I've been reading a couple of books about trees. It's made me think, are trees just chemical factories, or are they intelligent?
The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive - character - is all that matters in the end. It's a child's creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in a federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No, life is mobilised on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
This is the attempt Powers makes - to make the struggle for the world as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But he does it via the medium of just such lost people. Over the first 150 pages he introduces us to nine people. Aside from one couple they are strangers to one another and some of them never meet. What they have in common is that each of them has some sort of connection with a tree or trees. In the central part of the novel we are told the tale of the fight to save America's forests, an unequal and quite possibly futile battle between a few activists and cashed up logging companies which have the law on their side. During the course of this rolling campaign, five of the characters gradually come together as activists, finally abandoning their commitment to non-violence to engage in a brief and equally futile career as eco-terrorists.
The spiritual centre of the novel, as it were, is provided by two people. Patricia Westerford is a botanist who is more comfortable with trees than with people. Early in her career she makes pioneering discoveries about the ways trees communicate and cooperate and is ostracised and ridiculed for her trouble. She comes close to suicide and ends up working as a forest ranger before her findings are confirmed by other researchers and she finds herself back at the heart of the academic community, studying and arguing for the preservation of old growth forests.
Olivia Vandergriff is a completely different kettle of fish, a self-centred undergraduate who doesn't care about anything but her own pleasure. One night, high on hash, she is accidentally electrocuted and is dead for a full minute before the power shorts out and she falls off the bed, restarting her heart. That minute is enough to change he completely. She sees beings who she believes to be the spirits of trees, summoning her back to life for a purpose that she doesn't fully understand. She drops out of university and heads west, following the cryptic signals of the trees until she arrives at a protest attempting to save one of the last old growth redwood forests in California.
Along the way she picks up another of the characters, an artist whose family tended a giant chestnut tree for four generations, and together they end up spending ten months camped at the top of a 900-year-old redwood tree before being finally forced out of it and watching it felled. As the story progresses three of the others find their way into her orbit as the protests escalate.
The story follows a long arc and for a human reader it drags towards the end, but trees have a longer arc still, growing over centuries and capable in some cases of reviving even from a stump. We catch mere glimpses in the mighty ancient redwoods, the multi-generational chestnut tree, the remnant old growth forests with trees that pre-date the European invasion, the legendary trees of Chinese mythology, the garden and park trees that pop up throughout the story. But the trees are in trouble. The chestnuts, once prolific across the continent, have been all but wiped out by an imported fungus. The last of the old growth redwood forests are being aggressively logged. The Amazon is being rapidly cleared for agriculture. The puny efforts of the protestors can only delay this destruction for weeks or months before the law finally ejects them. Even Ray and Dorothy Brinkman's defiant garden wilderness is set to be destroyed by grumpy neighbours and Council contractors. Patricia Westerford's seed ark seems a futile gesture when mass clearing is under way and trees need whole forest communities to thrive.
Yet the trees themselves are calling, even screaming for help, drawing each of the characters in their own way, often against their own inclinations, into the task of saving them. Do they have a plan? If so what is it? And can it possibly be successful? We have no way of knowing because the arc of the story moves at the pace of trees which live for centuries, not of the puny humans who are all either old or dead by the time the book ends.
***
It's always hazardous to learn science from a novel. You never know when the scientific facts unveiled by a fictional luminary like Patricia Westerford are real and when they have been doctored to fit the story. According to Dr Westerford's discoveries, aided and abetted by Olivia Vandergriff's spiritual awakening, trees are intelligent. They feel pleasure and pain, communicate with one another and even with other creatures, and can cry out in distress. Olivia would have her acolytes believe that they are infinitely wiser than we are, being so much older. The transposition of Dr Westerford's scientific gravitas and Olivia's compelling spiritual experience, hallucination though it may be, is enough to make the reader suspend their disbelief and read on. It's certainly compelling fiction, but is it true?
This is not the only overlap with Powers' story. For instance, he talks about how trees of the same species intertwine their roots and exchange nutrients.
Scientists in the Harz Mountains in Germany have discovered that this really is a case of interdependence, and most individual trees of the same species growing in the same stand are connected to each other through their root systems. It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbours in times of need is the norm, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies....
But why are trees such social beings? Why do they share their food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages in working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment trees can live to be very old.
Hence there are a lot of tree behaviours which build community and work for mutual protection. Trees communicate with one another through their roots when they share nutrients and chemical signals, and also through scent via airborne chemicals. For instance, in Africa when acacias are being browsed by giraffes they pump their leaves full of a poisonous chemical for self-protection. This gives off a scent which warns the surrounding trees and they do the same before any giraffe touches them, forcing the giraffes to move away and protecting most of the community from damage. Other trees, attacked by leaf-eating insects, can identify which insect is attacking them and emit pheromones that attract that specific insect's predator. Various tree species transmit news of attacks via electrical impulses through their roots and the fungal networks that surround them, warning their neighbours to also emit the toxins that will ward off the predators.
So trees are social creatures and help one another, but are they intelligent, or is this just chemistry? Of course we need to be wary about that phrase, 'just chemistry', because our brains can also be described as sets of complex chemical reactions and electrical impulses, and yet we certainly see ourselves as intelligent. A few years ago I read a book about birds which, among other things, addressed the question of bird intelligence. For a long time it was assumed that birds basically operated on instinct, because they have tiny brains and appear to lack the cerebral cortex which is the site of thinking and learning in mammals. Yet over the years detailed observations of bird behaviour have shown this to be wrong. Magpies and crows can count to at least ten, and can recognise dozens of different human faces and tell friends from enemies. Domestic chooks have a language of about 20 different sounds which they use purposefully, and they even lie to one another. Turns out they have as much brain power as some of the higher apes, condensed into a smaller brain volume by shortening their neurons.
But what about trees, which don't look as if they have brains at all? Consider this from Peter Wohlleben:
For there to be something we would recognise as a brain, neurological processes must be involved, and for these, in addition to chemical messages, you need electrical impulses. And these are precisely what we can measure in the tree, and we've been able to do so since the nineteenth century. For some years now, a heated controversy has flared up among scientists. Can plants think? Are they intelligent?
In conjunction with his colleagues, Frantisek Baluska from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany at the University of Bonn is of the opinion that brain-like structures can be found at root tips. In addition to signaling pathways, there are also numerous systems and molecules similar to those found in animals.
So, we don't know if trees can think, and of so how deeply, but it is not safe to simply assume they can't. If they could, no doubt they would be hard for us to understand, just as chook language sounds to us like random clucking. Even though humans and trees evolved from the same stock of single-celled organisms and share a lot of genetic material, our lines diverged a long time ago. It is much harder to imagine communication with trees than with chimpanzees. But once we escape from anthropocentrism, we open ourselves to possibility that our form of intelligence, and of communication, is not the only one possible.
Wohlleben certainly thinks we should be according more rights to trees. He praises The Swiss law which requires that 'account be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms'. He comments:
Although this point of view has elicited a lot of head shaking in the international community, I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants. When the capabilities of vegetative beings become known, and their emotional lives and needs are recognised, then the way we treat plants will gradually change as well.
***
So lets take one more step. Supposing trees are intelligent, then as a Christian I would expect them to have some awareness of God, some sort of spiritual life alongside their social and emotional one. You might find this a stretch perhaps, but why would you? In earlier ages and mythologies, trees and people were not so far apart. There are many stories of people being turned into trees, and trees had their own spirits or gods in many different cultures. Pre-Christian European religions involved sacrifices to tree spirits and authorities were passing regulations to curb this practice as late as the 13th Century.
But we need not view this as just some sort of pagan heresy. After all, we've all heard Isaiah 55.
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
Or how about this, from Psalm 148?
Perhaps it's just metaphor, but on the other hand perhaps it isn't. We are so used to thinking we are the only show in town that we assume all these songs are really just about us. All this great cacophony of living creatures is really just an image to make us sing louder. But what if these creatures, these trees and flowers, these rocks and waters, could all really communicate with God just as much as we can. And what if God cares as much for them as he does for us, and listens to them just as closely? What if they have their own relationship with God that is not dependent on ours? After all, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to a chorus of loud praise and the Pharisees asked him to quiet his followers down, he replied, "“I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
And if they cried out, what would they be crying? Paul tells us they are groaning.
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
Us and them both, suffering from bondage to decay and longing to be set free. If, as Richard Powers imagines, the trees are calling out to us for help then why would they not also be calling out to God? And why would they not be crying out against us, for our many abuses, our acts of thoughtless destruction, for our heedlessness of anyone but ourselves?
We don't just need to be redeemed for our own sakes, but for the sakes of all our cousins, the thousands of species with whom we share not only this planet but a genetic inheritance going back a billion years. The air is thick with the chemical signals of tree distress. We are unable to decode them, but nothing is hidden from God.
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