Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
(Originally posted in December, 2019)
Each year, in the family holiday tradition, my wife and I venture out to buy our Christmas tree. We’re lucky enough to live across the street from a big tree lot so we don’t have very far to go—we can walk right over. It’s very convenient. It’s also nice to be able to look out our front window and see all the families getting their trees, wreaths, and other holiday trappings. I can sometimes hear snatches of carols drifting over from across the street. It’s nice, festive, but also a little bittersweet.
I know it’s odd, but I’ve always felt a little bad for the trees. Browsing through our neighborhood lot, past many magnificent specimens of Douglas fir, blue spruce, balsams, Fraser firs, and Scotch pine, I feel a sense of regard—almost respect—for them. While most of the trees are in the six-feet range, some of them tower to a height of fifteen feet or more. It can take anywhere from four to fifteen years for a tree to reach their typical six to seven-foot height. Chopping these beauties down in order to decorate them and keep them in our homes for a few weeks sometimes seems like an awful waste to me. And then, come January 2nd—or maybe a little later for some households—they are unceremoniously (and literally) kicked to the curb and left to lay on the dirty street slush like a nasty old drunk. I lean our old tree up against a speed limit sign in front of our house. Giving it a little dignity seems to be the least I can do.
I was a little embarrassed about my sentimentality until I happened to run across an article describing new scientific research concerning plant sentience. Apparently, according to this article, plants communicate chemically, releasing pheromones to warn others of insect attack. Some of these chemical messengers even notify predator insects that herbivorous insects, their prey, are attacking the plant. Maize attacked by beet armyworms released a cloud of chemicals that attracted parasitic wasps, causing them to lay eggs on the invaders’ bodies—ringing the dinner bell, as it were. I was intrigued, so I looked further.
Other research has investigated how plants use electrical transmissions, much as animals do, to communicate to parts of themselves as well as to other plants—sort of a rudimentary botanical nervous system. It’s been proven that if one leaf of a plant is being eaten or otherwise attacked, it will warn the other leaves, and neighboring plants, via this network.
Research has also proven that plants will not compete for root space with its relatives, a phenomenon known as “kin recognition”. Root systems from a single plant will, however, compete with neighbor’s systems, but not its own—a form of “self-recognition”.
So, if plants recognize family, recognize themselves, and communicate to members of its own species as well as those of different species, does that make them sentient? And, if so, this begs the bigger question—how smart are they? How sophisticated are plant perceptions? Do fir trees in a lot warn each other when the Christmas harvest begins? Do they have a perception of when the season is, of when the slaughter might begin?
Most trees can live to be a hundred years old, and some species, including the bristlecone pine and the great sequoias, can live anywhere from three to five thousand years. Some of these giants can grow to be over two hundred and fifty feet tall. They are massive beings and, apparently, fairly altruistic. Tree ecologist Suzanne Simiard’s research has proven that these trees use root systems to move water, nutrients, and carbon among neighboring trees of all species and that these complex symbiotic systems—mimicking human social networks—are often centered around “mother trees” that manage the information flow.
Perhaps this information exchange is only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps communication between trees and plants is much more sophisticated and complex than we might know. I know this is beginning to sound a bit like science fiction, like the movie Avatar or Alan Dean Foster’s novel Midworld, but this knowledge does pose intriguing new questions about intelligence, ecology, and the complexity of life on this planet. Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory—the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner—is another work that reimagines the human relationship with the world that exists next to our own, a world which we take for granted—a world of trees. The denizens of this fictional world are far more sophisticated, empathetic, and perceptive than we might imagine.
And yet we harvest our wheat, our corn, and our vegetables. We chop down forests for the wood to build and heat our houses, to write upon, and to wipe up our spills. We also use animals for their wool, their labor, their skins, and their meat. We even use our fellow humans for cheap labor—even slavery—and sexual exploitation. The human race is just that way—we are the ultimate consumers, Nature’s gluttons. We have to consume in order to live.
Perhaps, however, the price of our survival might be mitigated. We do need to eat, but maybe instead of cutting down hundreds of thousands of trees each year to celebrate the birth of our savior, we might take a look at a new tradition: potted Christmas trees. Why not plant an evergreen in a pot, bring it inside during that most festive of seasons, decorate it, and then place it back outside after the holidays? Besides sparing the tree, parents can enjoy watching the baby tree—a la Charlie Brown’s Christmas—grow up with their children, and then transplant it outside (a pot cannot bear a fir tree taller than five feet tall) when it has outgrown its usefulness.
A bond would then be forged between the family and the tree; perhaps the grandparents would someday go into the backyard and gaze at a mighty pine that used to adorn their living room and remember when it—and their children—were young. This might be the bridge between two species, the language that each of them, and all of us, might understand.