Possession

Given that we are in the midst of our annual solstice celebrations (aka Christmas), and the yearly orgy of buying that they have become, perhaps some contemplation of the underside of all this is in order. Notwithstanding the fact that the mythologized idea of Christmas consists in the buying of gifts for others, it takes no great perception to see that the real idea, cemented in our minds from childhood, has become more about ourselves: how much we get; how much we have after the presents have been unwrapped and are stacked in ‘our’ personal pile. In that sense, Christmas in the modern world has become a truly American holiday—steeped in the American ethic of rating our individual worth by how much material we possess. This ‘worth’ is also gauged, often enough, by how much we can affordto have, how much our net worth allows us, or would allow us if we cared to exercise it, to buy. And it cannot evade our consideration that the man who heads the United States government at this moment, Donald Trump, emblazoning his name in gold on all his holdings, epitomizes this American mania of possession. 

            Well, you may say, what of it? Haven’t kings and princes and potentates of every kind always done this, conspicuously displaying their possessions in order to elicit awe in those whom they ruled, whose loyalty they required? Well in some senses, particularly in historical times, yes. From Persians to Greeks to Romans to Moghuls to Chinese Emperors to the Sun King to Russian czars to Victoria, all modern rulers have found it necessary to display their riches for the sake of rationalizing and emphasizing their right to power. The plantation owners in Mississippi and the robber barons with their mansions in Newport dutifully followed suit. All these ‘blessed of the earth’ seemed to take delight in the vivid contrast/gulf between the visual spectacle of their consumption and the meager possessions of those they ruled, indeed literally possessed. For that is the most exaggerated form of possession of which humans are capable: to literally own the body and soul of other human beings, to possess the very means of their survival, of their ability to be. Which is what the capitalist moguls of our time possess as well.

            But again, what of it? Isn’t that what everyone always wants, what humans have always wanted? To lord it over their fellow humans, if they possibly could, to work diligently and ceaselessly to get to that point? Well, not exactly. In the chiefdoms of the Northwest Coast of America, for example, riches conferred on the chief an opposite privilege: the privilege of giving it all away. The potlatch was a ceremony where Indian chieftains took pride in giving all that they had to their assembled tribesmen. And the measure of their success was precisely how much they could give away. Possession, therefore, was not for keepingwhat others couldn’t have; possession’s most conspicuous privilege lay in how easily and freely it could be dispensed with, given away. And of course, sociologists tell us that such gift giving served the very important function of circulating goods so that their use and worth was distributed and multiplied many times over. 

            It is not clear to me whether chiefs or their tribe members understood giving in this way, nor if they understood the dark side of possession (as, for example, many cultures do as expressed in the folkway of evil eye, where the display of goods is believed to inspire envious eyes and thereby evil), but it certainly seems possible. Be that as it may, some among us have always understood that life and possession may not always be fully compatible. Surely, the slaves in the American South must have known that being someone else’s possession—to be bought and sold on a whim—made it impossible for the possessed one to truly live. And we all, on some level, understand that, hence our American mania to be the one with enough wealth to possess rather than be possessed, to own rather than be owned. What some of our folk wisdom indicates, moreover, is that there’s even more to it than that. “‘Tis better to give than to receive:” almost everyone subscribes, at least nominally, to that idea. The same goes for other sayings, often found on our Christmas cards: “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving;” “For it is in giving that we receive;” and so on. So many and varied are these sayings that it is almost as if a shadow of guilt lies over our annual gifting season, the holiday that, more than anything else, serves to determine how well the economy of our nation is faring. For if Christmas buying is anemic, the entire economy braces for a downturn. No wonder we are all hustled by advertising and the entire panorama of false holiday cheer into buying and possessing far more than we can afford. 

            But there’s a deeper side to all of this, (deeper even than the fact that so many are the useless goods that Americans give and buy even when it’s not Christmas that we, and western culture in general, are literally drowning in our own waste) and it has to do with possession itself. Ironically, some of the most impressive thoughts about possession and its problems come from some of our American thinkers in the early days of our possession mania. It is as if early on, thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson were able to see more clearly than we can now how much possession, or even dispossession, animated the founding and early ethic of our nation. Consider just the early settlers, starting with Columbus, who were so anxious to plant symbols, i.e. claims, of possession in the new lands they ran into. Not only did they insist on ownership, using western concepts of property to swindle the indigenous people out of their lands, but they proved themselves eager to cement the case with the murder of as many aboriginal claimants to “their” lands as possible. As settlers moved west and “claimed” more and more of the Indian lands they brought under cultivation (this involved the concept of vacuum domicilium, which meant that ‘undeveloped’ lands—those without such improvements as fenced fields and permanent structures—could simply be occupied and possessed regardless of Indian claims and unwritten traditions), they buttressed their claims with legal cases, the most important of which was the 1823 Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh. This case, stacked from the beginning due to the basic assumptions underlying it (Indians were “savage tribes” with inferior culture and primitive subsistence drawn from the forest),didinitially admit that Indians “were rightful occupants of the soil;” however, their actual sovereignty and right to dispose of their tradition-bound lands “was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.” In other words, their dispossession was made legal by the “discovery” of their lands by Europeans. Steven Newcomb, Director of the Indigenous Law Institute, summarized this legal doctrine as follows:

“Based on this bizarre theory, our very existence as Indians is now assumed to be subordinate to, ruled by, and possessed as property by, the political and legal successor of the first Christian ‘discoverers,’ namely, the United States.” see www.nativeamericannetroots.net. 

Thoreau was quite familiar with this dispossession, this theft of Indian land that lay at the heart of every American possession throughout the new nation, and so expressed again and again his problems with the very idea of possession, which goes deeper still. 

Consider that Thoreau’s deep problem with possession came from his understanding of his basic function, the function of the artist or poet. Thoreau, that is, meditated on the fact that the very material of his art consisted of the objects of the material world, and that to write about them meant in some sense to possess them. Though he did not have to ownsuch objects in the common sense, he did have to take possession of them, either by internalizing them, deeply understanding them or, as a poet, simply naming them. The problem, as he knew, was that whether incorporating or comprehending or naming, he was in some fundamental sense losing the thing itself. He was losing the innocent (Thoreau was obsessed with maintaining his ‘innocence’), the more or less primary apprehension of it in favor of a word or a concept. And that concept was really only shorthand for the freezing of the multiplicity of impressions that the living object actually was. The action of the taxidermist or the butterfly collector, who must kill his specimen in order to preserve it, perhaps conveys this sense best. Museum curators know this as well: once an object has entered a collection to be catalogued and mounted and preserved, it is like an animal caged in a zoo, in that it has lost its functional life. It becomes something named, circumscribed, identified, catalogued, and embalmed. Worse, we who view such things become, as voyeurs, embalmed as well. 

Here, then, is the deep problem with possession. To possess something—and this goes double for the possession of spouse that western and many other cultures gave to males in a marriage—is to establish it as an object, frozen in time as if to make it permanent. It is to circumscribe its always-changing life, its real being. It is to cripple its dynamic life in the most basic sense, to kill its freedom. This underlying demand is why so many murders are attributed to a male whose “possession,” his wife, has asserted her freedom one way or the other. “If you can’t be mine, then you can’t be anyone’s, and must die.” Nor is it just in the extreme case of spousal murder where this idea reigns. As noted above, simply naming things is truncating them, cutting them short of what they actually are—living, breathing, constantly-evolving entities. And so, when we know things by their names, it is an advance at first, as all shortcuts are; but after habituation, it becomes a loss. A reduction. We no longer see trees as dynamic always-changing life forms. We see treeas a concept. We see floweras a concept; skunkas a concept; ballet danceras a concept. And it usually takes artists to re-image such common objects to shake us out of our frozen and static conceptions. If we did not have this re-imagining, we would be embalmed in all our conceptions, blind to the world as it really is—which is, for most of us, the way we get through life. 

In many ways, we do the same with our selves. Though we recognize that we change over time, especially when we see photographs of our early selves, we still have frozen concepts of “self” deeply imbedded in our brains. We see our selves even in baby pictures. And so, when our physical characteristics or abilities change, we rebel: this can’t be happening; this isn’t the real me. Which is why the question about self is a basic one in wisdom traditions. Who are you? We think we know: I’m me. But which me? And for how long? And what of these other manifestations of me that I may not like or even know about? 

Getting back to possession, then, we can shape some conclusions that have to do with the basics of having and being. To possess means to take, to take possession. And this involves, at some level, the reduction or even destruction of that which we take possession of. What’s more, it also involves a reduction in ourselves. For if we focus, as many of us do and are encouraged to do in our culture, on getting and having, we not only lose the object—its ability to truly be—but ourselves as well—our ability to truly be. That is, by focusing exclusively on the havingof things—things as ourobjects that we keep and protect for ourselves—we remove ourselves from our true nature: directly feeling, or eating, or using; in short, being. We objectify, we concern ourselves with storing up for the future, we become preoccupied with securing for ourselves alone our “things,” and thus remove ourselves from the immediacy of living. Wherehavingbecomes paramount, being, in the sense of living life fully, becomes forgotten or delayed or put aside for a more convenient time. In this sense, we can say that in order to havesomething, we must diminish not only that which we possess, but ourselves as well—the true life of being we all yearn for. For Thoreau, this idea was implicit in almost everything he wrote. Specifically, he wrote in an early journal entry something that cast these ideas in the imagery of looking at Nature, which he did almost constantly:

Man cannot afford...to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through her and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone. (V45, Torry and Allen, eds, The Journals of Henry D. Thoreau, Boston: 1906.)

If we take Thoreau’s image of “looking at Nature directly” as a metaphor for ‘taking possession of,’ then we can see that the deadly result, for Thoreau, is that “it turns the man of science to stone.” In other words, scientists were those who separated Nature, who objectified Nature, and the result is that they became, metaphorically, stones: dumb, insentient beings. This is a kind of reversal of the cited myth from Greek mythology, where the Medusa’s glance turned men to stone. In Thoreau’s version, it is the men of science whose own reduction of Nature to objects— possessing them to study them—turns themto stone. 

            I think it is clear that Thoreau meant this to apply to most of his countrymen, to the American ethic of business and possession he inveighed against so often. ‘If you insist on possessing everything in sight, even or especially the natural world, you will end up turning yourselves to stone.’ It’s something we might want to think about in this mad season of getting, getting and more getting. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Things Are Just Crazy Here

The above title comes from a quote by Gary Cohn, Trump’s first Director of the National Economic Council and a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, in describing to presidential secretary Rob Porter his (Cohn’s) inclination to resign from the Oval Office. As described in Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, Cohn’s remark comes after the President made his fatal remarks about the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, when the president equated the victims with the neo-Nazi perpetrators: “There is blame on both sides…you also had people that were very fine people on both sides…” (246). As Woodward lays it out, this had Cohn threatening to resign right then, but he was persuaded by the president to remain and finish the crucial Republican tax bill. Cohn did remain, but the continuing chaos emanating from a president who never prepared or even read the briefing materials laboriously prepared by those like Cohn, had him disheartened. He conveys this to Rob Porter, Trump’s White House secretary: 

“I don’t know how much longer I can stay. Things are just crazy here. They’re so chaotic. He’s never going to change. It’s pointless to prepare a meaningful, substantive briefing for the president that’s organized, where you have a bunch of slides. Because you know he’s never going to listen…He’s going to get through the first 10 minutes and then he’s going to want to start talking about some other topic” (271). 

We then get a prime example of this when Trump, in an Oval Office meeting about the automobile industry, when he is shown Cohn-prepared charts proving that the auto industry was doing fine (though Detroit was producing 3.6 million fewer cars and light trucks since 1994, the rest of U.S. production, mostly in the Southeast, was up by the same 3.6 million). Unimpressed, the president insisted that the industry had to be fixed. Cohn then brought up the World Trade Organization document he’d put in Trump’s daily book, but which Trump clearly had not read: “The World Trade Organization is the worst organization ever created!” Trump said. “We lose more cases than anything.” Cohn then reiterated what was in the daily book, a document that showed that the United States “won 85.7 percent of its WTO cases, more than average.” Cohn added other wins at the WTO in disputes with China. 

            “This is bullshit,” Trump replied. “This is wrong.” 

“This is not wrong. This is data from the US trade representative. Call Lighthizer…”

“I’m not calling Lighthizer.”

“Well,” Cohn said, “I’ll call Lighthizer. This is factual data. There’s no one that’s going to disagree with this data.” Then he added, “Data is data” (276-7). 

But the president simply continued to argue against any data that did not fit his preconceptions and obsessions. 

            This pattern is repeated again and again in Woodward’s account. The president makes known his discontent, usually based on his obsessions, particularly his conviction that any arrangements with other countries should produce a profit for the United States. His shorthand for this was to usually blame generals or statesmen for not understanding ‘cost-benefit analysis.’ That was what should animate all deals, according to Trump: making money. When he saw agreements as costing the United States money—as in NATO, KORUS (the trade deal with South Korea), the WTO—then he wanted to trash the agreements and withdraw. For example, on August 25, 2017, the president decided he would make wide-ranging decisions concerning three ‘deals.’  “We’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” Trump said. “Just do it. Just do it. Get out of NAFTA. Get out of KORUS. And get out of the WTO. We’re withdrawing from all three” (264). Gary Kohn and General Kelly (now having replaced Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff) tried to explain how important the alliance with South Korea was in containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, how KORUS was actually cheap as national defense. Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, and H.R. McMaster, National Security adviser all agreed that withdrawing would be insane. Trump finally agreed to put off the 180-day letter announcing the withdrawals to a later time. But only days later, on September 5, Rob Porter entered the Oval Office to see in Trump’s hands a draft letter of the 180-day notice withdrawing from KORUS. Porter (normally the one who would write the letter) hadn’t written it, but someone (he guessed it was probably Peter Navarro or Wilbur Ross, usually the ones pushing Trump in this insane direction) had. It played right into Trump’s insecurity: “Until I actually take some action to demonstrate my threats are real and need to be taken seriously,” Trump said, “then we’re going to have less leverage in these things.” When Gary Cohn realized what had been done, however, he (Cohn) actually stole the letter from Trump’s desk and hid it in a folder marked “KEEP.” So central to the whole Trump presidency did Woodward see this incident that he makes it the opening prologue of his entire book. As Woodward describes it, Cohn told an associate, “I stole it off his desk. I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country” (xviii-xix). Cohn and Porter and many other principals knew this strategy would work because the president simply forgot anything that wasn’t directly in his face (If it was out of sight, it was out of mind…Trump’s memory needed a trigger—something on his desk or something he…saw on television (158). So the hope was that this insane impulse to scuttle some of the nation’s most important agreements would simply disappear into the memory hole. Woodward ends his Prologue and defines his theme with these words:

The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world (xxii). 

            What strikes this reader is not only the fleshing out of this hair-raising scenario (until, of course, several of his “staff” either resigned or were fired: Priebus, Tillerson and Cohn being the most important), but also the recurring assessments that many of these highly-placed leaders of Team Trump registered about their boss. Steve Bannon offers some of the juiciest assessments of the man he once called a “political genius.” When Bannon was prepping McMaster for his interview for the National Security job, for example, he told the general: ‘Don’t lecture Trump. He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals (he never went to class in college, never took a note (87). This same General McMaster said he believed that General Mattis and Rex Tillerson both had concluded the same thing: the president and the White House were crazy, so, as much as they could, they tried to implement foreign policy without him. After a particularly raucous meeting concerning the importance of world order and free trade, in which Trump publicly belittled his secretary of state, Gary Cohn asked Tillerson if he was ok. Tillerson’s now-famous reply: “He’s a fucking moron” (225). It was also at this point that one unnamed official summarized the meeting:

“It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views” (226).

Reince Priebus, Trump’s first Chief of Staff, offered his own summary of the president after he had been unceremoniously sacked by tweet (this after Trump had just assured him his announcement wouldn’t come until the weekend): “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way” (235). As to the operation of the White House, where the rules of access were routinely violated by certain privileged ones who simply walked into the Oval Office when they felt like it (Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, and Bannon), Priebus compared it to a 'team of predators,' where discussion is 

“designed not to persuade, but, like their president, to win—to slay, crush and demean…If you have natural predators at the table,” Priebus said, “Things don’t move…Because when you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens” (237). 

            There are many more of these assessments throughout Woodward’s book. Most underline the initial impression of a White House (where planet-impacting decisions are made almost hourly), in which Trump’s favorite mode was insulting his inferiors (“He’s a globalist. He’s not loyal to the president”—about Gary Cohn, whose wife Trump also blamed for Cohn’s upset about the remarks after Charlottesville), while they bit their tongues and commented afterward—“The president’s unhinged” said Kelly. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about” (263); “This is no longer a White House,” Porter said. “It’s just all-out war now” (252). Perhaps the most comprehensive assessment of the president came from Steve Bannon, Trump’s closest favorite in the early days, until he was fired. Here is how Woodward summarizes Bannon’s remarks:

Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary (299). 

This comes very close to what Secretary of Defense Mattis said after the meeting in which Trump maintained that collective defense, as in NATO, was sucker play, and that he wanted to withdraw from all deals not of his own making. The president, Mattis said, acted like—and had the understanding of—“a fifth or sixth grader” (308). 

            In other words, friends, the mind of Donald Trump—the most powerful man in the world—is, according to those working most closely with him, the mind of a volatile, unread, emotionally unstable, desperately aggrieved and predatory teenager. 

            And that doesn’t even get to his character, his ethics or morals. For that, Woodward waits till the very end of his book, and puts the assessment into the mouth of the lawyer Trump chose to maintain his defense against the Mueller investigation. John Dowd joined Trump’s team of lawyers in May 2017. He had a reputation as one of the most successful defense lawyers of his time. He apparently believed that cooperating with Mueller would be the best strategy, and he did that for about a year. But he also believed that Mueller did not have a real case concerning Trump’s collusion with Russians, and therefore urged the president not to testify in person. He would take written questions and have Trump answer them with his lawyers’ help, but he would not allow the president to sit down for an interrogation with Mueller and his team. He believed that Mueller would “trick” the president into perjury. Trump, contrarily, believed that he had to agree to testify. Mainly, he believed he was superior to the lawyers who would question him. He was seconded in this position by his other lawyer, Ty Cobb, whom he urged to assert publicly that the president was ‘not afraid to testify.’ This was the nub of it for Trump: how he would look if he was seen to have ‘taken the fifth’ (i.e. taken refuge behind the Fifth Amendment’s stipulation that a person could not be forced to testify against himself). He was, after all, the president who had made a religion of the idea of toughness, of breaking down his opponents with threats, with fear. How could such a man’s man be afraid to testify to a bunch of bureaucrats? But Dowd was insistent, and when he couldn’t find the words, was in fact afraid to use the real words to convince the president that by testifying he would end up in jail, he resigned. And this is how Woodward ends his book, with a summary of John Dowd’s real reason for his insistence that the president not testify. It represents the book’s final assessment of Donald Trump, and succinctly and shockingly says it all:

But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: 

       “You’re a fucking liar.” (357). 

Lawrence DiStasi

Cooperation Makes the Forest

The really big takeaway from modern research on trees is simple: trees in an old-growth forest cooperate. Far from being individuals seeking only their own success, trees cooperate not only with others of their own species but with those of different species too, and also with the fungi that, though often feeding upon them and debilitating them, also cooperate with trees to the mutual success of both. In order to do this, of course, trees must communicate in some way that has long been invisible to us, but is now becoming more commonly known. This ‘secret life of trees’ forms the basis for two books I’ve read recently, one a novel: The Overstoryby Richard Powers, and the other a nonfiction account by a German forester, Peter Wohlleben, who wrote The Hidden Life of Trees. Together with the pioneering research of Suzanne Simard about plant-fungi communication (Simard writes a note to Wohlleben’s book and is the model for the fictional scientist, Patricia Westerford, Powell creates in The Overstory), these two books change one’s outlook on what a tree is, and why preserving old-growth forests is more important in more ways than we ever could have imagined. 

            To begin with The Overstory, Powers writes a novel dramatizing the awakening to the importance of trees by several characters, most of whom he brings together as activists committed to saving old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. These actions are based on the activism of well-known ‘tree-huggers’ like Julia Butterfly Hill and others, but Powers has them take even more radical action, perhaps based on the Weathermen—that is, setting fire to buildings. All of them stop this activity when one of their number is critically injured in a fire, but their commitment makes the point: humans are latecomers to life, owe much of their sustenance and even genes to trees, and with logging are destroying the very means of maintaining life on the planet. For me, the most compelling character in Powers’ fictionalized account was scientist Patricia Westerford, so much so that I was driven to search out the character upon whom she was based. That brought me to Dr. Suzanne Simard, who has several videos wherein she makes the case for her major research finding, tree communication. 

            Simard is a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In her note at the end of Wohlleben’s book, she writes that her doctoral research led her, in 1992, to some amazing discoveries regarding the mutual relationship between paper birches, a deciduous tree, and their conifer neighbors. The birches seemed to be feeding the soil and helping Douglas firs nearby. Simard’s question was exactly how and why they were doing this. Here is what she writes:

            In pulling back the forest floor using microscopic and genetic tools, I discovered that the vast belowground mycelial network was a bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species. These fungi are mutualistic. They connect the trees with the soil in a market exchange of carbon and nutrients and link the roots of the paper birches and Douglas firs in a busy, cooperative Internet. When the interwoven birches and firs were spiked with stable and radioactive isotopes, I could see, using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, carbon being transmitted back and forth between the trees, like neurotransmitters firing in our own neural networks. The trees were communicating through the web! (Wohlleben, 248).

Simard went on to discover the dynamics of the synergy between the two tree species: “the firs were getting morephotosynthetic carbon from the birches than they were giving,” which meant that the birches were spurring the growth of the firs, as if they were caring for them; and the firs, in turn, were being “mothers” to the birches as well, depending on the season. There was, in short, a mutual exchange between two apparently rivalrous species, mediated by fungal mycelia, thus making a forest. In her paper describing this, published in Naturein 1997, the term “wood-wide web” was introduced. Many scholars have now built on Simard’s research about belowground communication between trees, mapping and monitoring the subtleties of communication that goes on in an ostensibly “silent” forest to the enhancement of the mutual health of all. As she puts it, “these discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system” (249).  

            This becomes the essence of what Peter Wohlleben describes for us in The Hidden Life of Trees. A forest is a community. That is, an intact forest that is allowed to grow on its own, without the interference of humans (who think they are helping forests by thinning them out but are really hindering them), seems to know what it is doing, and to act for the good of the whole. The deep humus soil, enriched constantly by dead and dying trees, and inhabited by an astonishing array of life forms (“There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet” (86), is really the lifeblood of this immense life-fostering system. When it is disturbed and compacted by huge logging machines and cleared by ignorant humans, it is crippled. This is why, for example, trees in urban neighborhoods topple over so easily in windstorms: the roots, which are the brains and anchor of the tree, are limited from growing by concrete and by compacted soil; without their normal extended root support, trees topple over in strong winds. What’s even more astonishing and sad is the fact that while trees in intact forests carry on an active conversation via several modes of communication, trees in monocultural plantations (which we are assured replaces all the old-growth trees we use for lumber) are spaced in such a way that communication is silenced. As Wohlleben puts it, “Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants (including trees planted for lumber) have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb” (11—emphasis added). 

            Wohlleben gives us many instances of exactly how and why trees communicate. First and foremost is to create the ecosystem of the forest, which “moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity” (4). In such an environment, trees are our elders, living, through cooperation, to be hundreds of years old and surviving even regular forest fires. Needless to say, when forests are cleared or ‘thinned,’ that ecosystem, and life itself, is interrupted. But if, on the other hand, trees are allowed to live and learn (yes, trees have been proven to learn from experience and store that learning, probably in their root systems), they can perform feats such as those found among the thorn acacias of Africa. Scientists discovered many years ago that somehow these acacias were able to discourage giraffes from feeding on them and their neighbors. Upon investigation, they discovered two things: first, as soon as the trees ‘felt’ giraffes munching on their leaves, they started to “pump toxic substances into their leaves to rid themselves of the large herbivores” (this ability of plants to create almost endless varieties of chemicals is a cause for wonder, not to mention gratitude) (7). But this was only the beginning; the acacias being eaten also “gave off a warning gas (specifically ethylene) that signaled to neighboring trees of the same species that a crisis was at hand,” and instantly the warned trees also pumped toxins into theirleaves to protect themselves! In short, while we used to think that only animals or birds could warn their relatives of coming danger (vocally), we now know that trees do the very same thing—only employing systems that escape our senses. 

            One reason for our insensitivity, of course, is that much of the communication between trees takes place below ground. Here is where that mycelial network comes in. Since they cannot photosynthesize as trees do, fungi bargain with their specific trees: the fungi spread their mycelia throughout the tree roots, greatly increasing the root surface to suck up more water and nutrients. As Wohlleben points out, scientists find “twice the amount of life-giving nitrogen and phosphorus in plants that cooperate with fungal partners than in plants using their roots alone” (50). In return, the fungi get the sugar and other carbohydrates they need (from the tree’s photosynthesis) by growing into the tree’s root hairs, so that up to a third of the tree’s total production comes to them. This is costly for a tree (and each tree seems to have its appropriate mycelium with which to cooperate), but it apparently pays off in better nutrients, in the communication mentioned above, and also in the trick the fungi have to filter out heavy metals (damaging to trees) and bacteria that would otherwise feast on the tree. In short, this is a kind of symbiosis that is widespread in nature but which many human societies (or parts of them such as robber barons and bankers) seem to have forgotten. 

            One other benefit of trees (among the hundreds cited by Wohlleben) deserves mention. Trees, especially coastal rainforests, play an important role in how rainfall is used and distributed on the land-locked portion of continents. Part of every rain is intercepted by the huge coastal forest canopy formed by the tree crowns. Wohlleben writes that “each summer, trees use up to 8,500 cubic yards of water per square mile, which they release into the air through transpiration” (106). This tree-created water vapor then actually forms new cloudsthat travel farther inland than the average of 400 miles for typical ocean-driven storms, to release their rain. In other words, coastal forests amplify the life-giving precipitation from oceans and spread it far into the interior flatlands—the lands that in North America chiefly depend on this rain for farming. When these coastal forests are destroyed or dry out due to clear-cutting or thinning (as is already happening in Brazil, and as lumber companies have been doing in the Pacific Northwest), this life-giving system falls apart. Because of their moisture-preserving capacity (coniferous forests in the Northern Hemisphere also give off terpenes—whose molecules, giving moisture a place to condense, create clouds that are twice as thick), such forests even play a part in slowing down climate change. Of course, this is of no interest to the lumber predators and climate deniers now holding sway, but very soon the real price of this ignorance will become all too apparent. And finally, trees actually disinfect their surroundings through the release of phytoncides, chemicals with antibiotic properties they release to fight off bacteria. This makes the air in pine forests almost germ-free, perhaps one reason people find being in such forests so refreshing. 

            In sum, as many of our primary myths and legends suggest, trees are our forebears, the source of much of our DNA, our cells, our rain, our communication systems, our structure, our nutrition. The next time you think to cut down a ‘dumb’ tree, therefore, or hear about idiot legislation to make it easier to ‘harvest’ what’s left of our national forests, you might want to think again. You might want to pay homage to your parent, and see if you can get others to do the same—that is, to cooperate both within and between species—before it’s really too late. 

Lawrence DiStasi