Stagtine, 26. Interspecific Intentionality
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Leading forest ecologist and best-selling author, Suzanne Simard has paved a gentle pathway through the once-closed and frost-born forest of the vegetative soul.
In her 2021 book, Finding the Mother Tree, Simard summarized her life’s work, demonstrating that trees talk to each other—that, in the networked and highly-connected communities of forests, roots and their fungal friends co-create a life that pulses and pulses with intentionality. In an interview with the Yale School of the Environment, Simard summarized that it is “sort of like a below-ground pipeline, that connects one tree root system to another tree root system, so that nutrients and carbon and water can exchange between the trees.”
Interactions between organisms is emblematic of Earth. This is the network of life. Even Aristotle’s division of sublunary life understood this. But fungi facilitate and speak of a deeper connection. If anything, they also question our ideas of what it means to be “a thing.” Fungi seem to facilitate or form a shared circulatory system between all of life, blurring the lines as they go, slithering by, busy in their work, our life.
This was questioned in the late nineteenth century, matured by Swedish botanist Erik Björkman in the 1960s, and then developed in the field by David Read and Suzanne Simard in the early 2000s.
This wood wide web, fungi’s deeply woven and layered fabric connecting and covering life, is a seemingly ministerial but not reductionist system of community and connection that benefits the fungi, the soil, and the many plants rooted in its warm and healing womb. Perhaps the most surprising property of life’s fungal web is its ability to enfold organisms together.
Winning is Not the Point
Communication is everywhere. This is not a substantive finding. Read today’s popular nature essays and witness a deeply interactive world. Even lab scientists with their lab rats understand this.
When the wind blows, seeds are dispersed. When seeds are dispersed, they land upon distant landscape in strange ways, inanimately and unintentionally of course, we are told. They grow until some human intentionally decides otherwise. Most importantly, they grow alone, mining the nutrients they need and competing with those around them for those resources.
But Reed’s and Simard’s observation of intentionality within a plant’s communicative pathways through its fungal circulatory system has opened a new language that extends beyond a particular species classification. And it changes everything.
Simard found that a plant’s root tips are clothed in fungus and “any water the roots would be accessing, or anything soluble in water for that matter, such as nutrients,” filter through the soil and its joining fungi as a two-way energy switch. From the root myco, like fungus, and rhiza, like root, Mycorrhiza fungi perform a function in Earth’s womb by stepping beyond their own biological nature and becoming the roots of the plants themselves.
Arbuscular mycorrhiza go so far in this selfless act of becoming that they grow inside of the roots and within the very cells of grasses, whereas ectomycorrhiza grow on the outside of the root’s cells in trees and shrubs. To make matters even more complex, monotropoid mycorrhiza grow as epiparasitic pegs in the host plant’s cell walls but they never actually penetrate them.1 Arguably the most famous monotropoid is the enigmatic Ghost Pipe, or Monotropa uniflora, that extends their pallid-white fungal and flower-topped phallus out of the forest floor and under beech and oaks during the early to mid-summer here in Virginia.
Fungi, like animals and plants, make up a kingdom of their own. The largest single organism on the planet—that we have yet found—is a fungus that lives in Oregon that weighs hundreds of tons and spills across two and a half thousand acres. It is believed to be between two and eight thousand years old!
Fungi are complex organisms with ancient associations. Different fungi do different things like digesting pollutants and nibbling on rocks to making medicines that heal and poisons that destroy. In 2017, a team led by anthropologist Laura Weyrich discovered in the El Sidrón Cave in northern Spain that Neanderthals over fifty thousand years ago self-medicated their dental abscesses—bacterial infections of their teeth—by ingesting fungus. Inferred from the archeological and DNA record of dental remains, Weyrich concluded that ancient humans intentionally let herbaceous material mold and then consumed the resulting natural antibiotic, Penicillium.2 At the molecular level, argues mycologist Merlin Sheldrake in his bestselling book, Entangled Life, fungi are “pharmaceutically prolific” and humans are similar enough to benefit from and share our mycelial cousins’ “biochemical innovations.”3
Some fungus even augment Earth’s atmosphere. Fungi explode spores—reproductive packets like a plant’s seed—through what botanist Levi Yafetto calls hydrostatic squirt guns. Podospora, a genus of fungi found in herbivore dung, has been measured to explode at 1.8×106 m s2, or 4,026,485 miles per hour. That is five thousand times faster than a modern jet needs to fly to break the sound barrier and create a sonic boom. The volume of these spores equates to nearly five hundred blue whales.4 This airborne and fungal mass is found in clouds and triggers weather patterns such as precipitation. Most strikingly, this great and entangled and explosive mass lives at your feet and we rarely even notice them.
Ecologists consider beneficial relationships between species as either symbiotic, commensal, or mutualistic. Symbiosis is when two species come together for the benefit of one or both; commensality is when two species come together for one to benefit and the other to remain unchanged but unharmed; mutuality is when two species come together for everyone to benefit. But Mycorrhiza fungi in all their complex forms do something else—they do more than co-create or co-exist with a plant’s root systems, they step beyond themselves and become the plant’s root systems.
Although the reason is scientifically unclear, it seems that it is more efficient to invest energy in befriending fungi than to invest energy toward the growing of more roots. Plants invest up to thirty percent of their energy (carbon) in their fungi friends. Mycorrhizal fungi are fifty times finer than a tree’s finest roots and can grow nearly a hundred times farther. This is because fungal networks have thin walls, lack cellulose and lignin, and thereby require less energy to develop and sustain themselves. But this is also because friends make light work of life and fungi seem to be the best of friends.
The fungi, who lack photosynthetic abilities, trade with trees by sending their mycelium throughout the soil to harvest nutrients and water and bring those nutrients back as plant available forms to the trees in exchange for photosynthate. The fungi utilize this sugary meal to expand and sustain their great wood wide web of mycelial threads and tunnels. As they expand, the nutrients and communities the plants have access to also expand and the system becomes increasingly complex, communicative, and resilient. It also becomes confusing—where does one tree start and another end? Community and its gift, the two-way energy switch that sustains and enmeshes the eons.5
Mycology, consciousness, communication, and soil born gift economies extend even deeper into the atmosphere of existence.
Renowned mycologist Paul Stamets recently observed the connection between long wave sound and mycelial operations. Long wave sound—thunder, deep bass, and especially drums—travel longer as rich vibrations through the environment. As they travel, they reverberate the mycelial networks below the soils like strings on a guitar or violin. This resonance stimulates the hyphal networks to grow and spread, which in turn extends nutrient pathways and feedback loops. This long wave effect wallops like a tsunami through the ecosystem and increases the nutrient-uptake of local plants, either enrichening their near-ripe fruits or causing more fruits to grow (or seeds, leaves, nuts, or meat). Stamets demonstrated that the thunderous, human celebration of life echoes through Earth’s eternity and the result is nourishment for all—the soil, the plants, the fungi, the humans, and everything in between. Dancing around the autumnal harvest fires with drums beating and feet stomping, Earth and her mycelia grow and give in a complex and communicative symphony. Consciousness settles, also like a tsunami, across all life, everywhere.
What if the modern pleas to “solve climate change” or to “save the earth” ultimately erupted as more late-night and fire-induced drum circles? What, if this is true, do we eat when we eat fruits or seeds or leaves or nuts or meat? Why, we eat the drums and their waves and their ceremonies writ in the fungal grit of Earth. What if the solution was more spiritual community and less agricultural work and management?
“The plant is fixing carbon,” Simard described, “and then trading it for the nutrients that it needs for its metabolism.” Vegetative life, seemingly, is an autonomous relationship where the plants harvest nutrients and communicate with their neighbors by trading with the fungi at their feet. That is, plants are seemingly conscious in their actions and are, most importantly, conscious actors within the great play of an autonomous economy—their family’s great and wooded hearth. Relationship does not necessitate a holistic reciprocity, however. Is a plant’s relationship with fungi only for increasing the efficiency in its own growth, as Aristotle argued? Is it only for the maximization of nutrients? Or is there more at play here?
It is important to differentiate cognition and adaption. Consciousness in regard to external stimulus may be one or the other, or both. But simple, evolutionary modes of survival, while important, are not revolutionary.6 Adaption suggests automatic response. A humble reaction, a knee-jerk. Cognition, on the other hand, anticipates response. A vision-directed change, an understanding of the future. Charles Darwin called this the “root-brain.”7
Through a time-sustained analysis of Douglas fir and paper birch trees, Simard observed something entirely magical. She observed cognition. As her team worked to place shade nets over the Douglas firs, to reduce or completely limit their photosynthetic abilities, they realized that photosynthesis, which should have dropped as the tree’s solar exposure dropped, remained static in the firs. Planted next to a birch, the Douglas firs grew without the sun. They grew without the ability to photosynthesize. They grew. But how? Scientifically, this cannot happen. But it did. Aristotle rolled in his grave.
Simard had stumbled upon the great conversation of life, like a dancing child stumbles over the time-exposed and now slowly eroding oak’s root into a face full of maitake mushrooms. Simard realized that the birch was passing nutrients to its friend, the shaded Douglas fir. These nutrients were in proportion to the amount of shading placed over the fir. As the fir needed, the birch gave and as much as the fir needed, the birch gave accordingly. This revolutionized everything. The great birch was keeping her friend alive and she was doing so willingly and intellectually. For, when the autumn came and her own leaves dropped, the nutrient flow switched. It did not stop, as you may expect in an unintelligent system like a car’s engine that stops when the ignition turns off. No, the flow stayed on and the flow turned around and went in the other direction. The Douglas fir began feeding the now defoliated birch with nutrients, excess carbon, and the net relationship through the seasons and between these two friends was a sustained satiation through the intentional relationship of life.
In further support of cognition over adaption, Simard’s student, Kevin Beiler, authored a study in the late 2000s mapping the spatial structure of this mycorrhizal-maintained collective. Beiler found that, while these carbon-pollinating networks cover tens of meters, not everyone is connected equally. Older trees have more connections with their neighbors than younger trees, indicating that time is a determining factor in communicational abilities—age, wisdom, learned knowledge. “Large trees,” writes Beiler, “play a foundational role in facilitating conspecific regeneration and stabilizing the ecosystem.”8 Because of this and using these older trees as hubs in the decentralized nodal network of forest socioecology, every tree in the wood wide web is connectable in three steps, or jumps, from canopy to canopy or root to root.
This reciprocal connection’s import furthers as we consider whether life is a zero-sum equation, as some modern ecologists and their unfriendly economist colleagues argue. Zero-sum is a term used to describe systems where wealth is neither created nor destroyed. Instead, what is had and won directly asserts that the other players in this “game” irrefutably do not have and thereby lose. In other words, life is finite and its operations rotate around a fixed, finite axis—or game—and the winning of this game is a matter of collecting and amassing things, like money or energy.
But what Simard and others have demonstrated and what our ancestors have long understood is that life’s network of interactions is not a winner takes all sort of affair. Resources are neither limited nor finite because time is at play. Yes, your hand, let’s say, can only hold so much. This is its finite limit. But how much could your hand hold over a thousand years? How much could you hold if you had millions of supporters, friends giving you their hands, holding you, holding them?
This is relationship and its responsibility’s infinity. It is the magic of co-relation and conscious interaction that transforms once finite resources into infinite realities of reciprocity. It is a give-and-get system where life is slowly built and balance is found over the long- term.
“Over and over,” writes Simard, “the experiments showed that carbon moved from a source tree to a sink tree—from a rich to a poor one—and that the trees had some control over where and how much carbon moved.”9 If life is a game, then winning is not the point.
When you look at them, they look at you. When you see them, they see the all of you—the birch, the fir, the air, the fungi, the birds, the carbon, the crow-ravens circling above, ready to consume that which consumes.
There is no mastery in our actual world. Only gifts. We must amend our focus from dominion and growth and species dominance (even with good visions) and instead consider what undergirds the life of the system as a whole, from the ground up. Anything else is atonal.
Cellular Consciousness
But Simard is not alone in her findings. In his book, Plant Behavior and Intelligence, Anthony Trewavas demonstrated intellect and autonomous life at the molecular level in a plant’s tissues. Trewavas found that a plant’s cells have memory and a knowledge of themselves—a culture beyond the petri dish. The knowledge of oneself, or what psychology calls “self-knowledge,” includes information about one’s “personality traits, typical emotional states, needs and goals, values, opinions, beliefs, preferences, physical attributes, relationships, behavioral patterns, and social identity,” writes professor of psychology from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alain Morin.10 As such, the self-knowledge that plants and their smallest cells possess does not represent a self-process per se, as photosynthesis may be a self-process, but rather the result of a complex, self-reflective, and social process.
It is a fine-tuned and directed cellular process involving memory, vision, and a sophisticated understanding of current and future needs.
In this way, vegetative plants both as single organisms and members of the greater, vegetative community, have fitness against environmental challenges—like Simard’s solar shading of Douglass fir and birch—and they assess with intelligence their surroundings. They remember past events and recall past responses. Most importantly, this intelligence and cellular assessment is conscious—that is intentional, directed, purposeful.
Heidi Appel and colleagues demonstrated through their analysis of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a small plant from the mustard family native to Eurasia and Africa, that this innate, cellular memory and self-understanding allows plants to become strategic alchemists in their own defense. Her team re-created the vibrations of a munching caterpillar and observed that the plant amplified its production of toxic mustard oils (glucosinolate and anthocyanin) and then quickly routed those new compounds to her leaves. The thale cress did this before she was attacked—demonstrating that this was not a chemical response but a strategic alchemical defense. When Appel’s team re-created vibrations that mimicked the wind, rain, or song of birds, however, the plant’s physiology did not change and her alchemical weapons remained sheathed.11
Another study, looking at Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), demonstrated that plants through associative communities and their sensory processes provide biotic and abiotic dynamics for overall system survival.12 Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), for instance, warns wild tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) when it becomes damaged by grazing herbivores by releasing a number of alerting VOCs into the air (researchers claim that 60cm is the maximum distance that these alerting VOCs travel—or travel with potency). 13Wild tobacco, sensing the good Samaritan’s warnings, produces phytochemical repellents in their leaves, deterring herbivores and other browsers.14 In other words, plants help other plants survive and maintain their defenses.
It has long been considered that sagebrush is not good feed for cattle, considering the high levels of terpenoids in its leaves—a secondary compound that upsets rumen digestion. What if intelligent, grazing herbivores understand this connection—that, by grazing sagebrush during the growing season when other forbs (like wild tobacco) are growing around it, the defoliation of the one plant increases the overall phytochemical load of the others, reducing and restricting the overall palatability and feed volume of the location. But in the winter, with less plants to warn, they graze the sagebrush. Learning to optimize foraging opportunity is, in some basic sense, a basis for survival. To make matters even more interesting, all of the research surrounding cattle and sagebrush occur during the winter months—when all other vegetation (again, like wild tobacco) is dormant and the shrubby Samaritan has no one to warn. One research team found that winter grazing of sagebrush by cattle over a three year period produced more grasses and forbs in the following years.15 The more balanced and vegetative milieu was created through cattle grazing a plant that, chemically speaking, they could not stomach. But they did—when the overall defenses of the system were at its weakest, or most basic or simple. And the system’s health slowly returned. Like two Roman consuls who shared the power, these systems alternate and balance over the years until some emperor enters the environment. Us.
Life speaks of relationship. Of a time-tested and learned adaptive response and intelligence that co-develops within animal and plant kingdoms alike. Without it, the harvest becomes predation and its members become the slaves to the emperor.
Renowned cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, Paco Calvo summarized life’s cognitive function:
Plants, on the other, have to make it in life as rooted, slow-moving organisms that have to grow creatively instead of just walking off. In order to survive, they need to integrate many different sources of important information—about light quality, direction, which way is up and whether there is something or someone in the way—and use it to control their patterns of growth and development. Plants are constantly, and tirelessly, swaying their organs, responding to uncertainties such as soil structure, predators, or competitive neighbors. Plants have to plan ahead to achieve goals.... They proactively engage with their surroundings. Like animals in the bloodied tooth-and-claw wilds, plants couldn’t afford to do otherwise.16
Vegetation’s cellular memory produces secondary compounds when attacked or questioned and they mine particular primary compounds—macro and micro minerals and nutrients—when they need to grow.17 They think, observe, reproduce and love, grow according to their own visions, and they do all of this while being rooted in place and being good neighbors. We transitory humans have much to learn from them.
Plants demonstrate an intrinsic life force that is also your life and my life.18 Really, fundamentally, if we are to be honest with ourselves, it is their conscious life that allows our own to live and ours is a blessed gift that they give willingly, for now.
In his Pulitzer prize winning novel, The Overstory, Richard Powers speaks through the character of Bill, a forest ecologist and father of Patty, a girl born with both a speech and hearing impediment. “Real joy,” Bill explains as he and Patty travel from farm to farm and forest project to forest project in his old truck, “consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.” He continues, “The only dependable things are humility and looking.”19
What plants and their communities lack is what we recognize as intelligence, a central nervous system, but they do not lack the thing itself. If anything, we lack looking and we lack what they happily and jealously possess: life in community and life in nothing else. “To see takes time,” writes early twentieth century modernist and recalcitrant painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Seeing takes time, yes, “like to have a friend takes time,” continues O’Keeffe. Do plants merely reproduce? I think not. We need to work on being better friends. We need to spend more time looking, not working.iii
What is the difference between a rock and a human?
Wrong question.
J.D. Lewis. Mycorrhizal Fungi, Evolution and Diversification, ec. Richard M. Kliman, Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology, Academic Press, 2016, Pages 94-99, ISBN 9780128004265, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12- 800049-6.00251-1.
Weyrich, Laura et all. “Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus.” Nature. 544. 2017. 10.1038/ nature21674.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape our Futures. New York: Random House. 2020. 9.
Yafetto, Levi et al. “The fastest flights in nature: high-speed spore discharge mechanisms among fungi.” PloS one vol. 3,9 e3237. 17 Sep. 2008, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003237.
Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2021. pp. 60-62.
Segundo-Ortin, M., Calvo, P. (2019), “Are plants cognitive? A reply to Adams,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 73: 65.
Baluska, Frantisek et al. “The ‘root-brain’ hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after more than 125 years.” Plant signaling & behavior vol. 4,12 (2009): 1121-7. doi:10.4161/psb.4.12.10574.
Beiler, Kevin J et al. “Architecture of the wood-wide web: Rhizopogon spp. genets link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts.” The New phytologist vol. 185,2 (2010): 543-53. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x
Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 185.
Morin, Alain, Famira Racy, “Dynamic self-processes” in The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes, ed John F. Rauthmann. Academic Press: 2021, 365-386.
Appel, H M, and R B Cocroft. “Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing.” Oecologia vol. 175,4 (2014): 1257-66. doi:10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6.
Chatterjee et all. 2007. A BELL1-like gene of potato is light activated and wound inducible. Plant Physiology 145(4): 1435-1443.
Vivaldo, Gianna et al. “The network of plants volatile organic compounds.” Scientific reports vol. 7,1 11050. 8 Sep. 2017, doi:10.1038/ s41598-017-10975-x.
Shiojiri, Kaori et al. “Airborne signals of communication in sagebrush: a pharmacological approach.” Plant signaling & behavior vol. 10,12 (2015): e1095416. doi:10.1080/15592324.2015.1095416.
These defensive compounds are toxic alkaloids, like nicotine and anabasine. Karban, R et al. “Communication between plants: induced resistance in wild tobacco plants following clipping of neighboring sagebrush.” Oecologia vol. 125,1 (2000): 66-71. doi:10.1007/PL00008892.
Charles A. Petersen, Juan J. Villalba, and Frederick D. Provenza “Influence of Experience on Browsing Sagebrush by Cattle and Its Impacts on Plant Community Structure,” Rangeland Ecology and Management 67(1), 78-87, (1 January 2014). https://doi.org/10.2111/ REM-D-13-00038.1.
Paco Calvo. Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2022, 19.
Gaillochet, C., Lohmann, J. U. (2015), “The never-ending story: from pluripotency to plant developmental plasticity,” Development 142: 22137.
Calvo, P., Gagliano, M., Souza, G. M., Trewavas, A. (2020), “Plants are intelligent, here’s how,” Annals of Botany 125: 11-28.
Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 2018, 115.