Do trees get lonely?

I have just started listening to The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence. Already, I love it.

He wonders if trees get lonely, saying that they are social beings. The exchange of nutrients through fungal systems, the way they communicate through hormones.

Talking of fungal systems... I think he was suggesting that fairy rings may be where the underground fungal systems are still in place though the tree has gone. They are ghost trees.

There was this section, on Scots pine, where he said that when they are metabolising, the trees give off so much... something... that it reflects sunlight. Other trees then know where they are and so they don't grow into the space.... the trees form these five sided tessellations.

And again, I am thrown back into why moral standing is dependent on sentience. Christ, or even on LIFE. A dead tree supports more life than a living one, according to Rawlence. It her life, the 'granny' pine soaked up CO2, exhaled oxygen, housed and fed thousands (millions?) of other plants and animals - and she's as great when she's dead! And yet we can't find a way to 'justify' why she matters. Why her corpse matters... Well, we can say she has 'instrumental' value.

I was thinking about Aristotle who goes through this process of reasoning in the Nicomachean Ethics to prove that happiness (flourishing - eudaimonia) is the most important thing, the ultimate good. Basically, we seek fame to be happy, money to be happy but happiness for itself.

And, well, this is like the reverse thing... a human needs to breathe, to have water and to eat. Plant roots filter water that falls as rain. Trees help cause rain. Trees and plants create soil - after the initial work done by mosses and lichens. Plants create oxygen.... what I am saying is that it all comes back to the damn PLANTS. Just like it all goes forward to the happiness. Even to have a chance at happiness, we need the plants and yet they do not merit intrinsic value??? If anything has intrinsic value, it's plants.

Plus, the dead things. I'm trying to work out how to say that maybe what is most important is NOT how any sentient being feels. Or whether any life form flourishes. But whether each thing, being, whatever, plays a role in negative entropy. I think that if there is a 'view from nowhere' that would be all that counted to it. That's why it may be as 'good' to be eaten by wolves as it is to scamper off. In fact, it's better to be eaten by wolves than to prevent a forest from living by munching all the saplings.

Enough rambling. More reading.