The Trees Don’t Care About Us
Silent observers of our lives, trees are on most peoples’ radar only at moments of transition or death: We mark springtime’s budding and autumn’s flamboyance, note somberly the tree felled by a storm or by the tiny, ravenous ash borer. Although emblematic of nature, they nevertheless are seen with the goggles of our human-centered vision, and thus barely seen at all.
With a rush of popular fiction and nonfiction on the sociality of trees, we are starting to recognize the extent of what we’re missing. Whether the simplest details—the plain fact of their presence more below ground than above it—or the awareness of their constant inter-arboreal communications, trees have officially entered our contemporary awareness as more than just a background to our human dramas.
Trees and tree colonies—including an 80,000-year-old grove of aspens in
