An Uprooted Existence
What does a book, a language, a history, a family and a species all have in common?
Trees. Books hold knowledge that might enlighten us. Epistemologies of language root themselves in historical culture and shape our lived experience of reality. Just as the rings on a trees trunk record its age and experience of the past, the world around us is a living memorial to what happened before us. Family and evolutionary trees remind us that no matter how far we branch towards diversity, we are still connected.
Our arboreal entanglement is inescapable; we depend on them for the air we breath, so it is natural that trees permeate our consciousness. During this moment of Great Unravelling, what wisdom can we learn from trees about how to navigate these uncertain times?
The Tree of Life
For time immemorial human communities have sought to make sense of the universe, and through doing so, find a deeper sense of meaning and belonging. These worldviews have taken myriad culturally-dependent forms, however a striking feature of ancient cosmologies is the prevalence of the Tree of Life. Symbolically, the symmetry between its branches and roots represents balance and harmony; captured in the concept ‘As Above, So Below’. For the Celts the Oak tree was axis Mundi, the centre of the universe, embodying the heaven-earth-underworld connection. This celestial macrocosm was mirrored in the mind-body-spirit microcosm; the intangible depths of the individual and collective subconscious are connected to the tangible realm through the physical body.
As a bridge between the earthly world and the cosmic Mystery, the Tree of Life appears in many creation and revelation stories. The Iroquois describe how earth emerged after heavenly bark was planted onto a turtle’s back. Irish Celtic folklore considered the Hazel tree, which grew upon the Well of Wisdom, as the first creation on Earth. Norse mythology centres around Yggdrasil, an Ash tree that connects the Nine Worlds, and where Odin sacrificed himself to learn the secrets of the runes inscribed in the tree bark. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden after consuming forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Buddha reached enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi tree.
‘In the vast expanses of the soilscape, rife with predators and disease, the Mother Tree bears many resemblances to the Celtic Oak, axis Mundi’.
The Tree of Life helps explain our entanglement in reality; I can act upon the world, but the world can act upon me, we mutually constitute one another. In other words, we internalise external experiences, and externalise internal thoughts and feelings. When we suffer we can either externalise this misery, or counterbalance it with greater care and empathy for ourselves and others. From a longer-term, arboreal perspective, suffering emerges as a sacrifice that helps us grow back in a stronger and more meaningful way.
An example of this reiterative feedback loop in modern life is the relationship between capitalism and the mental health crisis. The more metaphysically uprooted I feel, the greater the impetus to materially ground myself through unnecessary consumption. As I become increasingly entangled in the shallow, invasive roots of capitalism, the meaningful and sacred teachings of the Tree of Life are foregone.
The Celtic axis Mundi.
Entangled Ways of Being
Industrialised modes of living are the antithesis of the teachings of the Tree of Life. Paradoxically however, one of the central tenets of modernity - science - has enabled us to quantitatively hear the forest speak. Recent discovery of the ‘Wood Wide Web’, a fungal network beneath the soil that connects tree roots, has demonstrated that arboreal communication is far more complex than previously assumed. The research of Dr Suzanne Simard has demonstrated the importance of veteran ‘Mother Trees’ in the forest. Mother Trees deprive their offspring of light in the first couple of centuries of the saplings life, helping them to grow stronger and live longer. Unable to photosynthesise effectively in the understory, the Mother Tree sends nutrients and messages (such as warning signals about predators) through the Wood Wide Web to its offspring.
Remarkably, the network also connects different species of trees to help distribute nutrients. Thus far it is unclear how willingly trees cooperate in these partnerships; however biodiverse ecosystems are more resilient, suggesting that altruistic cooperation is preferable to Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest relations. The Wood Wide Web also reveals how entangled and complex forests ecosystems are. For instance, a mature Oak tree can have over one hundred different species of fungi attached to its roots. In the vast expanses of the soilscape, rife with predators and disease, the Mother Tree bears many resemblances to the Celtic Oak, axis Mundi. The Wood Wide Web is an example of the network archetype; trees communicate through it via chemical signals, which are identical to our own neurotransmitters. Paul Stamets, a mycologist, has described this as ‘nature’s neural network’.
‘When other trees are present they shade and touch one another, and the structural form they take is the embodiment of these sensory conversations’.
Trees have other sensory ways of communicating and interpreting their world. If an insect bites a leaf, the surrounding tissue sends out electrical signals, just as human tissue does when injured. Trees respond by producing scent compounds to fend off the attack, and many species can taste the insect saliva and tailor pheromones specifically unpleasant to that predator. The unique and elegant architecture of trees is largely the result of the availability of sunlight; when other trees are present they shade and touch one another, and the structural form they take is the embodiment of these sensory conversations. At ultrasonic levels, when trees are thirsty they scream; as the flow of water from roots to the leaves is interrupted, the trunk vibrates in a manner akin to the way air passes down the windpipe, causing vocal cords to vibrate.
When comparing arboreal traits to our own, one must be cautious not to anthropomorphise tree behaviours since this imposes normative judgements and denies agency. For instance, the term ‘Wood Wide Web’ is implicitly associated with modernity and democratic communication, and imposes this on an epochally ancient and (as far as we know) apolitical network, thus skewing our comprehension. Avoiding this predicament requires us to reflect upon the limits to our perception and culturally-contingent philosophies. Western worldviews are blighted by the Enlightenment dogma of scientific ‘proof’, that which is qualitative cannot be measured and thus does not exist.
Despite markedly different methods of knowledge production, there are striking parallels between the wisdom of our ancestors and modern scientific knowledge. The Tree of Life was the conduit between the ethereal celestial realms; the scientific tree exists in communion with the underworld of nature’s neural network and the transient weather gods. Both conceptions of the tree emerge from different ways of knowing, but peeling back the cultural differences reveals they arise at broadly the same conclusion. Although our senses, languages and the realities we create from them differ in many respects from our arboreal kin, their overlap enables us to tentatively step into an arboreal way of being.
As Oak trees reach the end of their lives they disintegrate, facilitating the cycle of succession in the forest.
As this magnificent Oak’s trunk hollowed and crumbled, revealing an intricate beauty within, what spurred it to grow tall once more?
How is the English language limited in speaking about nature’s sentience and will to regenerate?
How would our ancestors have interpreted axis Mundi’s story?
‘The Tree of Life was the conduit between the ethereal celestial realms; the scientific tree exists in communion with the underworld of nature’s neural network and the transient weather gods’.
Arboreal Archetypes
Fiction can be a useful tool for thinking about how language affects our perception of reality. Unlike ‘objective’ and fact-based science, stories ask us to suspend our reality and the words that resonate reveal much about the culture within which they are received. In fiction the forest occupies an archetypal role in popular imagination. According to Carl Jung, archetypes represent a universal in the collective unconscious of human thought; accordingly, they organise how we experience the world. In The Structure of the Psyche, Jung writes: ‘For it is the function of consciousness, not only to recognise and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses but to translate into visible reality the world within us’.
Forests have an essential ‘forest-ness’ about them, a characteristic that reveals itself most when juxtaposed with modernity. Whereas the archetypal setting of developed life - the city - represents order and rationality, the forest is governed by the ‘Law of the Jungle’. Forests in stories are typically conceived as spaces of liminality and transformation. Oftentimes the forest is a foreboding place, such as Tolkien’s Mirkood or Rowling’s Forbidden Forest, where chaos and evil find sanctuary. Social norms disintegrate in the enchanted forest of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The jungle in Golding’s Lord of the Flies becomes a setting for savagery: ‘Bushes and a wild tangle of creeper made a mat that kept out all the light of the sun’.
From an archetypal analysis, the forest as a space bereft of sunlight can be interpreted as embodying the duality of light-dark or conscious-unconscious. Protagonists, journeying and oftentimes lost within the forest, reveal their character traits and exit the forest with a deeper knowledge of themselves. It is only through encountering the ‘darker’ parts of ourselves, that we can move towards more enlightened ways of being. Just as trees shed their leaves, inviting sunlight onto the forest floor abundant with mycelial consciousness, peeling back our learned behaviours and beliefs cultivates deeper awareness of ourselves.
The idea of the forest as a representation of the ‘shadow’ side - the repressed elements of the unconscious mind - helps elucidate society’s values about morality and where power is situated. For Denver in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the forest is a sanctuary from the trauma of slavery: ‘closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver’s imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish’. The fictional forest is a subversive space; it represents the antithesis to ‘civilisation’. Twenty-first century capitalism organises society according to a hierarchy of monetary worth; meaning and purpose is constricted to maximising your individual economic value.
In this context the metaphor ‘Can’t see the forest from the trees’ takes on a new meaning. The focus on my individual tree makes it much harder to consider the collective woodland. Forests are an entangled web of trees and mycelium; capitalist societies are an enmeshment of structural inequalities. Completely antithetical to the Tree of Life, a lack of perspective of the wider system and deeper meaning enables the structures of violence and oppression to be reiterated. How did such a radical psychological reversal come to pass, and does it reflect reality?
‘Just as trees shed their leaves, inviting sunlight onto the forest floor abundant with mycelial consciousness, peeling back our learned behaviours and beliefs cultivates deeper awareness of ourselves’.
The Roots of Discordance
There are two major and interrelated historical narratives that profoundly influenced how we conceive of the forest: the production and control of ‘uncivilised’ populations and developed modes of living. Much of history has been determined by the need to define a sense of national identity or ‘self’ in comparison to the ‘other’. The forest, as a primitive and natural landscape, plays a key role in producing this difference.
In India during the colonial period, the forest was regarded as unyielding and stood in stark contrast to the domesticated and homogenised plantation. It was the ecological embodiment of the agency colonisers sought to erase in the Indian population. Reshaping the landscape and taming nature was an extension of the ‘civilising mission’ because it showed the Indian ‘savages’ that there was no place for them in modern society. In Holocaust Landscapes, Tim Cole devotes a chapter to the forest; documenting how it became a key refuge for thousands of Soviet soldiers and victims perpetrated by the Holocaust. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, the jungle became a critical battlefield for guerrilla resistance. The Vietcong used local knowledge about the land to avoid open conflict against the US, which proved instrumental in defeating the American army.
‘The forest embarrasses capitalism because its ecological flourishing and resilience exposes how vulnerable the economic system is to change, uncertainty and different ways of being. As spheres of resistance against the onslaught of violence accruing from the relentless surge of capitalist and colonial exploits, forests must be tamed, lest they undermine the entire endeavour’.
Since 2009, in the Brazilian Amazon there has been a proliferation of human rights abuses and over three hundred deaths of Indigenous peoples and environmentalists. These victims are part of the struggle against what Human Rights Watch terms the ‘Rainforest Mafia’, a criminal network of land grabbers and deforesters. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous rhetoric and ‘new frontier’ ambition demonstrates the pernicious psychological legacy of colonialism. Rather than choose to protect the Amazon as a site of cultural heritage and the lungs of the planet, Bolsonaro succumbed to pressure to emulate the Western development trajectory, compounded by Western demand for Brazilian agricultural products, and conceive of the Amazon as a barrier to capitalist expansion.
The forest defies the political hegemony of the West and is the antithesis of the principles of modernity. Capitalist societies and the forest are not binary opposites, but antithetical landscapes on the continuum of belonging. The forest is a place of cyclical time, relations of inclusivity and diversity, and value and success are measured in terms of utility and adaptive capacity. Capitalist societies are founded on linear time, hierarchical and exclusionary relations, and value is measured in reductive, monetary terms. The forest embarrasses capitalism because its ecological flourishing and resilience exposes how vulnerable the economic system is to change, uncertainty and different ways of being. As spheres of resistance against the onslaught of violence accruing from the relentless surge of capitalist and colonial exploits, forests must be tamed, lest they undermine the entire endeavour. How close are we to capitalism realising this ambition?
‘The more metaphysically uprooted I feel, the greater the impetus to materially ground myself through unnecessary consumption. As I become increasingly entangled in the shallow, invasive roots of capitalism, the meaningful and sacred teachings of the Tree of Life are foregone’.
Anthropogenic Appropriation
The story of human history is intimately tethered to the environment in which it unfolds. During the Holocene, humans altered their surroundings and sometimes had such an impact as to push another species into extinction or render a landscape unrecognisable. However, our current epochal juncture - the Anthropocene - is distinct in regards to the rate and scale of destruction.
The United Nations Environment Programme reported that since 1990, 420 million hectares of forest have been converted to other land uses. Though the rate of deforestation has decreased in the past three decades, 10 million hectares are still being lost annually. In the Amazon, between August 2021 and July 2022, an area equivalent to the size of Qatar was cleared. In light of the loss of most of America’s old growth forest, Paul Stamets has advocated defending these landscapes as a matter of national security: ‘remnants of old growth forests are genomic libraries that must be protected’.
As well as providing an abundance of anthropogenic benefits, forests weave ecosystems together and harbour most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. They contain 80% of amphibian species, 75% of bird species, and 68% of mammals. Some studies have suggested that 2.3 million species depend on single tree. For instance, a mature Oak tree can support 280 species of insects. In both the macrocosm and microcosm, trees are a locus for biodiversity and the flourishing of life.
Poor stewardship therefore results in the unravelling of entire ecosystems. For example, monocultures of almond trees are breeding places for disease and directly linked to colony collapse amongst bees. The increasing salience of extreme forest fires is directly linked to human fire suppression. Many Australian forest ecosystems are naturally fire resistant, however during the Australian ‘Black Summer’ of 2019-20202, over 24 million hectares (roughly the size of the UK) burnt. Whereas Aboriginal Australians actively encouraged low-intensity fires, colonialism and persistent drought has markedly reduced the capacity for fire-resistant trees to cope.
As well as direct human interference, the indirect effects of anthropogenic climate change have an equally devastating impact on trees. In autumn, trees store residual chlorophyl (the chemical that makes them green) for the following spring. The remaining yellow and brown pigments signal their health to predatory insects, compelling them to seek out less colourful trees to shelter and raise their offspring in. After periods of prolonged drought, trees have less energy to follow this process, making them more susceptible to invasive species.
Historically, when faced with these kinds of threats, successive generations of trees have migrated. The occurrence of a change in the environment which a seedling isn’t adapted to - for instance, a drought or pest - means the seeds that survive are those that were dispersed further afield. If this trend persists, the forest will gradually migrate. However, the speed at which anthropogenic disruptions are accruing does not afford trees the opportunity to uproot. For instance, the Red Spruce trees in New England - a species that has survived in Northern America for 20,000 years - is predicted to be gone by the late twenty-first century.
As the climate crisis unfolds before our eyes, we bear witness to the destruction of a self-regenerative and cyclical arboreal space-time. The temporal longevity of trees positions them as harbingers of humanity's relationship with nature. A veteran tree physically anchors us to history, helping root us spatially and temporally. For each tree felled or lost due to poor stewardship, capitalism advances in the attritional culture war it is waging against humanity’s need for meaning and connection to the lived environment.
‘A veteran tree physically anchors us to history, helping root us spatially and temporally’.
Capitalist Encroachment
The implications of this can be witnessed in the central paradox of environmental law. As a discipline, environmental law seeks to redress the harms done unto the natural world by human activity. However, it is founded on the assumption that humans are separate from nature, which puts human development needs in contention with ecological conservation ethics. This has made it susceptible to capture by economic rationale, which posits itself as objective and effective at distributing resources. Thus, the very logic that causes environmental degradation is deemed to be the solution.
In the context of the climate crisis, trees have been reimagined as ‘carbon offsetting’ schemes. Theoretically, trees are conceived in anthropocentric terms: their evolutionary history and ingenuity is reduced, and they become objects facilitating the continued extractive modes of capitalist accumulation. This further severs our connection to nature; the sentience and intelligence of trees is denied, and we forget our fleeting temporality in epochal history, instead fixating on the present. Practically, this ill-conceived framing pushes us further towards ecological catastrophe, as demonstrated by the epic failures of so many ‘carbon-offsetting’ tree planting schemes.
“Remnants of old growth forests are genomic libraries that must be protected.”
How might we reimagine our environmental laws and stewardship ethic? In a seminal paper, Should Trees Have Standing?, Christopher Stone proposed a rights-based framework that enables guardians to represent nature’s interests in court. One of the central imbalances in law is the issue that corporations and states have standing (i.e. their interests are recognised) whereas nature does not. Examples of where nature has been granted legal standing are the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia which recognise the rights of Pachamama, and legislation in India and New Zealand granting legal rights to rivers. Following the COP15 Biodiversity Summit, nations agreed to protect 30% of their land for nature by 2030. At best this is an imperfect piece of legislation, notably because it is not legally binding, however it represents a tentative step in the right direction.
Laws and economics, oftentimes appearing abstract and detached from reality, are determined by public sentiment and demand. Public opinion played a crucial role in the 2008 Climate Change Act, and can do so for post-Brexit environmental laws. The UK government has pledged to build a Nature Recovery Network, linking pockets of English nature together in a coherent network and rewilding landscapes. Everyone occupies a particular niche in the cultural ecosystem, but through forging synergistic connections we can turn the tide in favour of a society that recognises the intrinsic value of nature; regarding it equally, or higher, than the economy.
Re-Rooting Ourselves Within Nature
Our co-existence with trees teaches us many things. Human knowledge and beliefs are transient, but one eternal is the ecological wisdom we are embedded within. The entanglement of different systems and myriad ways of being suggests reality is much more complex than we can hope to comprehend. Being aware of the subjectivities in our worldviews and limits to our knowledge can be liberating. Sometimes accepting the unknown can help us derive greater meaning. This is a radical act in a culture that is fixated upon proof and materialism.
‘Forests are an entangled web of trees and mycelium; capitalist societies are an enmeshment of structural inequalities’.
The forest invites us to consider the violence capitalism does to humanity and the natural world. By creating a system that seeks to tame the natural world, we have unwittingly facilitated the emergence of an untameable institution that threatens the existence of all life on earth. The exploitation of trees unravels ecosystems and denies nature’s self-regenerative ingenuity. Moreover, it imposes a dichotomy between humans and nature, creating a hierarchy of being devoid of meaning and diversity. In the process, our spatial-temporal horizons fixate upon the present and we are uprooted from place.
The wisdom of trees teaches us there are many more languages and lenses than the sterile discourses of economic rationality and legal reasoning. Through deep empathetic learning and listening, we can create space for a more diverse conversation and relinquish hierarchical relations in favour of kinship. By doing so this brings greater opportunities for aligning our behaviour more synergistically with our arboreal kin, founded on the ethic of reciprocity that our ancestors knew so intimately. Trees produce the most elemental parts for life on earth; we must treat them accordingly.
This is no easy task in the age of the Great Unravelling, it makes bearing witness to the the violence inflicted upon natural world more painful. However, in a culture so utterly devoid of meaning, it metaphysically roots us to a sense of purpose that transcends the shallow roots of capitalism.
