NewScientist recently interviewed Professor Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia, whose Ph.D. thesis in 1997 made the case that “… forest trees share and trade food via fungal networks that connect their roots.” Since then?
[NewScientist] Is it too much to suggest that, like in a brain, there is intelligence in this network, even wisdom?
From a purely biological, physical analysis, it looked like it had the hallmarks of intelligence. Not just the communication of information and changes in behaviour as a result, but just the pure, evolved, biological chemistry and the shape of the networks themselves spoke to the idea that they were wired and designed for wisdom.
If you look at the sophisticated interactions between plants – and some of that happens through the networks – their ability to respond and change their behaviours according to this information all speaks of wisdom to me.
What about awareness? Are trees aware of us?
Plants are attuned to any kind of disturbance or injury, and we can measure their biochemical responses to that. We know that certain biochemical pathways are triggered to develop these cascades of chemicals that are responses to stresses and disturbances, like chewing by herbivores. And if they are so attuned to small injuries like that, why wouldn’t they be attuned to us? We’re the dominant disturbance agent in forests. We cut down trees. We girdle them. We tap them.
If I injure trees so much that they start to die, they start sending their carbon through their roots to their neighbours. They are responsive to us. We’ve proven it by doing our experiments. People go: “Oh, that’s kind of scary”. But why wouldn’t plants be aware of people? They are aware of everything else.
Which could be argued is simply a conserved trait of trees and not intelligence in itself. The trick behind the assertion is that we don’t know how to define intelligence, operationally or functionally – and whether or not only a single operationality applies, now do we?
This all leads to the question of whether we should respect trees for an asserted innate intelligence for which we have no method of interrogation, or because they are an integral part of our ecology, and if we imperil the forests further, we imperil ourselves?
I still have to wonder what part an apple tree plays in the intelligence of a forest.
