Hiking on a familiar trail through a tiny patch of secondary growth forest in Snohomish County, Washington, 120 acres called Southwest County Park. Several places on the trail, my footfalls echo as if the ground is a hollow wooden shell. Beneath my feet I imagine ten thousand years of compacted, root-bound treefall.
There is a larger presence here. Not in a mystical or spiritual sense, but concrete, palpable. The space around me is alive. It is not inert matter. And it is not merely a collection of individual lifeforms piled together, each striving, in concert or in competition, to satisfy their own evolved needs. There is a larger, integrated sentience here. My movement along the path is being registered, felt, experienced. The forest is aware.
Biologists have only recently started to scratch the surface in terms of understanding the complex interactive exchange of information among the trees themselves, much of it underground and mediated though dense networks of fibrous mycelium, and above ground through a variety of air-born substances that signal the activity of insects, birds, and other animals. Trees even sense the diurnal patterns of shadow from their neighbors and avoid growing in directions that would put them in competition for limited sunshine, a phenomenon called crown shyness. Despite all this, it still sounds strange for me to say that the forest is aware, because I have to use my own conscious experience as the benchmark for awareness.
What would it mean for a forest to be sentient? Where, what, or who would be the locus of awareness? Is awareness, as a concept, even applicable in this case? Is the idea of awareness too limited, too diminutive, too small? Might there be a sentience far more comprehensive, something that so far exceeds the limits of human comprehension that the notion of comprehension itself has no referent, no purchase, no meaning? All of the questions I could possibly ask come from within my limited primate perspective.