Nope, trees still aren't intelligent let alone woke

Both High Country News and the New York Times have written recently about research on trees as "social creatures" and not just individuals, focusing on the work of Suzanne Simard, with HCN's piece being a review of her memoir.

It's true that it was a bad step for scientists not to see trees as part of social groups and rather, only as individuals, to the degree that was actually the case. Per Jane Goodall and others, we would never view chimpanzees or other primates that way. We would never view ourselves that way. We would never view, say, wolves that way. (That said, before Goodall, chimps weren't viewed the way they are today, so to claim that this is ages-old "plant discrimination" doesn't fly.)

And, surely, at least the possibility of some of this evidence being available for trees and other plants was available before Simard.

Unfortunately, both push the anthropomorphizing gas pedal a bit hard at times. 

Worse than "unfortunately," HCN even ventures toward woke / SJW angles by talking about Simard learning from indigenous wisdom.

Contra Robin Wall Kimmerer, trees don't have a common "language." Not as language is understood for us, and to the degree some primates have been able to learn it from us to a limited (yes) degree.

IMO, even Ferris Jabr at the NYT is overreading Simard's research. And so may be other scientists.

First, on things like carbon dioxide exchange, there is ZERO indication trees are "helping" each other.

Rather, it's mycorrhizal fungi that facilitate the flow of CO2 between tree species, and it's only natural that if two species have different flowering and sapping times, the flow goes one direction in spring and the other in fall.

And, missing from the HCN story, and partly from NYT? What benefit fungi get. And they do. Jabr does, eventually, get into that.

“Where some scientists see a big cooperative collective, I see reciprocal exploitation,” said Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Both parties may benefit, but they also constantly struggle to maximize their individual payoff.” Kiers is one of several scientists whose recent studies have found that plants and symbiotic fungi reward and punish each other with what are essentially trade deals and embargoes, and that mycorrhizal networks can increase conflict among plants. In some experiments, fungi have withheld nutrients from stingy plants and strategically diverted phosphorous to resource-poor areas where they can demand high fees from desperate plants.

Oops! Sadly, there's still a bit too much anthropomorphizing language in Jabr's explainer of Kiers et al after the direct quote, but this is better than nothing.

Here's a counterexample. Doctors et al already talk about the human microbiome in our colons, but nobody oohs and aahs over it. Jabr eventually gets to that, but only way at the end, in bad editing.

So, what we have is Simard, who rightly notes that science of her long-ago student ways was rejecting and blocking her to some degree, setting up a potential future where more and more woke forest biologists then reject more traditional evolutionary takes on the role of fungi.

And, this ties in with environmentalism in general.

The woke and New Age types can ooh and aah over big Douglas fir allegedly "talking" to one another, let alone helping one another.

A subterranean fungus that's like roots of grass? Different story.

In short, what we have is the environmental world, just shifting a focus from charismatic megafauna to charismatic megaflora.

To his credit, Jabr does do some degree of call-out of Simard for her use of New Agey language about trees. That said, he then uses words like "socialism," and on the SJW side, the idea that Native Americans were Rousselean noble savages with magical environmental wisdom. (Rousseau actually originally proffered this as a thought experiment which he then rejected and was then framed by his hater, Voltaire; the idea was revived under 19th century Anglo-Saxon racialism.) And, the idea that Indigenous peoples have magic environmental wisdom?

Taint so.

Stuff like this, in addition to things like the Georgia GP dust-up as well as party mismanagement, are why I am an independent leftist, not a Green.

As for High Country News? When writing four months ago about rejecting their dollar-a-month digital subscription offer, I said I had a love-frustration relationship with the magazine. The love continues to fade; the frustration continues to grow.

 

Update: Contra Nautilus, which is about to get deblogrolled, trees don't see, either.