Media contributions
1Media contributions
Title https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556014067165 Impact / scope International Media name/outlet Facebook Media type Web Country/Territory Finland Date 22.02.2024 Description Forests make life on Earth possible by nurturing biodiversity, regulating water quality, mitigating climate fluctuations, affording habitats for pollinators, and supplying food, fibre, medicine, shelter, well-being, and other forms of sustenance (FAO and UNEP 2020, 162–163). As the global population surges past eight billion people, however, more and more of the planet’s natural resources are required to satisfy human needs at the expense of other life forms. Global deforestation and ecosystem degradation continue to accelerate, with an estimated four-hundred million hectares of forests converted to agricultural and other uses since 1990 (FAO and UNEP 2020, xvi). Yet, apart from their ecological importance, old forests have aesthetic, cultural, emotional, and spiritual value because of the powerful capacities that reside within them and that can, through close observation, remind us of the origins of life on Earth. Forests are natural and cultural nexuses. Ancient trees in particular are connected to personal and collective histories and identities. As old forests disappear, the cultural heritage associated with them risks becoming extinct (UNESCO 2023).
Parallel to the increasing threats to forest vitality worldwide lies a burgeoning body of research revealing how trees cope intelligently with environmental changes. The science of plant cognition examines attributes of communication, memory, kinship, and altruism in forests (Baluška, Gagliano, and Witzany 2018; Baluška and Levin 2016). Described as ‘sentinels’ (Ribeiro and da Silva Torres 2018) and ‘mother trees’ (Simard 2021), wise old trees recall ecological experiences and transmit their memories to subsequent generations to enhance the resilience of offspring. The imparting of experiential knowledge from older to younger trees through memory networks highlights the importance of age and diversity to long-term ecosystem health (Galviz, Ribeiro, and Souza 2020). More specifically, ubiquitous underground fungal systems known as mycorrhizal networks facilitate forest memory through the root-soil interface, or rhizosphere. Making memory and other capacities in trees possible, mycorrhizae are regarded by scientists as responsible for “the diverse intelligence present among humans and forests” (Simard 2018, 197).
The term ‘sentient’ in our proposal’s title conveys the view that forests not only have the ability to think and respond but also to feel and remember. In our proposed research, we understand the concept of ‘sentience’ as inclusive of the myriad capacities of trees and other plants for sensing, communication, behaviour, memory, and other percipient qualities associated with intelligence. Indeed, the premise of sentience has begun to permeate popular thinking about plants, forming the basis, for instance, of the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (Powers 2018) as well as influential works of narrative non-fiction such as The Songs of Trees (Haskell 2017) and Finding the Mother Tree (Simard 2021). At the same time, the notion continues to provide an inspiring basis internationally for a range of creative practices involving communication and collaboration between people, plants, trees, and forests (Ryan 2017). In Southern Finland, as a case in point, artist Annette Arlander (2019) has developed a series of performances with shrubs and trees in order to address the question of how to collaborate with more-than-human beings.
In Northern Finland—comprising Finnish Lapland and the provinces of Kainuu and Northern Ostrobothnia including the urban areas of Oulu and Rovaniemi—the harvesting of old trees for timber and other materials has resulted in the widespread decline of ancient boreal forests. Industrial-scale forestry has led to the homogenisation of forest structures and the reduction of ecologically salient features, such as large old trees, characteristic of healthy northern ecosystems (Aakala, Kulha, and Kuuluvainen 2023). Moreover, the impacts of climate change on Northern Finland’s forests are especially harrowing. During the cold months, snowfall has declined markedly while summer temperatures are becoming more unpredictable. Climate disturbance is predicted to significantly alter the composition of forests and the distribution of species, fracturing the long-standing interdependencies between people and trees in the country’s north. A report by The Finnish Climate Change Panel warns that Finnish Lapland—and the Rovaniemi area in particular—will experience catastrophic flooding as a consequence of climate change (Salonen 2021). Much about trees and their sentient attributes, additionally, has been forgotten or repressed over the course of Western industrialisation—the root of our present climate emergency.
To address ecological crisis in Northern Finland, therefore, it is time for municipal governments and the general public to rethink policies and philosophies allowing the massive destruction of old forests for economic reasons. In this context, our proposed project, ‘Gifts from the Sentient Forest’, promises a multidisciplinary intervention that will promote new perspectives on the region’s forests and the rich cultural legacies surrounding them. At the project’s heart is ‘forest sentience’, a concept with significant implications for the current era of environmental disruption. As biologists observe, understandings of forests as sentient systems are crucial to addressing the ecological and social challenges of the present (Popkin 2019). Viewing forest sentience as a means to redress biospheric disruption, researchers František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso (2020) highlight the idea’s “profound consequences not just for future climate scenarios but also for understanding [humanity’s] role and position within the Earth’s biosphere” (1). Engaging diverse audiences in learning about the sentience of forests has the potential to transform historically engrained perceptions of trees and other botanical forms as merely economic commodities, natural resources, or genetic repositories.
Producer/Author John Charles Ryan and Francis Joy URL https://www.sentientforestproject.com/project Persons Francis Joy, John Charles Ryan
Keywords
- Forest sentience
- Trees
- Climate change
- Ecology
- Bio cultural heritage
- Human-nature relationships
- Environmental policy