Forest Wisdom is a fresh attempt to safeguard imperiled ecosystems by reconnecting with the natural world. It’s an invitation to ‘fall in love outwards‘ in the words of poet Robinson Jeffers, opening our hearts and imaginations by forming relationships with trees as sentient beings with which we share a common life.
As complex adaptive systems, forests cooperate and care for their trees and other life forms by creating favorable conditions, resisting stress and fostering long life.
Forest Wisdom is a way of understanding these cooperative relationships that are mostly mediated below ground with the help of vast fungal pathways.
Trees provide carbon from photosynthesis to soil fungi, which in turn provide essential nutrients to the tree. Between 20 and 80 percent of a tree’s carbon is shared with soil fungi that can’t make their own. Fungi in turn mine essential minerals from the soil necessary for the tree’s photosynthesis.
Complex fungal networks of hubs and links allow trees to share nutrients and water, resist insects and disease and nourish their progeny until they reach the light. The most linked hubs in this network, known as Mother Trees, recognize their young, sending them the building blocks of life and reducing root competition. When injured or dying a mother tree releases its store of nutrients and defensive chemicals into the fungal network which doles it out to the newest and healthiest trees, even those of a different species.
Trees have highly developed sensory apparatus to locate food and identify threats. Trees “see” and react differently to wavelengths of light invisible to humans as well as to shadow. To protect themselves, trees “smell” chemical signals released by neighboring trees being chewed on by leaf eating insects, prompting them to make their leaves inedible. They “taste” the insect saliva then send out chemical signals that attract predators to feed on that particular insect. Trees have even been shown to “hear” by producing defensive chemicals in response to a recording of a leaf eating caterpillar.
Intelligence is a property of life. We are surrounded by wisdom. In trees thousands of root tips gather and assess data from the environment and respond in coordinated ways that benefit the entire forest. Forests achieve a “mindless mastery” through cooperation without the need of a centralized nervous system allowing them to respond in optimal ways to environmental challenges like human caused atmospheric heating.
Trees that have been growing for centuries in unmanaged forests have long been considered sacred. European cathedrals resemble the sacred groves of ancient trees with their soaring tree-like columns, ceilings converging high overhead penetrated by shafts of light. The essence of the sacred is found in the great age and highly evolved relationships of ancient forests.