What trees survive!!
And how... magisterial they can be!
I came across this the other day: apparently for some Native American tribes, a tree is seen as a "pansemiotic web of cosmic meaning". What that means, I think, is that a tree represents all of life, all the workings of the cosmos, in a way that can be understood by all different beings. It's not as strange as it sounds - well, it may be to us, but nearly all ancient traditions venerated trees. The Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, the Tree of Knowledge, sacred groves, the World Tree, the banyan tree...
They seem to be the conduit between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the corporeal.
When I listen to trees, I mean with my ear against them, and it's windy, I can hear the sound of all the wood movement channeled through the trunk. That low frequency sound travels better through solids than through air. Think of elephant rumbles - the vibrations picked up by the feet of other elephants many miles away.
It struck me that elephants must also hear the sound of the trees on a windy day.
Then I thought, what else hears? Everything in the earth... coral larvae - basically a cell with cilia - know the sound of a healthy coral reef and when they hear that sound in the vastness of the ocean, they swim toward it. The soil too is louder - with the pops and crackles and squeaks of life - when it is rich in biodiversity - hence soil acoustics offer an index of the health of the soil. Where there are noises, there are beings who hear. Do roots, like coral larvae, move toward noisier soil?
Do the soil fungi hear the health of trees through the vibrations on a windy day? I know that dead branches sound different through the trunk. Do soil fungi hear the wind?
There is a theory that the mycorrhizal fungi impact the weather as their spores seed clouds. Forests certainly impact weather - and not just raid through the chemicals emitted by trees, but the wind too.
What if forests need to know the weather to control it?
If they do, what if forests are cut down or unhealthy or lacking in mycorrhizal fungi or full of non-native trees that make unfamiliar sounds?
What if we need trees to hear and understand the atmosphere properly if they are best to impact if?
I can't get rid of the damn italics.
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