The Return of the Ents: The Tribe of the Trees

Image by VargasNi

The idea of trees moving and fighting humans is old, it goes back to Shakespeare's Macbeth and the prophecy of the witches

Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until

Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him.

You find the same idea again in Tolkien's "Trilogy of the Ring," with the creatures called "Ents," which attack the city of the orcs at the battle of Isengard. Both Shakespeare and Tolkien express a similar idea, that at some point too much is too much and nature rebels against human evil with all its force. To the point of seeing trees taking their roots out of the ground, and marching against human cities. 

In modern times, the idea that trees and humans are in conflict is gaining attention. The concept of "biotic regulation of the environment" proposed by Makarieva, Gorshkov, and others, is gaining ground in the world. It basically says that if we destroy the world's forests, we destroy ourselves. Not an easy position to take in a world where forests are considered "natural resources" and where the standard economic theories say that a tree has no monetary value unless it is cut down and sold as wood.

Would "humanizing" trees in fiction help people to have a more gentle attitude toward trees? Maybe, but it is not so clear. Personally, I always found depressing Tolkien's walking trees. Their representation in the 2002 movie "The Two Towers" didn't change my opinion of them. They are clumsy, ugly, and not really believable, not even in a fantasy movie. 

Recently, another take on presenting the world from the viewpoint of trees was tried by Stefano Mancuso, well-known botanist at the University of Florence, and an expert in plant neurobiology. If there is a human being on this planet who can know something about how plants think, he is the one! So, he published a novel titled "the tribe of the trees" (la tribù degli alberi). (so far available only in Italian).

I have mixed feelings about this novel. For one thing, it is a well-written story, nice to read, captivating, and with delightful characters.  The story moves onward smoothly, one event after the other, leading to the conclusion when trees discover the problem of global warming -- even though they don't know anything about atmospheric physics and have never seen a human being.  

Mancuso's trees have many "tree-like" characteristics, and they are far from being as clumsy and ugly as Tolkien's Ents. And note that there are no human beings whatsoever in the novel: it is only trees! But Mancuso's trees are, in my opinion, a little too humanized. They can move, speak to each other, and, in many ways, behave like human beings. Mancuso's forest looks very much like a modern university, with its various departments (=tribes) and their researchers, librarians, technicians, etc.

An expert in plant neurobiology, such as Mancuso, could have told us much more about how trees "think," if they do (I think they do!). But I can also understand that in novel terms it is not easy to build a story about creatures whose brain is located underground, cannot move, and perceive the external world mainly as a combination of chemical signals. The power of human imagination is immense, but it would be a truly alien novel, one that maybe only trees could read!

For me, the best human fiction piece that tries to understand trees is "The Secret of the Old Wood" (Il segreto del bosco vecchio) by Dino Buzzati (1935). It is, however, one of those masterpieces that go beyond the mere concept of narrative and touch the very fabric of the universe. If you can understand Italian, read the book or watch the movie (or both). It is a humbling experience that will make you reflect on what it means to be human. Or a tree.