Are Trees Conscious ? – Grounded Mystic

Trees Conscious ? The Hidden Life of Trees’s

Each of us have our own experiences and feelings which define what we consider real. That reality can be our north star to our individual purpose and life when we accept it’s validity for ourselves.

Peter Wohl-lenben’s book truth’s resonates with me even though this forester’s 36 chapters of The Hidden Life of Trees’s 288 pages are a little detail laden.

How many people are prejudged against non-human consciousness in trees: Many, perhaps most? – Human beings, including scientists, seem to resist accepting that all life has intelligence: can think, feel, and communicate.

1. time-scale prejudice -we are generally blind to actions that unfold over very long, drawn out, slow time scales.
2. Since trees have no brains – surely no brains = no minds – no learning or memory.

Do you know how old trees can be?

As people, we easily lose sight of what is truly old for a tree,”

Trees in plantations or in urban settings are planted in direct sunlight and watered and nurtured by gardeners. They grow fast and tall so that, by the age of 100 or so, they are ready for felling.

Australia’s King Billy Pine tree can live over 1,200 years and can clone itself. While the oldest individual tree or stem on the site now may be 1000 to 2000 years old, the organism itself has been living there continuously for 10,500 years. People had assumed a Spruce in Sweden was about 2 thousand years old.

Testing the roots showed it is more than 95 hundred years old. Trees electric impulses in their roots move at the slow rate of 1/3 and inch per second instead of the milliseconds of humans.. Yet why do they have electric impulses at all?

Trees need to communicate and electric impulses are but one of their myriad means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell, taste and touch.

Four decades ago researchers noticed that when a giraffe starts eating a African acacia within minutes they pump toxic substances within their leaves. the tree also releases a chemical into the air that signals the threat. As other trees – within a 100 yards – “smell” the warning, they begin to pump the bitter taste to their leaves. If the giraffes went upwind, they could find acacias close by that had no idea of the danger.

As we humans understand more we may behave with more kindness.