According Rush, they not only talk to each other, they are downright bitchy!
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According to a documentary film a few years ago, they are telling humans to “off themselves”
I’m reading a @Papasan classic “I’m FILL IN THE BLANK right now!” posts right now!
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Oh yeah, that was my point. At one time our hubris prevented us from seeing that other animals exhibit intelligent behavior, including things that we long attributed only to ourselves like tool making. I suspect that in the next hundred years we’ll come to find out that we greatly underestimated the “intelligence” of plant life.
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Oh. I thought your point was that trees have been around a lot longer than “we” have, so they’re probably all over this communication business.
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I’m really annoyed by Peter Wohlleben and his book. He’s mixing science, popular science, popular opinion, own observations and superstition to a dangerously anti-intellectual cocktail. And he sometimes gets his facts wrong in ways which are highly irritating for me as a biologist, ecologist, and botanist.
I got this book as a gift from both sides of the family. Well intentioned, of course. They think this must be interesting to me, because I enjoy popsci books.
The trouble is: it’s not popsci. It’s propaganda. Not for a bad thing, I’m really in line with Wohlleben’s overall intentions of making us see the beauty of nature and act to preserve it. But I don’t want the esoteric and anti-scientific overhead, thank you very much.
Just FTR, I know “his” forest a bit. The surroundings were my playground, and sites of study during undergraduate work.
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The behaviors being described sound like the sort of autonomous feedback mechanisms that exist in all living things. Sensing changing conditions and issuing a responsive chemical is one of the most basic adaptive behaviors that cells perform. I don’t think that it qualifies as intelligence, but it is a form of communication, as when a chameleon changes its skin color in response to detected threats.
But the big question: Do trees possess consciousness?
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Nope, just that it’s highly probable that having some form of communication would have imparted a reproductive advantage and their lineage has had a hell of a long time to develop it. I’m not saying that trees are likely intelligent, if they are, it’s an intelligence so foreign to us that we’d never be able to detect it.
I suppose I should add that I spent a fair deal of my childhood on a farm, and on that farm witnessed a lot of plant “behavior” that people might not necessarily know. Many plants have visible, physical responses to various stimuli, frequently regulated by things like water availability and barometric pressure. While certainly not intelligence, it’s not infeasible to think that some plants can communicate in response to threats and the like by releasing pheromones, or secreting something into the soil, not intelligent communication, but a fairly probable evolved response given that it would so greatly increase the survivability of the species.
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Imagine if they were banana trees…
Banana trees… just listen to them!
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See the video i posted previously. Obviously i’m not an expert but i would say that plants can actively react to their environment in a very targeted way, i wouldn’t say plants are intelligent or conscious but i don’t think they passively exist either.
Regardless of what the answer may be i find plants’ survival mechanisms quite clever and fascinating.
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If not for our own firsthand experience, would there be any reason to suppose that humans do?
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Today has been rough for a lot of them. This Nor’easter has caused several to topple, due to high winds and saturated soil. I’ve never seen this many fall in a single day. 
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It’s not hard for me to imagine turning this upside down, and just describing military action as an immune response, with no consciousness necessarily implied. So much human behavior seems to me similarly programmed by our genes, and it’s only after the fact we hear these elaborate stories about how so and so, “meant to do that”.
It’s not so much that plant ethologists are anthropomorphizing the trees, its that we give humans far too much credit for sapience.
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I’m not sure most people buy the idea that (nonhuman) animals are conscious. If you (not necessarily you personally) don’t think a mouse is conscious, how are you going to say a tree is?
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I think that I shall never see
A pervert creepy as a tree;
A tree that feeds on dried up shit
And welcomes dogs to whiz on it,
Which plants itself up on some crest
To spill its seed on Nature’s breast;
Which from Nome to Australia
Displays its genitalia.
If we behaved so monstrously
They’d lock us up! But not a tree.
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I do have to say, I am allergic to tree (and other plants) sperm, which they spew about every year, much to my displeasure. So, if they’re sapient, they’re doing it just to drive my sinus’ crazy.
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Are the humans intentionally trying to send messages to other humans? Or are they just broadcasting messages ambiently – in the matter of course of, y’know, being humans – that other humans just happen to pick up?
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He has been taken to task by some scientists, but his strongest denouncers are German commercial foresters, whose methods he calls into question. “They don’t challenge my facts because I cite all my scientific sources,” he says. “Instead, they say I’m ‘esoteric,’ which is a very bad word in their culture. And they call me a ‘tree-hugger,’ which is not true. I don’t believe that trees respond to hugs.”
