How trees make decisions

What can we learn from wooden 'beings' more ancient than us?

This olive grove surrounds a yoga temple I frequented while living in Arenas de San Pedro.

Trees might not be sentient, but certainly behave as if they are.

While evolutionary theory has taught us that creatures are pitted against one another in a fight for survival, trees are radically devoted to cooperation.

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester who wrote The Hidden Life of Trees, provides insight into the quality of decision-making amongst trees, and their apparent personalities.

“Their root tips have highly sensitive brain-like structures that can distinguish whether the root that it encounters in the soil is its own root, the root of another species, or the roots of its own species. If it encounters its own kind…we have measured with radioactive-marked sugar molecules that there is a flow from healthy trees to sick trees so that they will have an equal measure of food and energy available.”

Instead of allowing the weaker among their species to die, trees go to extreme lengths to preserve the life of one of their own. Wohlleben continues:

“This one beech tree was cut four to 500 years ago by a charcoal maker, but the stump is still alive - we found green chlorophyll under the thick bark. The tree has no leaves to create sugars, so the only explanation is that it has been supported by neighboring trees for more than four centuries.”

Wohlleben goes on to share that trees are excellent communicators. Whenever one tree is attacked by insects, foresters have observed electrical signals passing through the bark, into the roots, and down into fungi networks in the soil that alert surrounding trees of danger.

Trees seemingly function within a system where ‘everything is connected’. A mycorrhizal network is one such example, where plants transfer water, nitrogen, and carbon in a hidden ‘woodwide web’, which was termed so by Suzanne Simard, a scientist who teaches forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Laura James is an engineering leader involved with using satellite vegetation intelligence to analyze trees and prevent wildfires and power outages. She builds on Simard’s and Wohlleben’s idea that trees are actively exchanging information to make decisions.  

“An Aspen may not be just one tree: a whole forest of Aspens can be connected underground as one organism. The largest organism on earth is Pando Populus, an interconnected Aspen grove. Each individual tree is not itself, it’s a network.”  

James further suggests that trees gather data, and make short- and long-term strategic decisions together.  

“Trees are agile enough to ask, When do the leaves open? Patterns of rain and sun and wind and pests - all of that is taken into account and informs the decision of when to open the leaves. Long-term, a tree might be 'flagging', with branches avoiding growing on the upwind side of a heavy prevailing wind direction, which can occur over hundreds of years.”

Could trees be capable of reflection, of making decisions according to what they sense?

Wohlleben observes how trees that suffer drought might consume less water the following spring to have more available in the summer months.

“A tree can learn…it can remember a drought its whole life and act on that memory by being more cautious of its water usage.”

In certain places in the world because of more CO2 in the air, trees are growing faster than they used to. But Wohlleben says that is not a good thing.

“Faster growth makes trees less healthy and more susceptible to illnesses. The wood is also of lower quality, so the price we get for it is going down. The cells of these fast growing trees actually become bigger and more susceptible to fungi. A little wound can open them to rot, which kills them.”

How often in our organizations do we make decisions to rapidly accelerate growth, to ramp up the speed of execution, only to scale back because of an overlooked ‘little wound’ that has opened us up to rot?

And what if we humans are interconnected and interdependent, not merely individuals whose decisions have no bearing on the other. What if we are one sprawling, complex, infinitely connective organism?