While watching the broadcast of Ursula Heise speaking on "Environmental Futures and the Agency of Trees," a keynote delivered from Los Angeles for a conference in Warsaw (!), I got a sense of the larger swell of interest in trees of which I am a part and some questions about it. I suppose I should have known that, following in the footsteps of Critical Animal Studies, a field which challenged the boundary between humans and other animals, there is now a field of Critical Plant Studies (though some prefer to call it Literary Botany or Phytocriticism). Heise thinks this is affected by growing awareness of the new science of plants but noted earlier sources, like hippie ideas about the Secret Lives of Trees and hallucinogenics, and looked back farther still to artistic engagements with tree-rings as encounters with a greater-than-human longevity.
Critical animal studies furnished the framework for the most interesting question in the Q&A, too. Environmentalists have for some time known that some endangered species tug at our heartstrings more than many, and the phrase "Charismatic Megafauna" was coined for them. (Cuteness is another factor.) Wikipedia synthesizes:
Charismatic megafauna are animal species that are large—of the relevant category that they represent —with symbolic value or widespread popular appeal, and are often used by environmental activists to gain public support for environmentalist goals. Examples include Bengal tigers, African lions, elephants, blue whales, humpback whales, giant pandas, bald eagles, California condors, harp seals, and penguins, among countless others. In this definition, animals such as penguins or bald eagles can be considered megafauna because they are among the largest animals within the local animal community of pertinence, and they disproportionately affect their environment. The vast majority of charismatic megafauna species are threatened and endangered by overhunting, poaching, the black market trade, climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species, and many more causes...Critical animal studies scholars have noted a similar partiality in literary and artistic engagement with animals, suggesting that the human/animal boundary is stretched for the charismatic megafauna - and only for them, anthropomorphizing them and further othering the rest of the animal world. The questioner asked whether, within the larger world of plants, we oughtn't to see trees as "Charismatic Megafauna" presenting the same problems.
It's a great question - Heise reported encountering it before in a discussion with a specialist on liverwort (above) - and a troubling one! There is no question that trees have "charisma" for humans like me - not all trees but many of them, big and old trees especially but younger ones too. Discoveries about the sentience and sociability of trees connect to the enveloping aura of forests, too. But aren't all of these, the question suggested, still ways of prizing traits that humans have long thought distinguish us from the rest of nature, probably misrecognizing even the species we resonate with, too?
In my defense, I've been entranced by plants for decades, and not just by trees. My impulse has always been that we are more plant-like than we like to think, and the emerging understanding of plants sensing and reacting and communicating and collaborating doesn't so much undermine that as make me think our own sensing and reacting and communicating and collaborating are probably different - less "human" - than we think they are. Things to ponder!
