In a densely forested area it is often still possible to see the sky from ground-level because trees leave a space between themselves and their immediate neighbors, a phenomenon called crown avoidance. Every child learns that leaves (and needles) are able to orient themselves based on the direction of sunlight, and a common elementary school class demonstration of this involves placing a newly spouted bean or squash plant near the window in the morning and watching as the whole plant bends itself toward the light through the course of the day. Crown avoidance, however, involves something more than this simple photophilic response; it emerges, instead, from a sophisticated kind of plant intelligence. Leaves can detect light reflecting off the leaves of a neighboring tree and can differentiate between leaf-reflected sunlight and raw (and even tree-filtered) sunshine. Once a neighbor’s leaf-shine is detected, the tree stops growing in that direction. The neighboring tree is, of course, doing the exact same thing, and the result is a thin, puzzle-piece demilitarized zone that snakes its way through the treetops.
What is interesting here is that crown avoidance is not an example of tree altruism. The trees are not bound by an egalitarian social contract, nor are they observing an arboreal reciprocity norm or engaged in some kind of evolutionary quid pro quo. The trees are simply responding to the contingencies of their local environment, and they don’t want to invest energy growing in an unproductive direction; the strategy of doing your own thing while simultaneously not getting in each other’s way allows an entire forest to flourish. Trees, it turns out, are libertarians.
No, that’s not quite right. Libertarianism assumes some form of top-down control and a society structured by power relations. The freedom that a libertarian worships is the freedom to act on self-interest within the system. A system of structured power relationships is necessary in order for the idea of self-interest to have any real meaning. To speak of the subtle interrelationships in a forest as if they comprise a system is metaphor bordering on simple anthropomorphism. Without top-down control, without a system of authority and restriction, self-interest has no target beyond the satisfaction of momentary needs. And, in the absence of a system of control and restriction, there remains nothing to prevent or limit the pursuit of authentic needs. In a traditional foraging society, for example, where access to essential resources is direct and unmediated, the idea of self-interest carries very little weight. What does it mean to say that I have a self-interest in hunting antelope when the only thing that prevents me from doing so is the antelope themselves? I mean, I could say that, but why would I? Why would I need to include the “self” part if my interests and your interests are not in competition with each other. I want to hunt antelope today and you want to fish, and there is no reason for me to distinguish my interest from yours—at least no reason to assert that I have a right to pursue my interest. Civilization, however, involves a complex hierarchical structuring of disparity. All civilizations run on restriction of, and violently enforced differential access to, resources. Self-interest emerges only when it is in competition with the interests of others, and competition emerges only when limited resources are coupled with a system of unequal access and distribution.
Trees are not negotiating with an externally-imposed system of power and restriction. Trees, in pursuing access to sunlight while avoiding their neighbors who are doing the same, are not libertarians. If anything, trees are anarchists.