Last night I was listening to plant scientist Monica Gagliano, who is pushing the boundaries of what we know about plants. She proved that plants respond to the sound of water by moving toward it; they cannot be tricked by a machine that plays water sounds. Bio-acoustics is the study of sound and Monica is researching other ways that plants communicate.

We know they use chemical messengers to warn each other above ground and below through the mycelial network, thanks to the work of Suzanne Simard, who I shall discuss in a moment. We have also learned that plants emit electrical impulses above and below ground. But Monica is studying another way that plants communicate. She says they listen to all the plants around them and learn from each other so that they do not have to reinvent the wheel with each generation.

In one amazing memory experiment, mimosa plants taught her that plants remember what happened to them when they were dropped (!) and don’t repeat their mistakes. The Mind of Plants was her first book. She also studied with Indigenous healers in the Amazon and discusses this mysterious and compelling journey in her latest book Thus Spoke the Plants.

Suzanne Simard discovered that trees communicate above and below ground through complex mycelial networks, favor their kin, and transfer nutrients, water, and carbon back and forth between broadleaf trees that photosynthesize most efficiently during the summer months. They share their food with conifers in the fall when the two types of trees reverse the process and the conifers feed the deciduous trees.

Needled conifers photosynthesize for much longer periods (though less efficiently). Trees in a forest live in community and the emphasis is on the health of the forest and not the individual tree or plant. Competition does exist (why do detractors focus on this aspect?), but overall, the forest works as a sentient living being with an eye on the survival of the whole.

The moment a tree falls, it begins to nourish other trees and plants on the forest floor. Walk through any forest that hasn’t been logged for a while and you will be amazed at the ground covers, seedlings, mosses, and lichens that spring from one old stump. One fallen log can become a nursery for a whole row of seedlings.

After writing a memoir that every human should read, Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne founded the 100-year Mother Tree Project that focuses on long-term intergenerational tree research, incorporating her graduate student as assistants (some of whom are now scientists as well). In Suzanne’s words, “The Mother Tree project is investigating forest renewal practices that will protect biodiversity, carbon storage, and forest regeneration as climate changes.

This field-based research compares various retention levels of Mother Trees (large, old trees) and their neighbors, as well as regenerating seedling mixtures, in Douglas-fir forests located across nine climatic regions in British Columbia”. Suzanne has both eyes focused on the future… What she says elsewhere is that this project is in its infancy and will extend well beyond her lifetime.

A laudable contribution like this one creates hope for the next generation and for the future of this planet. I believe that someday this research will be taken seriously enough to change the current Forestry practices, as well as the dominant paradigm (both parts of the same problem).

Suzanne, who began her life as a logger and comes from a family of loggers, has also been working with Indigenous peoples, most of whom are professionals. She discovered that what she learned about trees as a child ‘being part of the forest herself’ is the same way Indigenous peoples learned about nature through their keen senses of observation, intuition, and feeling; they listened, they dreamed, and the forest spoke.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, another plant scientist, is best known for her book Braiding Sweetgrass (Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants). Her first book, and my favorite, because I love mosses, happens to be Gathering Moss. She is also a distinguished Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York. Kimmerer has Indigenous roots – she is a member of the Potawatomi Nation and successfully blends science with Indigenous wisdom, demonstrating primarily through story and personal narrative, as well as science, creating an alternative to the life-destroying paradigm we are presently living through.

One commonality between all three is that these women have merged imagination, keen observation, intuition, feeling, and the use of all bodily senses with rigorous scientific experimentation (in the lab and in the field) upsetting the dominant materialistic/mechanistic paradigm that is stuck on objectivity. Since there is no such thing as objectivity because of the well-documented observer effect which states that the observer will affect whatever is being observed (just one more indication that we are all interconnected) we must ask why materialistic science is so resistant to these new plant studies that indicate sentience in plants. What would we have to change if, for example, we acknowledged that plants have feelings? What could we learn from 400-million-year-old trees that have survived five extinctions?

The second common thread is that all three of these scientists currently work with Indigenous Peoples, crediting them with Ancient Knowledge that Western Science is only recently uncovering, using the scientific method. Ask an Indigenous person how they learned about plants, and you will be told the plants taught them.

What does this blending of disparate traditions offer us? The obvious answer is that we can benefit from open-minded rigorous science and the teachings of the Original Peoples of this land. Two aspects of one whole. And yet, this has not happened. Instead, for the most part, these scientific breakthroughs have been dismissed or relegated to anonymity. Is this because these scientists refuse to separate doing rigorous science from the knowledge they have gained from attending to their senses? Using half of our abilities is apparently preferable to using them all?

The critics of these recent discoveries fall back on phrases like ‘pseudo-science’ or the perils of anthropomorphizing nature, still generally considered ‘other’ and raw in ‘tooth and claw’. As more scientific evidence piles up to support interconnection between all species including plants, detractors refuse to create space for this groundbreaking science to gain credibility. Attributing sentience to nature is an anathema to a culture in which the state of economy for humans in the short term is the only thing that matters.

Unfortunately, Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs are and have been automatically dismissed. Story is just myth and has no basis in ‘reality’.  Evidently, these disparagers are not aware that the dominant culture is itself living a mechanistic myth of its own making, one that hinges on keeping humans separate from the rest of nature at all costs. The absurdity of taking such a position would be humorous if the fate of our children, wildlife, forests, air, and water was not in such peril.

Because I am a Naturalist, I have been asking the same sorts of questions as these female scientists have about plants – how do they know what they know – (often receiving answers, not through words, but through my bodily senses as well as through observation and research), and I am thrilled that these cutting-edge women scientists are attempting to prove what the plants have been teaching me all my life. Like Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Monica Gagliano, the Naturalist’s keen eye can uncover hidden worlds.

It is my earnest hope that this cultural breakdown will birth a breakthrough that allows us to become who we are, one species that is connected to all others, living on a sentient earth that supports the whole.

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