"Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants."

Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. -Hermann Hesse

“The palo santo trees bear the lichens effortlessly, unconsciously, the way they bear everything. Their multitudes, transparent as line drawings, crowd the cliffsides like whirling dancers, like empty groves, and look out over cliff-wrecked breakers toward more unpeopled islands, with their freakish lizards and birds, toward the grieving lagoons and the bays where the sea lions wander, and beyond to the clamoring seas.”

Thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones.

---Gregory Bateson
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (12)

[The rain forest is] an emergent and expanding mutilayered cacophonous web of mutually constitutive, living and growing thoughts.
---Eduardo Kohn
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (79)

Patty Westerford is a young botanist in the 1960s who discovers that “trees are social creatures”: They communicate with each other and react to their environment in dynamic and ingenious ways. (Patty’s ideas echo those of Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, popularized in the best-selling book “The Hidden Life of Trees.”)