COMMENT | COMMUNITY
JAN, THE TOY LADY, HAS NOTICED THAT SUMMER HAS ARRIVED WITH ITS CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS AND, UNFORTUNATELY, WILDFIRES: Construction vehicles from Bruder and Tonka? Yes, we have them too!
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Trees are the protagonists, who provide us with everything: medicine, oxygen, sustenance, shade, raw materials — in essence, life.
Tangled Roots We are an infinitesimal but interconnected part of this grand old evolutionary arc BY INGA LAURENT
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hile teaching in Italy this summer, I got a little lost. In the humid, viridescent Tuscan hills, time altered its rhythm. My fingers brushed a cool piece of stone in Il Duomo di Siena and suddenly years stopped making sense. Objectively, I knew that the cathedral’s construction took place between its commission in 1196 until its completion in the 1300s, but my mind simply could not grasp the meaning of centuries. My hand had touched what millions of others had also once felt, and our lives merged together through time. I was all awe and wonder about those others — their heartaches, joys, sorrows and daily woes. History’s rope had intricately woven past lives into my present, which will eventually become my past in another’s future. Individual story is illusive, succumbing to the only thing that can remain intact over millennia — collective narrative. From this perspective, any action but global synergistic allegiance seems ludicrous and laughable. Why is our sole purpose not to live in daily devotion to the pursuit of shared societal advancement? Then on the flight home, I read about trees. Time altered again. In Overstory, Richard Powers preaches the gospel of our endangered greens by
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centering them in chapter and verse: “Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds.” Trees are the protagonists, who provide us with everything: medicine, oxygen, sustenance, shade, raw materials — in essence, life. I read that they communicate and coordinate: “Trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. … There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events.” They protect: “We found that trees take care of each other… trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. A forest knows things.” They adapt: “The planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.” And they even sing: “The Redwoods do strange things. They hum.” Trees are a part of us: “You and the tree in
