01/29/2020
“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure that nothing looks like us. Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: Only man could know enough to want things.
But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted something from them. This isn’t mystical. The environment is alive – a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the aunts who guard it. Fruit bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit lead to color vision. In teaching us how to find their beat, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by the forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.
Men and trees are closer cousins than you think. We’re two things hatched from the same seed, heading off in opposite directions, using each other in a shared place. That place needs all its parts.
Tree stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, ‘trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.’ But people could be the heaven that the earth is trying to speak to.
“If we could see green, we see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on the third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the earths interests and ours. They’d be the same.”
— Patricia Westerford,
from Richard Powers’ breathtaking ‘Overstory’
