The Language of Trees

Yesterday I took a hike on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. I didn't do the whole thing, just a section near Haywood Gap. 

Much of the trail in the mountains is like the Appalachian Trail: although you know you are in the mountains because of the slope of the land and the difficulty of the terrain, rather than long views you are just in a green tunnel. The Appalachians do not generally rise above the tree line, like the Tetons or the Big Holes, so you are always surrounded by trees -- many of them evergreens, especially Red Spruce and Hemlocks.

All the same occasionally you come to a spot in the forest in which you can at least get a glimpse of a long ridge some distance away. These views are welcome, if rare. 

The effect is to give you plenty of time to be with the trees. They are good companions, for the most part: Tolkien clearly loved them. Every now and then you are imperiled by a dead one, or a dead limb high above, especially if the day is windy. Yesterday was not. It was a very pleasant day to walk through the woods.

I had with me a companion for whom the long-range views were not of interest. For him, the really interesting things about the forest are found with the nose.

Observing his interest, I got to thinking about how different his experience of the forest is from mine. I have no idea what the olfactory experience of a dog is like. Clearly he is fascinated with smells, and his focus on them strongly suggests that he takes a deep pleasure in experiencing them -- even smells I know that I wouldn't like, as I experience them. The quality of his experience must be genuinely different from our own.

One of the arguments that theorists of Intelligent Design often make about the universe is that it is so well-fitted together that it implies a kind of universal engineer. Usually this has to do with how perfect Earth is as an environment for human beings, or for life in general. Dogs are sometimes offered as an example: though we are very different, humans and dogs are extremely compatible. Their senses end up augmenting our own, and this is possible because their ability to appreciate our emotions and interact with them makes them excellent companions as well. We help each other, take care of each other's needs, are fitted to each other. To a lesser degree this is true of horses, who can also be very sensitive to emotions (and whose mouth is structured with a gap into which a bit just happens to fit, a gap absent in other similar animals).

Trees, though, are a kind of counter-example. Oh, trees are well-fitted to humanity in a way: we breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and they breathe carbon-dioxide and exhale oxygen. Yet unlike dogs, whose forms of communication fit us so well, the language of trees is forbidden to us. Indeed, over the long co-existence we never knew they had a language: it is only very recently it has been discovered. There are in fact multiple ways that they communicate, one involving a fungal network. 

The sounds that the plants are emitting are too high for humans to hear. Humans usually hear up to around 16 kilohertz. Plant sounds start from around 40 kilohertz up to around 80.

Tolkien imagined the Ents talking, too slowly and patiently for most mortal beings. In fact the long conversations of the trees have been going on the whole time, whole forests in communication with each other, and we could never hear it. 

It is worth imagining how different our world would be if, for thousands of years, we had been able to talk with the trees. To take a trivial example, the current moral fad of veganism would probably not exist. There might still be the sense that it is exploitative to exist by devouring another living being for its complex carbohydrates and proteins, but it is less likely that people would think themselves moral for destroying a plant for nutrition instead of an animal. Perhaps we would make our houses out of stone rather than wood; perhaps people would regard a wood house as a monstrosity, like building a home out of the disjointed bones and dried flesh of a man or a beast. Or, perhaps, it would go the other way, and we would be no more bothered by making a tent out of a hide and dried bones than we are a house out of sawn and nailed wood.

Perhaps, less trivially, we might wrestle more than we do with the weird fact that it isn't possible for animal life to exist without killing and devouring others. As a point of natural theology, that's striking. What does it say about God that he made, or allowed, a world in which killing and eating each other is absolutely necessary? 

Immediately after this hike, we had a search and rescue call in which a young woman had gotten herself into a very precarious position and needed help getting back down again. At least twenty people showed up for free on a holiday weekend to spend hours saving her. Humanity has a keen interest in moral behavior, at least towards those we take as important or significant. She counted; a dog counts. The trees usually have not counted. I wonder if that would have changed if our hearing had encompassed a higher range, or if we had been able to understand the signals they translate through the fungus?