With What Mouths Could These Trees Talk?

Spruce trees, a solar eclipse, quantum entanglement, and the loneliness of capitalism

Photo by Ben Lockwood

Maybe you've seen the headlines–a new study finds that trees talk to each other. News sites tripping over themselves to write things like "the forest talked before an eclipse", or "during an eclipse old trees shared intel with young trees", or even "evidence of a living collective of forest communication". Stories of trees sharing the secrets of deep time are spreading like fibrous root systems through your drainpipes and I'm here to tell you that none of them are true, and that such stories only reflect an empty, inhuman loneliness.

First, though, the study. As I mentioned, it's been generating a lot of buzz in the media, getting covered by places like Discover Magazine and The Conversation. It's also been getting a lot of criticism, so it's worth spending a few words to clarify what’s going on.

The research was conducted by a group of scientists working in the Dolomite Mountain region of Italy. Think high peaks and karsts and places where if trees did have something to say, maybe it would be in strange, unrecognizable words.

To test this–sort of, anyway–the researchers analyzed changes in tree physiology during a 2022 solar eclipse (when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun). The researchers used specialized equipment to monitor the bioelectrical signals of spruce trees during the eclipse, then analyzed these signals at the individual tree and group levels. They used the data to quantify the degree to which the responses were synchronized and reveal the form of the synchronization.

So, what did they find from this analysis? A couple of things. First, they found that at the individual level, trees did appear to respond to the eclipse, exhibiting bioelectrical changes that were different from their typical patterns. Specifically, the trees showed reductions in bioelectrical potentials, or in other words, a reduction in how much energy would be required to move the charge between the two points on the instrumental probes they used to measure the signal in the trees.

Second, when they looked at the trees collectively, they found high degrees of asymmetry and variation in how they responded. The trees did all seem to exhibit some response, but that response differed at the individual level. These two results are, essentially, the whole of what the researchers found, and it seems reasonable enough on the surface. In fact one could argue that it would have been, if not for the claims the authors made about what they found. So let's take these one at a time.

The first claim, which is that at the individual level the trees exhibited responses, seems accurate. Now, it's not exactly clear what a "bioelectrical response" means, and the authors only provide some vague guesses, but I'll come back to that shortly. For now, we can say that the evidence they provided seems to support this first claim.

The second finding the authors claimed was that the trees acted collectively, in terms of their bioelectrical responses. This claim is harder to accept based on the evidence they provided. What they show in their results is a large amount of variation in how the trees responded. This means that the trees they measured were not all responding in the same way or in similar magnitudes. To me, that suggests the trees were not acting collectively during the eclipse, but rather that individual responses were more evident than collective ones.

Lastly, and this is where the paper really stretches the imagination, the authors claimed that the collective responses (which I just argued don't exist) represent a “quantum entanglement” (their words, not mine) between trees, which in turn reflects the synchronized, communicative, and cooperative nature of the forest itself. They claim that the forest is, in fact, its own singular organism responding systematically and collectively to the sun's disappearance, all the trees chanting in unison at the night of the day blanketing the planet in darkness. Or maybe the forest was screaming.

Let's not take these claims at face value, though, because there's reasons to be skeptical. One major reason is that the study's sample size was three trees. That's it, three total trees. Even worse, the trees were at different sites, creating confounding factors. So, not only was the sample size extraordinarily low, it also didn't contain any replicate samples from the different sites. The authors used this incredibly small sample to make wild claims about trees and forests in general, despite that we know there are probably trillions of trees on the planet.

Did you know that Jeff Bezos’s net worth is over 200 billion dollars? He owns the Washington Post, and yet a subscription there can cost you as much as $170 a year. A paid subscription to Brief Ecology is only $5 a month, or $50 for the whole year. And it’s produced entirely by me, using an e-bike, a laptop, and a camera. No billionaires involved here.

Another issue is that it's entirely unclear what these bioelectrical responses mean, or correspond to. It seems likely that they're simply the result of some other, underlying ecophysiological mechanism, which the authors should have measured instead. We can measure trees’ photosynthesis rates, internal water transport, and many other things. Choosing a vague metric like "bioelectrical responses" is incredibly unusual, but may not surprising for physicists trying to do ecology.

Which brings me to my last criticism, which is that there are plenty of evolutionary and ecological reasons that trees might respond similarly to an eclipse. Plants have evolved to rely on sunlight, thus they are remarkably sensitive to changes in light availability, particularly at specific wavelengths. We already know that changes in plant photosynthesis processes begin before the sun gets to the horizon, because the angle at which the radiation is coming from changes throughout the day, changing the wavelength proportions of light, all of which plants respond to, different species to different degrees. Genetics and ecology can perfectly explain it without resorting to quantumly entangled tree-forest organisms talking to each other.

But we see what we want to see in nature, don’t we? Those who want to dominate others see a battleground, a competitive nature red in tooth and claw, and they use it to justify their own aggression. We've modeled our capitalist society on this assumption, that nature is intrinsically competitive and individualistic. As such, we feel justified in our domination of nature and each other, to the point that every aspect of our lives is monetized so that someone can accumulate wealth from it. This leaves us feeling hollow, empty, and alone. So now we seek a different nature, one that is cooperative and collective and based on community, because these are characteristics our society lacks.

We tell ourselves elaborate stories about the wisdom of nature. We devour books like The Hidden Life of Trees and The Overstory, escapist fantasies meant to absolve us of society's sins. But if trees could talk, would we want to know what they have to say? What would we say to them when we're cutting them down? Could we be trusted to communicate with them responsibly? I think not. I think we'd turn away from their suffering, if they expressed it. I think we'd point to their cursing of us and say look, they hate us, they deserve it. I think we'd lie to them about our true intentions when we enter the forest.

Photo by Ben Lockwood

Of course, this framing is false. The point is that nature actually is competitive and ruthless. It's also cooperative and mutualistic. There are examples of all types of interactions in nature, enough to fit any worldview. Which suits us well when we pick and choose aspects of nature to model our violent politics on, and then, when society leaves us broken and alienated, we search in a non-human nature for what makes us human.

It's all backwards and upside down. The nature that produced our species was diverse and complex. Humans arose from an evolutionary tapestry of biodiversity, and what makes us distinct from every other species is our abilities to act cooperatively, to exert our agency, to coordinate, to think temporally and spatially, and to plan accordingly. We do this to such an incredible degree that we produce societies, wildly complex groupings of humans with culture and art and intellectual development. We are a social species. These are the characteristics society should be based upon.

What I'm taking a lot of words to say is that trees are not humans. They are not conscious and they don't talk. What we're looking for in nature is what we already have; our own consciousness. We won't find human nature in the non-human, and we don't need to twist the non-human into something human.