Resurrection

Despite Dutch Elm Disease, there are a few elms around the reserve. There is one large one and, in the area around Kairos, many "suckers". They grow to a certain height, get infected, and die. But the root system produces more suckers. There is a kind of immortality conferred by this process of regeneration.

I was thinking about how to think-with-a-tree when thinking about sentience. If sentience means feeling, as in an emotional response, I am not sure if that's right... sentience about sensing, however, makes sense (!).

Let's imagine we cut the top off a young tree. The area immediately around the wound senses and responds, sending out resin or sap to prevent infestation. The roots might sense a change of weight or balance. And a change in water pressure? In the growing season, as there were now no leaf bearing branches, the tree would produce many shoots around the top. All this would be expensive for the tree, perhaps, but it might be of limited "shock" if this were done during the dormant period. But the need to heal and so on might be a negative consequence. It might be "bad" for the tree, having to use up resources. And yet, this is pollarding, which actually revitalises trees and can render them, like the sucker system above, very long-lived. So, it might be "good" for the tree.

I am assuming there is not pain. And I think that because of the distributed thinking and doing of trees. I think pain is about alerting the part of the system that determines stuff about a whole being, but where intelligence is distributed and so is action, maybe only that part needs to know? the other parts deal with how the change impacts them, if it does.

And, I thought, this way of thinking might map on to thinking about a woodland too. An area where a (normal) fire has swept through, or where humans have coppiced, or whatever... that might be costly in the short term, revitalising in the longer term. Only the creatures and plants affected need to know. There is not pain.

And where there is death, it offers opportunities... and its own beauty.

This one below is an oak that has pretty well succumbed to Acute Oak Decline.