More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 15 - October 22, 2021
When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.
But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old.
Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover.
Trees, it turns out, have a completely different way of communicating: they use scent.
The rate of photosynthesis is the same for all the trees. The trees, it seems, are equalizing differences between the strong and the weak. Whether they are thick or thin, all members of the same species are using light to produce the same amount of sugar per leaf. This equalization is taking place underground through the roots. There’s obviously a lively exchange going on down there. Whoever has an abundance of sugar hands some over; whoever is running short gets help. Once again, fungi are involved. Their enormous networks act as gigantic redistribution mechanisms. It’s a bit like the way
...more
The redirected power of a windstorm can tear at the base of the trunk with a force equivalent to a weight of 220 tons.19 If there is a weak spot anywhere in the tree, it will crack. In the worst-case scenario, the trunk breaks off completely and the whole crown tumbles down.
There is a honey fungus in Switzerland that covers almost 120 acres and is about a thousand years old.23 Another in Oregon is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends for 2,000 acres, and weighs 660 tons.24 That makes fungi the largest known living organisms in the world.
we are now discovering that animals share many human emotions. And not just mammals, which are closely related to us,
