Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Do trees celebrate Mother’s Day? The question would have been meaningless for most of us humans, even though we have been aware of the important role trees play for us as the suppliers of oxygen we breathe and logs we use for our houses and furniture. But the question is not totally meaningless for us now in view of the recent findings by biologists and forest researchers about the life of trees.

It goes without saying that the idea that trees can speak is not such an outrageous one, for it has been circulating in the world of mythology, art, and fiction. Thus, in Nihon-shoki, or Chronicles of Japan, we find the following statement: “In that land there were numerous deities (or spirits) which shone with a luster like that of fireflies, and evil deities which buzzed like flies. There were also trees and herbs which could speak.”¹ Turning to Shakespeare, we find the line, “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak,” in Macbeth.²

If trees can indeed speak, to whom are they speaking? Do trees talk to each other? In other words, do trees communicate with each other? The idea that trees talk to each other and communicate, though it may sound far-fetched to the modern rational mind, is actually gaining credibility and support, thanks to a small number of pioneering researchers and scientists.

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, is one such individual whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, is attracting a huge audience worldwide.³ In this fascinating book, Wohlleben expounds his idea that trees have evolved to live in cooperative and interdependent relationships with a communication network, or the “wood-wide-web,” as some prefer to call it. According to him, trees in a forest are connected to each other and communicate through underground fungal networks. A scientific term for these fungal networks is the “mycorrhizal network,” which is a network of fine, hair-like root tips of trees joined together with fine fungal filaments. Trees and fungi form a symbiotic relationship: fungi consume the sugar trees photosynthesize from sunlight, while trees absorb and consume nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients fungi collect from the soil. To communicate through the network, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pushing electrical signals.

Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia is another individual, who has done an extensive research on the mycorrhizal network.⁴ As a matter of fact, Simard sounds a lot like Dr. Pat Westerford, one of the characters in Richard Powers’ new novel, The Overstory, who discovers that a forest’s trees are all communicating, all the time, via a nuanced chemical language transmitted from root to root.⁵ Be that as it may, Simard identifies hyperlinked “hub-trees,” or “mother trees” in common parlance. Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest with the most fungal connections. With their deep roots, they draw up water and make it available to shallow-rooted seedlings. Mother trees help neighboring trees by sending them nutrients, and when the neighbors are struggling, they detect their distress signals and increase the flow of nutrients accordingly.

The conventional view of evolutionary biology would be to argue that each individual root and each fungal filament are genetically programmed by natural selection to do their job automatically. However, we cannot completely dismiss the idea as expounded by Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard that trees talk to each other and communicate. While we tend to think of a transmission of information through some signal when we talk of communication, communication, according to Humberto Maturana, a Chilean biologist known for his work on the cybernetics of living systems, is not a transmission of information. Rather, it is a coordination of behavior among living organisms through mutual structural coupling.⁶

Whether we are ready to accept the view that trees talk to each other and communicate, we cannot dismiss the presence of the intricate web of connections and interactions among living as well as non-living things that defines the world around us. Indeed, to the extent that mother trees exist with their intricate networks of communication, we cannot totally dismiss the idea that young trees around them celebrate Mother’s Day as well, albeit in a way different from us humans. Instead of dismissing the idea that trees talk to each other and communicate as outrageous, it may be about time that we start welcoming Mother’s Day for us humans as an occasion to acknowledge the interconnectedness of our lives with the trees and all the other things in the world around us. It was St. Bernard (1091-1153) who reminded us of the importance of listening to trees and stones: “You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.”⁷

1. Anesaki, Masaharu, History of Japanese Religion, Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1963, p.19.
2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act III.
3. Wohlleben, Peter, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016.
4. Simard, Suzanne, “How Trees Talk to Each Other”, TED Summit, June 2016.
5. Powers, Richard, The Overstory, New York: Norton, 2018.
6. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela, Autopoesis and Cognition, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980.
7. St. Bernard, Epistle 106.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

On April 29, 2015, Blue Origin, the spacecraft company founded by Jeff Bezos, the founder and the CEO of Amazon, became the first company to launch a rocket into space, fly it back to Earth, and re-launch it. On February 6, 2018, SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, launched the Falcon Heavy rocket into deep space, carrying the billionaire’s electric car with a mannequin named “Starman.”

Ever since 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into orbit, space exploration has been mostly carried out by government agencies such as NASA, Roscosmos, and the European Space Agency. While companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been involved in the NASA’s space program in the US as private contractors, the emergence of companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX signal the arrival of a new age of space exploration in which the initiative shifts from government agencies to private enterprises. Along with this shift will be the shift of emphasis from the science-motivated exploration of space to the profit-motivated search for celestial objects in space. In addition to Blue Origin and SpaceX, other companies such as iSpace, Moon Express, and Nanoracks are also involved in space exploration as capitalistic ventures. The idea of space exploration as capitalistic ventures was eloquently expressed by Musk, when he told at the press conference held after the successful launch of Falcon Heavy rocket: “We want a new space race. Races are exciting.”¹

Bezos’ vision is to create a real space age and a real space economy, aiming for profitability by 2020 and market dominance by 2040. Bezos is confident that once space is safe and cheap, entrepreneurs will rush to create new businesses, for the abundance of natural resources in asteroids and comets can be used to produce products in space and send the finished products back to Earth. Moon Express, an American company, is planning to send a lunar mission in 2019 to set up a “robotic village” and bring back Moon rocks to Earth in 2020 for sale. And Planetary Resources, an American company, and Deep Space Industries, an American-Luxembourg joint company, are planning to mine asteroids. As for SpaceX, it plans to send a spacecraft to Mars by 2022, with an ultimate goal of colonizing it.²

With private enterprises entering space exploration, the stage of global capitalism has expanded to include the whole universe. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the age of cosmic capitalism has arrived, in which everything that is out there in space becomes an object of profit for capitalistic ventures, including a star. In a way, the coming age of cosmic capitalism was anticipated as far back as 1943, when the businessman in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince uttered these words: “When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before anyone else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them.”³

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies, but does not prohibit owning and selling stuff extracted from them. This means that, while the Treaty says that space’s use should be “for the benefit of all peoples,” there is no guarantee that those billionaire entrepreneurs will share profits they earn from their capitalistic ventures in space. Considering that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of rich capitalists has already become a big problem under global capitalism, opening up space for capitalistic ventures under cosmic capitalism may further exasperate the wealth divide between rich and poor—something we need to ponder before we are caught up in the excitement of the arrival of a new age of space exploration.

1. As quoted in: Alan Yuhas, “The New Space Race: How Billionaires Launched the Next Era of Exploration,” The Guardian, February 9, 2018.
2. For these and other companies involved in space exploration, see: Benjamin Sutherland, “Reaching for the Stars,” The Economist, The World in 2018.
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, Chapter 13.