The Island of Missing Trees

“History is a most fascinating subject,” Mrs. Walcott was now saying, her brogues planted firmly behind her desk, as though she needed a barricade from behind which to teach her students, all twenty-nine of them. “Without understanding our past, how can we hope to shape our future?”

She could detect other people’s sadnesses the way one animal could smell another of its kind a mile away.

So many times in her past she had suspected that she carried within a sadness that was not quite her own. In science class they had learned that everyone inherited one chromosome from their mother and one from their father—long threads of DNA with thousands of genes that built billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them. All that genetic information passed from parents to offspring—survival, growth, reproduction, the colour of your hair, the shape of your nose, whether you had freckles or sneezed in sunlight—everything was in there. But none of that answered the one question burning in her mind: was it also possible to inherit something as intangible and immeasurable as sorrow?

This year, since autumn, the climate had been erratic. At night we heard the howling of the gale and it brought to mind things untamed and unbidden, things within each of us that we were not yet ready to face, let alone comprehend. Many mornings when we woke up, we found the roads glazed with ice and blades of grass stiffened like shards of emerald. There were thousands of homeless people sleeping rough on the streets of London and not enough shelters for even a quarter of them.

Her voice cracked but persisted. There was something profoundly humiliating yet equally electrifying about hearing yourself scream—breaking off, breaking away, uncontrolled, unfettered, without knowing how far it would carry you, this untamed force that rose from inside. It was an animal thing. A wilderness thing. Nothing about her belonged to her previous self in that moment. Above all her voice. This could have been the shriek of a hawk, the soul-haunting howl of a wolf, the rasping cry of a red fox at midnight. It could have been any of them, but not the scream of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts. With their roots tangled and caught underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

No species is obliged to like another species, that’s for sure. But if you’re going to claim, as humans do, to be superior to all life forms, past and present, then you must gain an understanding of the oldest living organisms on earth who were here long before you arrived and will still be here after you have gone.

My guess is humans deliberately avoid learning more about us, maybe because they sense, at some primordial level, that what they find out might be unsettling. Would they wish to know, for instance, that trees can adapt and change their behavior with purpose, and if this is true, perhaps one does not necessarily depend on a brain for intelligence?

Arboreal-time is cyclical, recurrent, perennial; the past and the future breathe within this moment, and the present does not necessarily flow in one direction; instead, it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut us down.

Arboreal-time is equivalent to story time—and, like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines, flawless curves or exact right angles, but bends and twists and bifurcates into fantastical shapes, throwing out branches of wonder and arcs of invention.

Where there is trauma, look for signs, for there are always signs. Cracks that appear in our trunks, splits that won’t heal, leaves that display autumn colours in spring, bark that peals like unmoulted skin. But no matter what kind of trouble it may be going through, a tree always knows that it is linked to endless life forms—from honey fungus, the largest living thing, down to the smallest bacteria and archaea—and that its existence is not an isolated happenstance but intrinsic to a wider community. Even trees of different species show solidarity with one another regardless of their differences, which is more than you can say for so many humans.

Kostas felt a sense of loneliness so acute it was almost tangible. After that day, he would no longer talk about fruit bats and how important they were for the trees of Cyprus, and hence for its inhabitants. In a land besieged by conflict, uncertainty, and bloodshed, people took it for indifference, an insult to their pain, if you paid too much attention to anything other than human suffering. This was neither the right time nor the right place to carry on about plants and animals, nature in all its forms and glory, and that is how Kostas Kazantzakis slowly shut himself off, carving an island for himself inside an island, retreating into silence.

When we left the tavern… the moon, the smell of your hair, your hand in my hair, your hand in my hand, after all the horror when we realized we had only each other to depend on.

You know what I’ve been thinking since? I’ve been thinking that you are my country. Is that a strange thing to say? Without you, I don’t have a home in the world; I am a felled tree, my roots severed all around; you can topple me with the touch of a finger.

On an island plagued by years of ethnic violence and brutal atrocities, humans were not the only ones that suffered. So did we trees—and animals, too, experienced hardship and pain as their habitats came to disappear. It never meant anything to anyone, what happened to us.

It matters to me though and, so long as I am able to tell this story, I am going to include in it the creatures in my ecosystem—the birds, the bats, the butterflies, the honeybees, the ants, the mosquitoes and the mice—because there is one thing I have learned: wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.

[Kostas] asked, cautiously, “And the missing you’ve found here, were they Greeks or Turks?”

“They were islanders,” [Defne] said and there was a sharp edge to her voice then. “Islanders, like us.”

Overhearing, David interjected. “That’s the thing, my friend. You don’t know until you send the bones to a lab and get a report. When you hold a skull in your hands, can you tell if it’s a Christian or Muslim? All that bloodshed, for what? Stupid, stupid wars.”

We trees owe a lot to [ants]. So do humans, for that matter. Yet they regard ants as trivial, of no major consequence, as they do so often with things that lie beneath their feet […]

With a life span that surpasses almost any other insect, they are also the smartest in my opinion. Have you ever watched them drag away a millipede, or gang up on a scorpion, or devour a whole gecko? It is both fascinating and frightening, every step perfectly synchronized […] Everything they learn, they transfer to the next generation. Knowledge is nobody’s property. You receive it, you give it back. In this way, a colony remembers what its individual members have long forgotten.

When they subjected survivors’ seedlings to high-intensity fires in lab conditions, they discovered that trees whose ancestors had experienced hardship reacted more swiftly and produced extra proteins, which they then used to protect and regenerate their cells. Their findings were consistent with earlier studies that showed how genetically identical species of poplars growing in similar conditions responded differently to traumas, such as dry spells, depending on where they came from. Could all this mean that trees not only had some kind of memory but, also, they passed it on to their offspring?

Much as he loved the arboreal world and its complex ecosystem, was he, in some roundabout way, avoiding the day-to-day realities of politics and conflicts? A part of him understood that people, especially where he came from, might see it that way, but a bigger part of him fiercely rejected the idea. He had always believed there was no hierarchy—or there should be none—between human pain and animal pain, and no precedence of human rights over animal rights, or indeed of human rights over those of plants, for that matter. He knew many among his fellow countrymen would be deeply offended if he voiced this out loud.