Can trees talk to each other? In fact, this is quite real. Scientists call this secret connection between trees the Wood Wide Web, because the exchange of information between our green brothers really resembles the Internet.
Forester Peter Wohlleben explores this fascinating theory in his best-selling book, The Secret Life of Trees. For more than twenty years, the author was an employee of the forestry in Germany, and before leaving this job he decided to implement all his environmental ideas. Currently, he is working on the problems of the ecology of the country's forestry and, due to his duty, lives for months among the trees, solving their secrets.
So what did he learn? According to Peter Wohleben, the forest is a social network. The trees in it resemble human families, where parents live with their children, communicate with them, support them during growth, share nutrients with those who are sick and weak.
Through the roots, the trees serve the sugar solution even to the stumps left over from their cut down comrades, keeping them alive for centuries. They are able to warn each other of impending danger. The author is convinced: knowing how amazing and rich wooden life is, it is no longer possible to walk through the forest just like that, without respect.
How do trees communicate with each other? Their roots are responsible for communication. They are formations resembling the brain in everything: at least the processes occurring in the roots and in the human brain are very similar. Just like our nerves, chemical and electrical signals are transmitted along the fibers of the roots, and with them information.
For example, a mother tree can use its roots to "check" whether a small tree nearby is her cub. At the same time, small trees are fed by their wooden mothers in the same way as human children. The most real families. “Trees care about each other, and therefore a lonely tree is often doomed,” says the author.
In addition to roots, terrestrial "fungal networks" are used, a kind of "distributed intelligence", which also transmit information from one tree to another. Our green brothers can count, learn and memorize.
Thus, we come to the conclusion that the world of plants is more complex than it is generally believed in official science and our inert, established worldview. As Samuel Coleridge once wrote, "everything lives its own life, and we are all one Life."
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Standing in our hierarchy of "intelligence and animation" at one of the lowest levels, trees sing, dance, avoid predators, and also give people hidden tips and advice, strength and protection. We can talk for a long time about the World Tree as the basis of the universe. And that the worship of the Slavs for trees should not be taken literally: having chosen the oak as the center for performing religious rituals, people prayed not to him, but to the great power that created this oak.
This means that the forces of the cosmos are alive and it is necessary to exist in harmony with them. What did our ancestors know when they bowed to the ground in a crop field or when they talked to every tree in the garden? Considering nature as a living organism, they felt themselves to be an integral part of it, dissolved in it, saw in it the same part of God as they themselves, respected every link of this large system. And nature paid them the same.
Let's remember that in nature, as in technology, there is a concept of total dependence. All elements of the integral system are connected to each other, and if at least one falls out, then the whole mechanism stops working.
Elena Muravyova for neveroyatno.info