Listening to the Thoughts of the Forest

"To speak of intelligence in a forest is, on its face, an anthropomorphism, a violation of the creed of ecologists and science writers alike: Don/t treat other species like charming little humanoids! Trees are not leafy people and forests are not woody brains. But just as dangerous as projecting human fairytales onto forests is the overzealous rejection of all analogy between human minds and the networked flow of information within ecological communities. Mind emerges from relationships among living cells. We experience one manifestation of these relationships inside the bony plates of our skulls. Other minds may exist within other living networks. To speak of a forest's mind and intelligence, then, is not to impose caricatures of humanity on other species. Rather, our human experience of mind allows us to imagine what might be possible in 'the other.'" David George Haskell shares more in this piece.

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