Biologists have always known that the plants and animals have their own councils, says scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass). Some trees, she writes, warn each other of disease and drought, sometimes the wind carries their messages from one to the other, transmitting hormones and microbes and other news.

“in the old times,” writes Kimmerer, “the trees talked each other. They’d stand in their own council and draft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was dismissed.

In her remarkable book, Kimmerer, a scientist herself, challenges that idea. The conclusion that plants cannot speak, she said, was drawn because they lack the mechanisms that people and animals use to speak. (We make this same mistake about dogs and cats, we imagine, in our arrogance that they must speak like us, and in our words.)

Recently, she wrote, scientists and biologists have begun exploring the idea that plants and trees do have ways of speaking to one another. Pollen, for example, has been carried for thousands of years on the wind, communicated by males to receptive females who make nuts and other foods. If the wind can be trusted with that, why not with messages?

There is a growing body of evidence, she writes, that the old ones were right, that trees are talking to one another. They communicate with hormonelike compounds that are carried by the wind, laden with meaning. Scientists have identified specific compounds, Kimmer says,  that a tree will release when it is under the stress of insect attack  – gypsy moths or bark beetles, or drought.

Trees who receive these warnings can often manufacture defensive chemicals.

This is a stunning idea to me, I have been reading about it more and more lately. I think there are people who live in nature, and see us as a part of it, and people who live totally apart from nature and see it as something completely different from us. It is easy to destroy nature when one sees it mostly as an inanimate system without feeling or consciousness. In that way, we go about our business, assuming we have the right to destroy the world so that we can make money.

I never thought about nature much until I lived in it, and Maria has furthered my consciousness about our connection to other living things. So have our animals, as our connection to them has grown.Walking in the woods, each day, I have come to feel the animate presence of trees, I can sense that they are aware of us, I can almost feel their connection to one another, their sharing of the sun, of the water in the ground.

I think they know us now, they envelop us when we walk, they feel the vibrations of our feet, they know if we are friend or foe,  fellow traveler or enemy.

They seem gentle and benign to me, of course, not looking for conflict but intensely aware of each other, and why wouldn’t they be? What makes us think we are the only living things with a consciousness for community?

Walking in the precincts of the woods and forest, I no longer take it for granted. I try to take only what I use, only what is given, and to use it  well, to be grateful for the gift of it, and to return the favor in any way that I can. I do this by caring for the woods, keeping it clean, protecting it from danger and harm, walking where I should. By respecting it as part of the chain of life that connects us all.