LUNA;
REALITY SNEAKS IN AGAIN.
The story goes that during a tree-sitting vigil in the US a woman in a Coastal Redwood near a clear-felling operation was drenched in large quantities of sap by the tree, now called Luna, as the logging continued. She felt, understandably, that the tree was reacting to the felling, and the sap was a display of grief. She reported a mental contact from the tree, which isn’t a great leap of reason if you accept grief as a reaction from it.
This is one of those situations whereby it doesn’t matter what you think of it, there are a lot of questions to answer. Facts don’t need human opinions to be facts.
Please excuse a clinical approach, but the reason for it will become apparent. I’m a horticulturalist, as well as a verb grinder, and I do have some questions.
Science has a few issues here:
It will be seen from the above that these are not simple issues, even from the most conservative conventional view of a tree as an organism. Even the most enthusiastic believer or skeptic is confronted with a physical fact.
Pre-conditions for the event require the tree to interact in some way with its community. There were enough trees around to make it a viable commercial operation, so some degree of large scale physical association was definitely occurring.
Let’s move on from the unknown to the known.
It should also be noted that trees in groves by definition tend to cooperate to the extent of forming territories. Oaks routinely exclude other trees, for example, and their growth habit protects them from incursions by other species because of their joint actions in shading their areas and monopolizing the ground with their root systems. This is a tricky relationship, because for the grove to be viable all of the trees have to be able to get enough nutrients. Not all plants do well in direct competition with their own species, but those that do are highly successful plants. Pines are the classic natural example.
So there’s nothing particularly unusual about a community of trees. It is a territorial behavior, in the most literal sense. Communal living is a sign of social animals, why not social plants?
There are a lot of chemical actions involved in being a tree, and for a big tree the amount of material involved is in the range of many tons. Materials necessary for the tree to survive at all include minerals, like potassium, magnesium, phosphorous, etc. Most of this material is however water. The vast majority of the actions involved in the tree are water based. No water, no movement of nutrients, no osmosis. Water is also present in the soil, forming a unifying medium, along with soil, in a grove. Trees share water in groves. They extract minerals and transport them with water. (You’d never guess I was a horticulturalist, would you?)
So much for the obvious.
A few other characteristics of water and minerals are worth a look at this point.
So if you look at a tree in terms of energy usage, you find a very well-organized entity indeed.
This is highly relevant to Luna. The redwoods are an ancient, highly evolved species. They’ve been around a lot longer than humanity. They are a peak in plant evolution, in the same sense that whales, ants, and humans are top of the pile in their phylums. It needs to be emphasized that this is a far from simple organism we’re dealing with.
Far less complex plants have reactions to predation. Others have symbiotic relationships, also very highly evolved responses to their needs. Plants, in short, do most of the things animals do. They just do them differently. There are predator plants, parasite plants, colonizing plants. They are the most efficient users of sunlight, the best users of minerals.
The redwoods are at the top of the plant social scale. Given the way they grow and develop, it is reason able to consider that redwoods probably have more than enough energy available at any time to have less obvious attributes.
Energy usage defines an organism. The more energy in a biological system, the more potential for organic action. Whether the organism uses starches and/or proteins, the amount of energy available dictates the functional capacities of the organism.
Human energy consumption and usage is very different from all other animals. We eat a far wider variety of foods than other animals and we get different types of materials from them for a diverse repertoire of uses. Therefore our energy usage makes us different.
It’s not unreasonable to believe that amounts of energy dictate a different form of life in another way. Elephants are quite unlike other mammals in their behavior. They’re very large animals, and they have a totally unique grazing and communal style, which works very much to their advantage. The elephants run their own ecology, too, and their grazing habits dictate growth in their ranges. Nobody’s questioned their intelligence since the earliest attempts to study it.
Redwoods are possibly the plant equivalent of elephants. Very advanced, big, able to process gigantic quantities of material to the extent that they dictate and structure their environment. All living things have stores of reserve energy. Not many have the sort of quantities available to a redwood. As mentioned, this material exists largely in the form of water. Big amounts of dissolved mineral salts are also distributed throughout the plants’ organization.
So; what happens when you have large amounts of energy present in a living process? All forms of energy do something. Most forms which are acquired by living things are acquired for a reason. The presence of large amounts of active materials describes a very active organism. We may not think of trees as active in the sense of animal life, but that’s more of an indictment of our perspective than an appraisal of potential uses of energy.
Ma Nature doesn’t mess about. Either an organism functions, or it dies. The natural preference is to the better use of energy, and it really is that simple. It is fair to believe that redwoods are as successful as they are because of their energy usages.
Few other plants have managed to achieve anything near their size. They’ve outlived many other species, through cataclysmic periods in Earth’s history. For super-big organisms, that’s pretty hard to do; few large animals survived the Ice Age, and none previously survived the Cretaceous. The old giant plants generally died out with the dinosaurs, and the angiosperms wiped out a lot of habitat formerly used by the older species. The redwoods have seen a lot of competition come and go.
The redwood is not, therefore, an evolutionary neophyte. It is probably the most highly evolved mega flora left on Earth. For all those millions of years, it’s been sitting on reserves of energy. This is good survival practice; don’t starve.
Energy, however, is rarely passive. In living things energy can’t be entirely passive, anyway, even in relative dormancy. Fat, in humans, is stored energy. Try and clean fat off anything; it’s very chemically active. Similarly, water ions are far from passive. One of the most basic forms of energy is the water ion. Nothing living on Earth could exist without it. Trees certainly couldn’t. If you have huge amounts of electrical potentials, shared in identical ways, situated in a grove, sharing a conductor in the form of soils and water, what do you get?
The honest answer is that I don’t know what you get, at least, not as a word. A “shared biochemical entity”? Not a very efficient description in many ways, or great logic. A circuit board, comprised of thousands of giant trees? Not a lot better, if pretty mind boggling.
Sounds a bit simple, doesn’t it? Is it likely that all that would happen over all that time is that a few electrons would move between trees? What if the trees found other uses for their energy, other than just letting the Cambium layer grow?
For example, trees are foragers. Every plant on Earth goes actively looking for water, and it finds it, using ions. They don’t just stick their roots into the ground and hope. If you’re a big tree, you can be very efficient doing that. Actually, you have to be efficient doing that.
What if all this biochemical energy created a mutual relationship between trees, at the simplest physical level? Water reacts to water. Like water droplets, they tend to draw together. Remember we’re talking about thousands of tons of water in a redwood grove. Enough to overcome gravity, in terms of mutual attraction, perhaps?
Since the trees don’t move, the water can’t flow freely. But the interaction is set up. Through that, electrical potentials can move; electricity can jump between conductors. It happens in our synapses every second, literally, every movement, potentially huge numbers of interactions. The human equivalent of the spark plug, the nervous transmission system. You couldn’t leave home without it.
So a physical reaction between the trees is created. Given that this must first have happened several million years ago, the physical relationships must have developed considerably. Energy usage tends to improve over generations. Modern plants are more advanced and efficient than their predecessors. Bear in mind the redwoods’ original ancestors were single celled algae. The development of living things tends to be a bit dramatic over time. Several million years of electrical usage, if present, would be no minor adaption. We’ve only had electricity for 140 or so years.
Before discussing any psychic phenomena[1] regarding trees, a few facts about electricity and the human brain:
It should be noted, however, that the result is the defining manifestation of human intelligence, not the thing that produces it. If you can get the same result with a simpler method, why not? If all you have to do to have a brain-equivalent is toss your electrical energies around, why have a sort of organic neuro-opera to do it if you don’t need one? An organism which doesn’t need specialized organs to think is a lot more advanced. Certainly more cost efficient in terms of use of materials.
Another clinical aside; what use is it to a tree to have consciousness? Living things, except people, don’t usually develop useless characteristics. Use of a physical environment is made a lot more efficient by adaptions of some sort. Physical adaption to exploit an environment is the primary form of species development, and it’s usually based on need. In plants, an extreme example of use of the natural environment are the pyrogenes, like pines, or eucalypts. In these species, the seed case literally has to be incinerated for the seed to germinate. The incineration also supplies a lot of potash and other nutrients, and clears out competitors. A real danger is now an asset. Result, two of the most successful species of trees in the world.
So, if you’re a tree, adding an opportunistic ability to exploit new terrain isn’t a bad idea. Nature promotes those that can overcome adversity. That still doesn’t tell me what advantage it is to a tree, functionally, to be conscious. Awareness supposedly means an organism uses its environment better. Trees and other plants are already experts at use of their environment. The root system of a large tree is a ferocious scavenger of elements it needs. It doesn’t need to be conscious any more than a human intestine, although it does as mentioned use a built-in search methodology. Hardly definitive proof of a need for consciousness.
I don’t know what an intelligent tree might do with its intellect. Whatever it might be, I doubt if anthropomorphic values are likely to understand it. Therefore I’m not going to claim to know on what basis a plant becomes sentient. Maybe an organism with a potential brain mass bigger than several thousand people has its own reasons. Maybe they’ve got a lot of thinking to do.
To me what matters far more is whether we as a species have the guts to ask these questions, and make any sort of real effort to answer them. We have direct evidence of a totally unsuspected biological ability on the part of an organism bigger than a whale. (Actually, if a whale started bleeding like that, with no injury to it, we’d have a world wide study going within minutes). We have a proven phenomenon which is in direct contradiction of botanic science. We have a circumstantial event which just isn’t explicable according to existing theory. It’s an impossibility, and it happened. That’s interesting enough, psychic phenomena or not. What are we going to do about it?
One possible explanation of the shedding of sap is the shared-pressure theory, that the trees were interconnected, and that cutting down the other trees caused a massive change in pressure, which expelled sap from Luna. Fine, except there isn’t any mechanism on the tree except the pores on the leaves to do that with, and they’re very grudging about releasing water, let alone an oily sap. They also don’t expel much water, and then only as vapor. Large quantities of sap would have ruptured the plant, theoretically. There would be massive vascular damage. Osmosis isn’t a fire hose process; there isn’t the capacity for that sort of pressure. The entire plant is structured to make sure that catastrophic losses of material don’t happen.
That’s exactly how far out of the ball park this bit of information is. I’m also not inclined to dispute the veracity of another person’s subjective mental experience. That’s not for reasons of political correctness, but because I am inclined to believe that this was a particularly traumatic experience, and that a person’s awareness is greatly heightened under such circumstances. I don’t feel qualified to tell someone what their perceptions were, or rationalize them on the basis of theories which don’t fit any of the available facts. I wouldn’t walk up to a person with a broken leg and tell them how they felt, either.
It’s a yes/no scenario. The claim of psychic contact with a plant has been made; if correct, we have to reassess our entire relationship with the planet and everything on it, on a personal level. Do we really believe we’re able to do that? If so, why? What in human experience leads us to believe we’re able to make such a major shift in perspective? Since when are we so interested in facts? This is maybe where we climb out of the bassinet. About bloody time, too.
[1] (Groan; you can hear the professional skeptics from miles away. Just for the record, thinking is a psychic phenomenon, and only marketing people dispute that humans can think).