So my first question is, what is a tree? Ah, what is a tree? Damn it! That's a tough one, actually.
What is a tree? Human beings have been living at the edge of forests for a very, very long time. The edge of the forest is where we belong. Trees are both familiar and alien.
They don't go anyplace very fast, but they endure. Compared to humans, they're old creatures that we scarcely understand. The world of Pines preceded the world in which humans could live. It takes a stretch of imagination to ask, well, what does that world look like? We don't usually see them until they're a few years old.
You can imagine how vulnerable it is in those arid soils, getting enough water through those long, hot summers. But if mom was living there for 4,000 years, then that was a pretty good place. The estimates are less than 1% of survival.
But if they survive those first few years, they're pretty good to go. And really, there isn't much that kills the bristlecone. As an historical ecologist, I think a lot about times when there were trees but no humans. And so sometimes I'll go to places where there was before humans in my mind because I know those places well from studying them.
Where pines evolved, in the bristle ponds and the limber pine forests, are those places. I am interested in trying to understand how these trees in a mountain environment tolerated historic natural climate change, because I think that can be useful for understanding what will come in the future. Through the growth rings of the wood, I can reconstruct the past climate, and I can know how they responded. So to see a 5,000 year old tree and to think of how much it's endured and what it's able to persist under.
In 5,000 years there's been an enormous amount of climate change. They can't move to get away, they have to stay and face what comes. They're just perfectly adapted to be in one place. A small, small dot became this big.
Japanese believe that God dwells in the tree. The tree is called the Jurei-sennen. It was transplanted 35 years ago.
At that time, I saw the vitality and energy of the trees. I felt that very strongly. I was very impressed by the trees.
I always help them, so I ask them to tell me what they want. People who value trees are my family. Some people think that if this tree withers, I will die.
My grandfather and my husband raised me with care. If I let this tree wither, I can't enter the same grave as my grandfather and my husband. The end of the world The end of the world Please call the number you have dialed The end of the world I don't think of myself as a healer. I receive teachings from the trees and I touch them.
I am very happy. It is said that it is very important to be grateful for the way the Shinto think. The world of shrines says that our lives are being used. Our lives are not being lived alone. We are supported by many things.
Originally, humans were the last people to be trained in Japan. They would take trees and animals from the forest. They had a way of life to live.
They had a place to get the blessing of life. At the same time, it's an old age, so if you get hurt by a beast, you might die in an era without a hospital. So, the sea, mountains and mountains are places where you can get the blessing of life and also places that give you the fear of death.
The first board to be built Kodama... Kodama... It's like a spirit living in a tree.
Each one of them is inside of a tree. I don't think it's even visible. I feel and appreciate the existence there. The shrine, the temple, the shrine, the big tree planted in the shrine, is a tradition that is worshipped and prayed as a god.
That kind of tradition has existed since ancient times. I believe that the Earth has life too. When I enter the forest, I feel like the earth's thumping sound is coming to me.
I feel like the earth and I are one. Thank you. In the forest, there are ultrasonic waves.
And there are many things that you can't see. I want to absorb all of that, but I want to bring it closer to you. It's the image I had in my mind.
All the pores are cleared, and the sound of the forest air, all of that is passed through my body and circulates. That's the image I had. I'm going to hold it.
I started to think that it's not a snowboard but a snow surfing. I think it's interesting to ride the waves of the sea along the mountain terrain while having conversations with the terrain. I think everyone has moments where they're just sliding in the forest and then they're like, ah.
Then it might be the moment when you're resting in a tree just above you. The moment when you feel that you're part of nature. You don't know until you know that moment. It's very difficult to express it in words. I was seven and I was with my ski group and I could remember them weaving through the trees and I don't know what happened to me but I just remember at one point being lost in the trees.
And I just sat there wooing for a little while and realizing that I was alone. Growing up, tree skiing, you had to have a call. I a lot of times lose the person that I'm skiing with. And then all of a sudden, my friend will be like, as like a signaling beacon. You'll get the reverberation from someone else, and then we know we're really close together.
It's kind of a cool way of communicating through the trees without being able to see someone. The forest is a holistic place. It's a place that's connected.
You know, since I was a little kid I played in forests like this. They're like treasure chests full of biodiversity, of genes, of species that are really, really old. You know, this is a special little heartbeat in the landscape where these things reside.
600 years is a long time. You know, it's 12 times as old as I am. And so you get that sense of history, of many spirits have been here before. Not just human spirits, but many creatures have lived here and they still live here.
And I get that sense that I'm not here alone, ever. I feel like I've entered into this cathedral and the pews are full. I walk in and I feel at home because I feel like I'm in this community of all these creatures.
Pretty much every day of the year in the winter I ski in some way. I'm always in the forest. I don't think that I would have been a scientist unless I had these connections myself. Being out here is the source of that science. These are my people and they're telling, we're talking and they're showing me things and I'm saying okay I'll go study that.
So yeah it's a constant back-and-forth conversation between me and these guys. Oh this is really hot. Oh wow it's really really really labeled.
If you go into an old growth forest and it's quite dark, it can be quite shady, and you can see little plants growing in the understory or seedlings that are kind of cropping up and there's not a lot of light so the big old trees are competing with those little seedlings for light. But they're able to live. Well why is that? If they can't photosynthesize very well how could they live? As soon as you walk in a forest, most of us look around and we go, when we see that big old tree.
And so this one caught my eye. Other trees are the biggest ones and the oldest ones in the forest. We've been able to trace that this tree would be connected to all these trees around it, as far as you can see. These big old trees are like the center, the hubs, and that they're nurturing the young seedlings around them.
As the seed is germinating, the mother tree is communicating with the seed. Sometimes in a really dense, shaded forest, those seedlings can sit there for a hundred years and just be feeding off the mother tree, waiting for a little gap to open up, for a tree to fall over, or a branch to fall. Just waiting, patiently. Just waiting.
My time will come. This fungal highway is kind of like a direct way to communicate. So you can think of the network as kind of like an internet or a bunch of telephone lines and the trees will call each other up and say, hey, did you know that there's an insect over here? Or, hey, I got some extra nitrogen, do you want some? They communicate all kinds of things.
They communicate about poisons, they communicate about insects and diseases, they communicate about resource availability, they communicate about their stresses, their happiness or whether they're replete or not. So when you're skiing through these forests, there's still this communication that's going on between these trees in the winter. It's very much alive.
When we look at the pattern of the mycorrhizal network, when we actually dissect it and look at all the mathematical relationships, it's the same pattern as a neural network. And it's evolved for efficiency of communication. And that leads you to think, well, it's kind of like a brain. It's a highly conserved structure that's evolved because it works. If you were to look for that, then that resides at the community level.
It's not in the individual tree level, it's actually at the forest level. And then I started thinking about the materials that are moving through that network. When we look at the actual compounds, it turns out that some of them are exactly the same as neurotransmitters that are in our brains.
Intelligence is a word that we ascribe to humans and animals and we tend to associate it with nervous systems and brains. Plants don't have nervous systems and they don't have brains like we do with neurons and axons. In the traditional sense of if we restrict our thoughts of intelligence to the physical brain and the physical nervous system, well then, yeah, plants don't have that, trees don't have that, but they do have intelligence in a broader sense in that they are perceptive. and they receive information, they make decisions, they have memories, they can learn. These are all attributes that we ascribe to intelligence.
They have all those capabilities, all those skills. And they've actually been evolving those skills for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, far longer than the humans or the animals, which came on much later in evolutionary history. So their ability to carry out these life skills are highly evolved and I would say highly intelligent. The origin of that intelligence I think is much more complex and not that different than we find in human beings. As we look at these old forests more and more, we realize that these are the biggest carbon storehouses in the world, really, our old-growth forests.
I think we need to say, is that where our values lie? Is that what the most valuable use of those forests is? Is it for a product that's been valuable to British Columbians for the last hundred years?
Well, maybe that product is not going to be as valuable as keeping carbon in the ground and having clean water and clean air. I think the most important thing is to be educated and aware and then to become involved in what's happening in your local forest. Being educated and aware about forests means going into those forests, spending time in them, learning about them, being part of the forest, not being separate from it.
Then you actually start caring about the forest because you know what. It becomes part of who you are. It's important to us to know that it's there, that there's something wild there, that, you know, the wild creatures can live there and that they carry on the life that we depend on and we strive for ourselves.
Marvel at being able to have stayed in one place. So to see a 5,000-year-old tree and to think of how much it's endured and what it's able to persist under. And really there isn't much that kills a bristlecoat.
They basically just poop out and eventually topple over. There is no eternal life. People, animals, trees, trees, one day, the end will come.
We accept it as a natural cycle. It means returning to the soil. So, after one life is over, you return to nature again. And you are blessed with another life. I wonder if that cycle exists.
The death of a tree is not the death of a forest. Just like the death of a person is not the death of their community. You know, earlier today we saw a tree fall over. When that tree fell over, it started sending signals to the neighbours around it.
What we found out is that those dying trees start sending carbon. So they're sending their energy and I think their wisdom to the trees that are still alive around them. So that the community can stay whole. The death is really life in the forest, right?
It's really just a transformation of the energy from, you know, one creature to another. Okay, one minute The tree does not say that it hates you.