In a 2017 book, En Compagnie des Hommes [In the Company of Men], Véronique Tadjo follows the Ebola epidemic spreading across Africa. Eventually, we realize that one of the narrators is a huge baobab, who complains about human stupidity and confides that trees love to see themselves as guardians of rivers and seas: “we dare to believe that we speak to the running water, that dances and sings”.
The whole universe moves around the trees, which embrace a world beyond themselves: birds, insects, lichen, everything lives around them, while they photosynthesize and breathe inside out, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Their sky-touching crowns offer the world a refreshing shade. When things are properly observed, trees are responsible for what they can’t even see. But when they realize that they are not alone, they let us know, through the baobab, that their permanence is everyone’s permanence.
Since at least the past decade, there has been a boom in interest, both in philosophy and in the arts, in plants’ collectivist character. There is talk of a “vegetable turn”, which would invite us to think like them, to put ourselves in their place. Without eyes, ears, limbs or organs, plants perceive the world as a “non-spatial”, “a fluid [body] in which nothing can be separated from anything else”, as suggested by Emanuele Coccia.
Monica Gagliano, who runs the Biological Intelligence Laboratory at an Australian university and worked at the University of Florence’s International Plant Neurobiology Laboratory headed by Stefano Mancuso, took the plant-narrator idea to heart. Playing with Nietzsche’s famous title, she wrote Thus Spoke the Plant, where she reminds us that, since Socrates, the so-called “Western” world forgot to listen to vegetables.
However, as João Paulo Lima Barreto teaches from the “practical knowledge” of indigenous specialists from the Upper Rio Negro, the human body itself consists of many elements, some of them “immaterial”, and many of them linked to the world of plants. Light, forest, earth, water, animals, air and human beings make up the body, of which balance depends on the well-regulated coexistence of disparate and distant elements. We are not far from Véronique Tadjo’s baobab imagination, for whom the trees touch the whole world with their existence. Nor are we distant from those “word strings” that make up Nhe’éry, this forest being that is so difficult to translate, at least as long as we continue to use a vocabulary that cautiously separates human and non-human.
Be as is may, the new millennium exposes the climatic and existential crossroads we all stand at – trees, things, animals – and seems to claim for an open sensitivity to forms of communication that go far beyond the book. By valuing both conservation and transformation, new knowledge approaches certain indigenous cosmogonies that reject the notion of a world made exclusively for human beings to inhabit.
According to such concept, humans the bossy kings could no longer behave like the center of the universe. Not even thinking would be uniquely human. To put it simply: if the idea of conquering nature goes on, what we call “nature” will soon show the end of our foolish domination dream. In fact, it is quite suggestive that, at this moment, the expansionist desire advances towards outer space, perhaps with the intuition that Earth is already at its limit and can be abandoned as cosmic garbage, as Ailton Krenak notes. Until then, though, as long as there is indigenous knowledge and resistance, it is convenient to expand knowledge on end-of-the-world delaying ideas.
It is not possible to continue disregarding the knowledge and sensibilities that advocate us being part of something bigger. Our permanence depends on what we may not see, but is also part of us, whether we know it or not. The individual being does not exist or stand alone. Such a premise is simple, but it has profound consequences.
When Peter Wohlleben’s bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees was released in 2015, the world was already facing the climate crisis, which, in its own way, autocracy and inequality have been accelerating. After all, there is nothing less democratic than an environment harming development, which creates growing poverty zones. In his book, Wohlleben tackles this issue from a lesson given by the forest itself. But to understand this lesson, it was necessary to observe it, or, as in the case of Tadjo, Gagliano and the indigenous sages, it was necessary to listen to it.
Wohlleben worked for years in the lumber industry, managing forests in western Germany. At a certain point, he began to realize that trees were related, which completely changed his perspective on the forest: “when you know that trees feel pain, they have memories, they live with their relatives, you can’t just cut them down and kill them with machines”.
The account of how he discovered the feelings, relationships and even the memory of plants is fascinating. But one thing in particular caught my attention in Wohlleben’s book. In a chapter entitled “Sozialamt” (translated into English as “social security” and into Portuguese as “social service”, although a more adequate translation would probably be “social welfare”), a true collective protection system among the trees.
The interconnection of roots and the synergy between plants, already investigated by Suzanne Simard in the 1990s – and which would engender the idea of the wood wide web, published by Nature magazine in 1997 – opens up the possibility of describing the forest with a vocabulary that gained meaning especially in the post-war period, when the reconstruction of a tattered Europe demanded an imaginative elaboration of a complex social security idea.
Of course the notion of social welfare, as well as the social security agency (Sozialamt), date back earlier than World War II. But it is within the framework of European social democracy, already in the Cold War context, that the concept of the welfare state expands. In Germany, on both sides of the wall, the possibility collective care generated an expectation of the future, which may be interpreted as a reaction to damage and horror experienced during the war. Either in the socialist world or in the universe of European liberal democracies, the reconstruction of the collectivity bonds was a poignant necessity, and it is under the mark of this poignancy that Wohlleben imagines the world from the forest.
For those who suppose plants can be great narrators, the question: would there be conscience in the way trees communicate? The question is tricky, because the idea of “consciousness” suggests separation between the thinking subject and the moment they observe. Categories such as “subject”, by the way, grants little or no understanding about the vegetable turn. Perhaps it is better to stick with the poetic image of Emanuele Coccia: “we are objects of the plants’ cosmic gardening”, so “plants are not the landscape, they are the first landscapers”. They watch us and assist us at the same time. Deep down, we are nothing more than a late consequence of them. In fact, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them, and we won’t be here for long if we continue to mistreat them.
It is hard for human beings to deal with the idea that they can be a mere object of a universe that transcends them and that they do not master. The vegetable turn, however, is a sure antidote to the Faustian nightmare of someone who is supposed to be able to dominate matter and time itself. Bowing to the wisdom of the material (or “non-human”) world and the mysteries of vegetable time is an effectively modern attitude that we have barely begun to discover.
It is interesting that Wohlleben (who has the “buen vivir” embedded in his name: Wohl + Leben) asks himself, right at the beginning of his book, about the gratuitousness of the trees’ underground encounters. His question is whether the roots grow randomly, connecting casually when meeting others of the same species. If we believe in simple chance, trees would have no choice but to exchange nutrients, composing a purely accidental community.
However, he says, nature does not work so simply or casually: trees know the differences between their own roots and those of other species. But then, why would they be so “social”? Why reach out even to your competitors? Why exchange nutrients with trees of another species, for example?
In times of xenophobia and heightened nationalism, the question is less naïve than it might seem. Wohlleben’s answer may be in the title of his first chapter: “Friends”. There is a support network in the forest, based on the recognition of the most diverse species. Let’s say that whoever has a friend has everything, quite literally. The sensitive point to explain this solidary universe is that the tree is not the forest. Something bigger transcends the tree, making it impossible to imagine it individually. This would be the beneficial limit of the vegetal turn: there is no way to sustain worldviews or cosmologies based on the individual anymore.
Comparing the vegetable turn to the global political context, Rob Nixon recalls the cutting sentence in Richard Powers’ The Overstory: “There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.” And it goes even further, remembering that the neoliberal creed is condensed in the famous Margaret Thatcher pronouncement: “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”.
The idea that there is nothing but the individual and the unclear family, plus Thatcher’s correlated verdict on the death of society, date back to 1987, less than a year earlier, reminds Nixon, from NASA’s James Hansen launching the global warming warning and rushing society to collectively and multilaterally to curb it. What came after that, as we know, is our sad story so far…
Communication inside the forest is one of the great themes in The Hidden Life of Trees, and of several other books written in recent years. Wohlleben faces the topic with a lot of narrative imagination. Let’s have a look at the “social security” chapter. It begins with the observation that, in the case of forest logging handling, engineers usually determine the cut of competing trees, leaving only healthy individuals, which will grow free of hindrance. But this only works because the trees chosen to live will be cut down when they are still young. A forest left to itself, on the other hand, has no interest in losing its weaker members, because the voids that would then be created could ruin the delicate microclimates in which they find themselves, destroying all the trees in the end.
Recent research, recalls the author, led to the incredible discovery that, in a beech forest, they are able to equalize the volume of photosynthesis that each one does, which explains why weaker trees and those less endowed with good terrain conditions, for example, are helped by the strongest and luckiest ones. Equalization takes place through an underground exchange of nutrients “according to which those who have a lot give in and those who have little receive help”. This would not be possible without the fungi, a network working as “a gigantic energy redistributor”, which reminds us of “a social assistance work trying to prevent the social abyss that harms disadvantaged individuals from growing”.
When artificially spaced, trees continue to send messages to their neighbors, but they do so “in vain, as only the stumps of their trunks remain”. The problem then is that “each one starts to only take care of itself, unleashing a big differences in productivity among the members”. Some trees carry out so much photosynthesis that they overflow with sugar, but that does not mean they are able to live longer, “because the quality of the tree depends on the forest that surrounds it”.
However, there is still a question: the fact that some trees are left behind and die, consumed by fungi and insects, would not be the result of evolution, with the survival of the fittest? Wohlleben uses a very beautiful image: being asked that question, the trees shake their crowns, all together, in disapproval. As if they said, in unison, that “the well-being of the group depends on the community, and when the supposedly weak members disappear, the others also lose out.” If it betted on the isolated individual strength, the forest would be “more exposed and the hot sun and wind storms” would reach the ground, “interfering with the humidity and the ideal temperature”. One’s fate is everyone’s fate.
The chapter closes with a kind of parable. Wohlleben tells that, at the beginning of his career, he “girdled” younger beeches, that is, he removed a bark circumference so that trees would die and give way to stronger ones. To his surprise, many of the trees injured by the girdling were still alive. That’s when he realized that, using “the underground network”, they “assumed the interrupted root supply and made it possible for the survival of their mates”. The tree community is strong, and the “old saying that ‘the chain has the strength of its weakest link’ could well have been created by the trees.” And since trees know this “by intuition”, they “unconditionally help each other”.
“Unconditional” help is not a simple moral imperative, but a form of wisdom. This is what Uyra Sodoma talks about, in a conversation full of plant wisdom with Emicida: “inside a forest and in peripheral urban communities, houses are very close together, like trees”. On the forest floor “the roots connect and emit signs of protection”, exactly as happens among the small houses in the populous and creative city fringes. Fascinated, Emicida replies to Uyra saying that listening is the soul of business: “listening to a friend, listening to the planet, listening to a tree that lives so long and sees so much; imagine how much history it can tell”.
Here we find ourselves back around the trees that narrate the story and resist in adversity, betting high on diversity, putting themselves not against the individual, but in favor of all individuals. Vegetable meritocracy (and only it?) would doom the planet. Continuing what we call world depends on a movement that is not giving up individual power. It is about its correct use though, in favor of a common space and other individuals that we may not know about, but who ultimately back us. Individuals, by the way, not just of our own kind. Everything takes place in an immense garden, plural and complex in its functioning.
Emanuele Coccia reminds us that, in the hanging garden called Earth, the human being is not the only one to influence other species’ lives. These “other” species also define, in their own way, the fate of the most diverse living beings, in a potentially infinite chain of relationships. What we call evolution, therefore, is nothing more than “a kind of generalized interspecific agriculture, a cosmic interculture – which is not necessarily aimed at the useful.”
Life is not useful. Nor casual. It is high time that we work and contemplate this large and delicate flying garden populated by gardeners of all kinds. As we prepare for the cosmic dance around plants, it is beneficial to lend your ears to the poet (José Miguel Wisnik) for whom the Earth dances among silent stars, “embracing in circles its own escaping center”, “with no ground other than its own/with no ground other than heaven”.
Pedro Meira Monteiro is Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture at Princeton University. Director of the Spanish and Portuguese Department, he is affiliated with the Latin American Studies Program and the Brazil LAB. He is a contributor to magazines such as piauí and serrote and author, among others, of Mário de Andrade e Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (2012, Brazilian Academy of Letters Essay Award 2013), Conta-gotas (2016), A queda do aventureiro (2021) and co-authors A queda do aventureiro (2022) with Rogério Barbosa, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and Arto Lindsay.