THERE ARE A LOT OF HUMANS. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves onto a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins - it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought.
And yet, humans are not Earth's chief occupants. Trees are. There are 3tn of them, with a collective biomass thousands of times that of humanity. But although they are the preponderant beings on Earth - outnumbering us by nearly 400 to one - they're easy to miss. Show someone a photograph of a forest with a doe peeking out from behind a maple and ask what they see. "A deer," they'll exclaim, as if the green matter occupying most of the frame were mere scenery. "Plant blindness" is the name for this. It describes the many who can distinguish hybrid dog breeds yet cannot identify an apple tree.
Admittedly, trees do not draw our attention. Apart from plopping the occasional fruit upon the head of a pondering physicist, they achieve little that is of narrative interest. They are "sessile" - the botanist's term meaning incapable of locomotion. Books about trees often have a sessile quality, too; they are informative yet aimless affairs, heavy on serenity, light on plot.
Or, at least, they were until recently. The German forester Peter Wohlleben's surprise bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees (published in English in 2016), has inaugurated a new tree discourse, which sees them not as inert objects but intelligent subjects. Trees have thoughts and desires, Wohlleben writes, and they converse via fungi that connect their roots "like fibre-optic internet cables". The same idea pervades The Overstory, Richard Powers' celebrated 2018 novel, in which a forest scientist upends her field by demonstrating that fungal connections "link trees into gigantic, smart communities".
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 03, 2024 من The Guardian Weekly.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 03, 2024 من The Guardian Weekly.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Moving Back To Moscow: How Dream Of Freedom Unravelled
The army of riot police had finally retreated from Tbilisi's Rustaveli Avenue, the broad thoroughfare in front of the parliament building, back into the barricaded parliamentary estate.
News Of Raisi's Death Met With Fireworks And Few Tears
Activists in Iran have said there is little mood to mourn the death of the president, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash near the border with Azerbaijan on Sunday.
Red Flag? Alito Scandal Casts Doubt On Supreme Court Impartiality
With less than six months to go before America chooses its next president, the US supreme court finds itself in an unenviable position: not only has it been drawn into a volatile election, but swirling ethical scandals have cast doubt on its impartiality.
Infected blood Final report vindicates the families still awaiting justice
\"We have been gaslit for generations,\" was the reaction of Andy Evans, chair of the campaign group Tainted Blood, in response to the final report into the contaminated blood scandal, which was published on Monday.
The race to evacuate Vovchansk's remaining residents
Rescue operations ever more dangerous as fighting reaches Kharkiv townat the centre of Russia’s latest offensive
Alice Munro 1931 -2024
The Nobel prize winner whose masterly accounts of ordinary lives in smalltown Canada elevated the short story into the highest form of literature
Creativity takes root
From Nikide Saint Phalle's Tuscan Tarot Garden to Barbara Hepworth's coastal oasis, artists’ green spaces are about somuch more than plants
Tory war on overseas students is all about saving their own skins
A key turning point in British politics was Tony Blair's famous priorities: \"education, education, education\".
Catalans once longed for freedom, but it doesn't look so appealing now
For the first time since 1980, parties opposing Catalonia's independence from Spain have the support of a majority of voters in the region.
I believe that Ricky's law has saved lives, it has changed lives, restored families'
Ricky Klausmeyer-Garcia’s friends struggled to get him addiction treatment, leading to the creation of alawin his name. Buta year after his death, profound questions remain about how best to help those with substance use disorder in the US.