Do trees talk? Can they communicate? When a tree burns on Trinidad’s Northern Range, does it die in silence or does it scream out in agony? If we could hear what they say, would it change how we value them? It is an important question, because our value system goes hand in hand with what we choose to protect, nurture and give rights to.
Last week I stood at the Maracas lookout and looked along the coast, towards the setting sun. A forest fire was burning on the jagged Jurassic era mountain slope. Amid the smoke, two massive tree trunks, engulfed in flames. As the flames shot up towards the crown, the trees took on human forms, the branches flailing limbs, the crackling the screams.
Now, I know you are going to accuse me of having gone soft in the head. All that tree hugging has made me lose touch with reality, but my imagination has science on its side. Scientists say that trees can communicate.
Humans have a hard time looking at the world from the perspective of other life forms, so we do exactly what I did when I imagined the trees to be burning humans, which is to give anthropomorphic qualities to plants and animals. This limitation of our thought process causes us to not recognise the complexities, and the intelligence, of other living beings that do not remind us of ourselves.
If it doesn’t have a mouth, it can’t talk. If it doesn’t have eyes, it cannot see. If its brain structure is not like ours, it cannot think. If it doesn’t have neurons like we do, it cannot feel. We judge other living beings by how they compare to human life experiences. Instinctively we value chimpanzees more than silk cotton trees—we can recognise so much of us in them.
Talking trees don’t have mouths. They have fungus. They use something that scientists have dubbed the wood-wide-web. Anybody who works with soil knows that where plants are, you will find fungus. Mushrooms are the fruits of fungi but as so often, the really impressive part is what you cannot see: the wide web of stings of fungus that interconnects forests.
The trees depend on this fungus for minerals from the soil, and the fungus gets sugars from the trees. The wood-wide-web of fungi interconnects trees in such a way that we should think of trees as being communal beings, rather than individuals.
The amazing thing is that trees use this fungus network to communicate danger to each other. Dr Suzanne Simmard, from the University of British Colombia, studies the wood-wide-web. She found that when trees are attacked they send chemical signals through their roots to the fungi network to neighbouring trees. These alerted trees then activate their own defence genes, like producing toxins that deter threats.
Simmard found that trees also use the fungus network to share carbon-based sugars to trees that need them. Somehow the trees and the fungi know where the chemical signals need to go. Is this being smart, or simply physics and chemistry?
Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso thinks that plants are intelligent problem solvers. He did an experiment with two climbing bean plants. A single stake was placed between them, and they competed for it. Once one of the two plants reached the stake, the losing plant would immediately sense this and start looking for an alternative. Mancuso likens this to consciousness in animals.
Can we, Trinidadians and Tobagonians, evolve our thought to understand that it is not only what looks, acts and thinks like us has self-awareness and intelligence? Accepting that thought, that science-based knowledge, is dangerous. It will change how we think about our role in this world. We will understand that we are not unique in nature, that we are not the only ones with sentience, intelligence and value. The next time we look at a blazing tree, it will not be a dead bit of burning bush, but something more recognisable to us, something worth saving.