fire, sudden oak death, gypsy moths, pine and engraver beetles, rust, and plain old felling for farms and subdivisions. But there’s always the same distal cause, and you know it and I know it and everyone alive who’s paying attention knows it. The year’s clocks are off by a month or two. Whole ecosystems are unraveling. Biologists are scared senseless.
“Life is so generous, and we are so . . . inconsolable. But nothing I can say will wake the sleepwalk or make this suicide seem real. It can’t be real, right? I mean, here we are, all still . . .”
Twelve minutes into the talk, and she’s quaking. Her palm goes up to beg for three seconds. She retreats behind the podium, retrieves a plastic water bottle left her by the well-meaning organizers of this conference on Home Repair. She twists off the cap and lifts the container. “Synthetic estrogen.” She clicks the crackly plastic. “Ninety-three of every one hundred Americans are laced with this stuff.” She pours some into a waiting glass. Out from her hip pocket comes the replacement glass vial. “And these are plant extracts I found while walking around this campus yesterday. My goodness, this place is an arbor. A little paradise!”
Her hand shakes, splattering the pour. She cups the vial in both hands and puts it on top of the podium. “You see, a lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there’s a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They’re learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven’t even identified.”
She clicks through a menagerie of bark behaving badly. Dragon trees that bleed as red as blood. Jabuticaba, whose billiard-ball fruits grow right out of the trunk. Thousand-year-old baobabs, like tethered weather balloons loaded with thirty thousand gallons of water. Eucalypts the color of rainbows. Bizarre quiver trees with weapons for branch tips. Hura crepitans, the sandbox tree, launching seeds from its exploding fruit at 160 miles per hour. Her audience relaxes, calmed by her turn back toward the picturesque. Nor does she mind taking a last detour through the world’s best things.
“At some time over the last four hundred million years, some plant has tried every strategy with a remote chance of working. We’re just beginning to realize how varied a thing working might be. Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
She can’t hear if her audience laughs or groans. She taps on the side of the podium. The thump is muffled under her fingers. Everything in the hall is muted.
“My whole life, I’ve been an outsider. But many others have been out there with me. We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks.
“Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
Her words sound far away, cork-lined and underwater. Either both her hearing aids have died at once or her childhood deafness has chosen this moment to come back.
“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure 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