After reading The
Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, this writer will never again be
able to look at trees in the same way. But my politics remain unchanged. Trees
offer the human (if we can call it that) race a planet-old reminder: no matter
how fierce the competition, survival depends on communal organization! (That
means us too.)
Darwin once famously quipped: Trees have their brains on the
bottom and their sex on top. Perhaps that makes trees much more thoughtful
beings than humans. For one thing, they limit their reproductive abilities:
each tree, because of the exquisite balance of the forest ecosystem, reproduces
itself only once each mast year, despite releasing into the environment as many
as billions of seeds in the years it decides to blossom and fruit. (The year
trees “decide” to fruit is referred to as a mast year.) And a community of
forest trees “decides” unanimously what that year will be. In this story, there
is an interplay of weather, sunlight, predators (deer and wild boar) and pests
(fungi and bacteria). All are necessary, indicating that when humans attempt to
make things “better,” the delicate balance of nature is disrupted, to the
detriment of the entire ecosystem.
Forests are best left undisturbed. The political implications are vast:
countries (I am thinking of Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and others) are best
left undisturbed.
In my recently published Apology to a Whale, I quoted Wintu matriarch, Kate Luckie:
When the Indians all die, then God will let
the water come down from the north. Everyone will drown. That is because the
White people never cared for land or deer or bear…. The White people plow up
the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, “Don’t. I am
sore. Don’t hurt me….” The Indians never hurt anything, but the White people
destroy all…How can the spirit of the earth like the White man..? Everywhere
the White man has touched, it is sore.
Yes. Trees feel pain, but their “nerve” impulses travel much
more slowly than ours, only 1/3 of an inch per minute because trees live in the
very slow lane. It may take them as many
as 120 years to reach puberty. But unfailingly, they (like animals) take care
of their young! Yes. Tree mothers
nourish their offspring with sugar transfusions until they are old enough to
make it on their own. They do this by a nervous system which co-exists in a
colonial arrangement (much like the Portuguese man of war): tree cells coexist
with the cells of mycorrhizal fungi which connect their roots, the forest’s
fiber-optic cable system (yes, Darwin had a point). (A curious question might
arise if we speculated that human brain cells co-exist with other human cells
in a similarly colonial arrangement). One teaspoon of dirt contains many miles
of such fungal fibers. And some of these fungal systems occupy many square
miles. As such, they are the largest living beings on earth, infinitely larger
than the largest mammals.
Not only do tree mothers nourish their own species, but depending on the delicate balance of sugars in their blood streams, because of intra species communication, trees of divergent species can exchange nutrients. In this way, the forest thrives because it requires the participation of every living being in its ecosystem—reminding us that there exists no other silver bullet than community organizing, and community resistance in a united front to successfully resist all invading pests, whether fungi and bacteria or our own toxic political systems.
Lots of Lovely Flowers amidst this week’s thorns
None of these victories could have been
won without YOUR resistance.
Blackfeet Nation to control its own
waters after 35-year-long
battle.
Chelsea Manning was released this week. History will mark her as one of this country ‘s foremost she-roes for all she revealed.
Louisiana to reduce its prison population down from 8% of its citizens.
Baltimore Action
Legal Team partners with a coalition of racial and criminal justice
organizations across the country to
bail out mamas on Black Mama’s Bailout Day.
New York State beats California in being the
first to pass Medicare for all bill.
Healthy California Act now on
its way to the Senate Appropriations Committee as California advances another step towards single payer health care.
Financial Times
declares that alternatives are already the winners in
energy’s future, with
fossils taking a back seat.
Sweden drops rape charges ag. Julian
Assange, but he still
faces harassment from harassers-in-chief, the UK and US.
Veterans for Peace
to march In DC on Memorial Day with their message: Peace at home, and peace
abroad.
Michigan District
Judge Victoria Roberts orders government to turn over Giuliani
secret travel ban documents.
Long-time Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar
Lopez Rivera is freed to return
home to Chicago and the movement.
Special prosecutor Mueller
is assigned to investigate Russia/Trump ties, but surprise, Mueller has ties to the deep state.
San Jose City Council approves new
community choice energy
plan.
Utilities losing
customers as California mulls retail electricity
choice.
Walmart agrees to reduce carbon footprint of its suppliers by one billion metric
tons.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Earlier this year,
activists and their elected officials began moving $5.4 billion out of banks
invested in the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). As you know, Trump ordered the
pipeline built and oil is now flowing - and leaking. So we’re demanding that
banks divest, not just from DAPL but from all the dirty pipelines transporting
climate pollution throughout North America.
No comments:
Post a Comment