[Buddha-l] redwood trees, memory, and entity-ness

[jkirk]

The New Yorker of Feb 14 & 21 has an astonishing article on US west coast
redwoods, their canopies, and the climbers who research them. Redwood tree
canopies are huge, integrated, often interlinked between-trees ecosystems
growing hosts of other organisms like ferns, saplings of other species,
huckleberry bushes, lichens, and creating fertile soil. Steve Sillett is the
tree scientist who took the article's author with him and his wife up to the
crown of a gigantic redwood. Reading the article I came across a bit that
startled me into thinking more broadly of co-dependent arising and how we of
the human species assume that our brand of consciousness is perhaps the only
one worth pondering.

Quoting from the article:
"...Do you really think of this tree as a kind of entity?" I asked.
"It's a being. It's a 'person" from a plant's point of view. Plants are very
different from animals, but they begin life with a sperm and an egg, the
same way we do. This organism has stood on this spot for as many as two
thousands years. Trees can't move so they have to figure out how to deal
with all of the things that can come and hurt them...Redwoods don't care if
they burn. After the fire...it just grew back."
"...A tree is not conscious, the way we are, but a tree has a perfect
memory. If you injure a tree, it's cambium--its living wood--will respond
and the tree will grow differently in response to the injury. The trunk of a
tree continually records everything that happens to it."
Sillet then says, "But these trees have no voice. My life's work is to speak
for these trees." (224-225)

Compassion is based on identification. Generating compassion for the living
non-human entities on this planet could be helped, perhaps, if in our
education institutions we made sure that every student understood the shared
basis of non-human living things, easier with the animal world, less obvious
with the plant world -- whether it's from sperm and an egg, or from cloning
itself. Redwood trees do that too. They are also monoecious (a new word for
me) -- both male and female, producing differently functioning cones, one of
which has eggs and the other, pollen (sperm). And then there is that large
abstraction, DNA, that we can better comprehend if we have access to special
lab equipment.
I tend to avoid pondering on metaphysical thoughts, but sometimes it feels
beneficial for practice to think about the botanical world, a world that
moved beyond genes and mutations to more complex causal dependencies.
Joanna