosophers,” dialoguing over the ages, and offering up
a quiet wisdom. We should listen, the biologist says, because they know what
they’re talking about. Haskell writes, “Because they are not mobile, to thrive
they must know their particular locus on the Earth far better than any
wandering animal.”https://qz.com/1116991/a-biologist-believes-that-trees-speak-a-language-we-can-learn/
