I have felt sometimes lately like I am descending into some kind of limbo. So much seems to be going sideways in the world at the same time, yet there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to slow or halt the decline. For the last three years, all I seem to have been able to do is to helplessly bear witness to what is happening and to make a record of it. Though I wasn’t sure it would, that investment is, at last, paying off. The rewards for my patience and persistence in bearing witness have, in fact, begun pouring in at such a rate that I can’t keep up with what I should be doing to reinvest what I am witnessing into positive change.
It all started with Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. That trees have intelligence and forests are sentient over timeframes previously imperceptible to humans has been validated scientifically confirmed what I have always known, but as a scientist-communicator could never publicly say. There has been no time in my life when I did not feel other presences in the natural world that scientific objectivity and the mechanistic world view that objectivity demanded forced me to deny. That single paradigm shift has since opened the door to a flood of new realizations that have completely altered my own worldview. And everyday it just keeps coming. The further discovery that, at great cost in energy, forests transpire far more water than is necessary for photosynthesis, and in so doing they create their own rain is just one example. What evolutionary benefits would accrue to trees for doing that? It is simple. Trees release moisture to make the world fit for more trees.
This confirms something I have believed and have been saying for decades. Forests and other natural systems are self-willed. They create the circumstances that ensure and maintain the conditions favourable to them, which just happen to be the conditions must favourable to us.
This new knowledge also confirms something else I have believed but could not convince anyone around me could be so and that is that evolution is conscious and that if conscious evolutions existed in the natural world, it was something we, too, could possess beyond just what we being done with genetic engineering.
We have the potential to consciously create the society that would best serve and sustain us but at the same time sustain the natural systems upon which we depend for everything that ultimately matters in our existence. But, as I shall report, this is only the beginning of the shake up in conventional wisdom that is shattering the edifice of the world view science has spent since the Enlightenment building. It is most interesting to observe that it is science itself that is tearing down that 500-year-old edifice.
I feel I am witness to a landmark moment in human thought – a Darwinian moment, if you will. It seems to me that the death of James Lovelock this past week put into relief the major contribution to humanity he made when he went out on his own and on a very long and slender limb to prove that the Earth itself was a single great self-maintaining organism. He has, at last, been fully vindicated.
I feel now that I have lived my entire professional life trapped in a fog of willful blindness created by my strict adherence to the principles of the scientific method, a fog which, ironically, that very same scientific method has just evaporated. Oddly enough, even though I feel that the scientific life I have lived has been a lie, my faith in that same scientific method has been vindicated. Science, in its relentless pursuit of truth, has proven that, though its methods to be right, its findings have been wrong, at least until now. Intellectually, I have been freed by that which held me captive. And with that new freedom I am discovering that it is not just a few precepts in the Earth sciences in which I have worked that have been transcended. I am waking up in the morning to a completely different world; a world in which all of the pieces of reality have been completely reordered but in ways that are somehow more accurately aligned with the reality of our living world.
1.
Forests Are Sentient and Actively Seek to Maintain and Expand the Conditions That Sustain Them
One of the great rewards for painfully but patiently bearing witness to what we are learning about our planet over the past three years, is that trees have a voice, a voice I can now hear. So, what are the trees telling us. First, trees are trying to mind us that they are the biggest and longest-living organisms on the planet, and as such they deserve our respect, a respect that has not been forthcoming.
About half of the world’s forests have been cut down since the dawn of time. That said, almost a third of the planet’s land surface is still forested. There appear to still be around three trillion trees on Earth – more than there are stars in the Milky Way. They are home to more than half the species on Earth. They manage the water cycle, store water in soil to maintain river flows and control floods. Collectively, they slow and moderate climate change. They continue to store as much carbon as humans have emitted into the global atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Most importantly, they create the conditions most favourable to maintaining themselves.
The trees are also telling us that we don’t have to get carried away with planting billions of new trees. If we leave our existing forests be, they will do what is necessary to stabilize the climate themselves. The great forests have recovered from human activity before. The lesson seems to be consistent: we can put our bulldozers and trowels away. Pack up the seed nurseries and put our money back into our pockets. In most places, to restore the world’s forests we need to do just two things: ensure that ownership of the world’s forests is invested in the people who live in them, and give nature room.
Meanwhile they have a great deal to teach us about ourselves and our world.
2.
The Fundamental Elements of Basic Meteorology Have Been Upended
Recently, what we have come to know about trees has turned traditional meteorological precepts on their head. We used to think that almost all of the moisture in the atmosphere came from evaporation from the oceans. Now we know that more than 40% of the moisture in rain comes from the land rather than the world’s oceans. We know now that much of that rain is generated by forests. Knowing this means we need to revise on our weather models and prediction and forecasting protocols.
In addition to projecting how an energized and destabilized global water cycle will function in a warming world, that new hydrology must take into account what has been discovered recently about the extraordinary ways water vapour in transported in and through the global atmosphere.
3.
Now We Know Forests Create Their Own Flying Rivers
As Fred Pearce recounts in his 2021 book, A Trillion Trees: Restoring Our Forests by Trusting in Nature, it is been held for decades that great forests like the Amazon create their own rain, the process by which that happens has never be satisfactorily explained. Until now.
Antonio Nobre, a climate scientist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus was intrigued by a theory that had been circulating among climate scientists that the Amazon rainforest was South America’s biggest rain generator. Those who entertained this theory hypothesized that most of the clouds delivering rain across the continent contained moisture that had been taken up and recycled back into the air several times by the forest’s trees. Nobre believed, moreover, that this moisture was carried by a concentrated flow of wind recently identified by meteorologists as the South American low-level jet, which blew across the Amazon at up to nearly 200 kilometres an hour. Noting its similarity to the giant Amazon River over which it flowed, Nobre called the moisture laden jet a “river of vapour. Later meteorologist José Marengo, coined the term “flying rivers.”
It was a legendary bush pilot named Gerard Moss who proved the theory. After clocking more than 700 hours flying and collecting air samples about ten metres above the canopy, analysis of the water vapour in the air samples proved that the water vapour flowing in the low-level jet came from the trees. Moss reported that at one moment he would be flying under blue skies and then suddenly out of nowhere the humidity would shoot up for ten or fifteen minutes and then drop again. It was then he discovered that he was flying in and out of the flying river. But Moss also found the river in the sky to be temperamental. Sometimes the flow was fast and concentrated. At other times it spread or meandered. Sometimes it would become three kilometers high and hundreds of kilometers wide.
On-going research demonstrated that as much as half of the moisture in the flying river, and therefore half the rain falling over the Amazon, had transpired from the rainforest. There was now no question. The world now knew that the rainforest really did, in large measure, create its own rainfall.
The data Moss produced was compelling, to say the least. The data showed that the flying river Moss followed from Belém to Sao Paulo was transporting more than 100,000 acre-feet of water a second – enough in a day to supply the 20 million residents of Sao Paulo, South America’s largest city, for almost four months. In that journey across the rainforest the rainfall in the Amazon was being recycled, not once, but typically five or six times. Recent serious droughts that have caused devastating water shortages in Sao Paulo demonstrate how important halting the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is to the future of Brazil. It is the trees that keep water flowing in flying rivers.
Since then, flying rivers have been found to exist widely in association with remaining intact forests all over the world.
One teleconnection inevitably leads to another. Because of improved satellite imagery and analysis, we have known for more than a decade now of the presence of what are called atmospheric rivers, great rivers of water vapour sometimes thousands of kilometers long and hundreds of kilometers long that, upon making landfall, can create flooding of a magnitude never before experienced in our time. The relationship, if there is one, between atmospheric rivers and flying forest rivers is unknown. We still have much, much more to learn about our planet’s accelerating global water cycle and what its dynamics will be in an increasingly warmer world.
4.
Rain Follows the Trees
There was once a theory, promoted by boosters and land speculators wanting to open us the arid parts of the American West, that “rain follows the plow.” The lie here was that if you simply tilled the land, rainfall would increase turning what was near desert into productive farmland. The scheme was a disaster because rain does not follow the plow. It follows the trees.
5.
There Is Hydro-Climatic Tele-Connection Between the World’s Forests
Just as the Amazon flying river can deliver more rain inland than at the coast, so do the forests of the Congo Basin. Coast cities such as Pointe-Noir, get around 40 inches of rain each year, whereas more deeply inland at Kisangani, more than 60 inches of rain fall each year.
The same pattern holds when travelling inland from the Arctic across the great northern Boreal forests. The recycled moisture fills great Siberian rivers such as the Ob, Yenisei and Lena. A traveler moving upriver will discover precipitation doubling every 1200 miles. The same is true on the Mackenzie River in Northern Canada. Published climate records show that annual precipitation increases from six inches where the Mackenzie enters the Arctic Ocean to twelve inches at Fort McPherson in the northern Northwest Territories, to seventeen inches at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca River. There is no ocean to provide this rain – but there are trees.
6.
The Loss of a Forest in One Part of the World Can Lead to Devastating Changes in Climatic Conditions in Other Parts of the World
Forests also sustain weather patterns far beyond the paths of flying rivers. They do so by influencing how energy moves around in the atmosphere. It is now thought that the Amazon rainforest maintains rainfall on the other side of the equator in the U.S. Midwest grain belt and snowfall in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Nevada supplies both the cities of California and the irrigated farms of the Central Valley, a major food source for the entire continent.
Models show that complete deforestation of the Amazon would reduce precipitation by a fifth in faraway Oregon and Washington, causing a halving in the winter snowpack of the Sierra Nevada while at the same time reducing rainfall in the lower Midwest in the spring and summer; and do likewise in the upper Midwest in winter and spring. These long-distance influences, often called teleconnections, are a ripple effect from the drying of air over the northern Amazon, projected around the global by patterns of winds in the upper atmosphere known as Rossby waves.
This is a particularly disturbing teleconnection given that it suggests a direct link between deforestation in the Amazon and loss of snowpack in the Sierras. That is exactly what is already occurring. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada has been in persistent decline exacerbating what is becoming the rapid aridification of much of the American West, an aridification that if it persists will lead to desertification.
7.
The Threat of Loss of the Global Forest May Be a Greater Immediate Threat than Climate Change
The new view is that the loss of moisture recycling as a result of deforestation may well be a more immanent threat to the stability and sustainability of human presence on Earth than climate change, to which it also contributes.
8.
A New Form of Hydro-Diplomacy as a Vehicle for World Peace
A new image of the global hydrological cycle is emerging. The implications are important. In much of the world, many of the most important regions of agricultural productivity, from regions in China, to the African Sahel and the Argentine pampas, all depend upon distant forests for their rainfall. Forests are also the water source for nineteen of the world’s most populous cities.
In Northern China, 80% of the rain that falls on its farmland and its cities is generated by the forests of Scandinavia and Siberia in a process that involves several different stages and takes six months or more.
Given these new realizations, it is possible to imagine wars over generation and control of flying rivers. That said, the discovery of their importance also offers opportunities. Future hydro-diplomacy to maintain and augment flying rivers could generate new potential for transboundary cooperation, with negotiations between countries for the restoration of forests upwind to keep the rains falling and the water flowing downstream. To protect water supplies for Beijing, China could ask Russia to expand its northern forests. The countries of the Congo basin might be paid to keep their forests intact as a means of ensuring the flow of the Nile from Ethiopia through Sudan to Egypt. The United States might pay Brazil to stop deforestation in the Amazon as a means of halting aridification in its southwest.
In this way, international cooperation on maintaining forests could be a vehicle for ensuring and maintaining global peace.
9.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Was Only Half Right
There are much larger implications with respect to what we are learning about the function and value of forests. There are ethical moral lessons to be learned also. What the trees are teaching us demonstrate that Charles Darwin was only half right in his theories of evolution. While he was clearly right about natural selection, evolution is not all about competition, red in tooth and claw. Peer-reviewed science demonstrates that it is cooperation as opposed to competition that was the origin of not just sentience but intelligence in mature forests – and later in us. This realization ranks with Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection as a landmark breakthrough in Earth science thinking.
How Suzanne Simard and others arrived at this hypothesis also marks a breakthrough in how we should view the world. They have proved to us by way of peer-reviewed science that a forest really is more than a collection of trees. Trees, as Simard points out, are capable of perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. Forests really are a web of interdependence, linked by systems of underground channels, where trees perceive and connect and relate with one another by way of an elaborate filigree of roots and fungi and the millions of living things that inhabit the soil. From this we see that forests are most certainly not simply inert standing wood as forestry companies would have us believe.
Forests possess an intelligence that can no longer be denied. They are wired for wisdom, sentience and healing. Our conventional wisdom is inadequate. Yes, we should be concerned about how we can save trees; but we should also be far more aware of how trees can save us.
10.
Our Mechanistic World View Has Lost Its Foundation
Knowing what we know now, we can never look at the world in the same way again. We are on the cusp of great change. After centuries of dominance, we are on the way to replacing the mechanistic worldview with one that is life-affirming, based on the deep recognition of humanity’s interconnectedness and not competition with the living Earth.
We cannot deny either, however, that we are at present at a crossroads. We have a long way to go and there is much to do if we are to make it through this bottleneck in the human journey and we are running out time.
Amitav Ghosh is right. Much, if not most, of humanity today lives as colonists once did – viewing the Earth as though it were an inert entity that exists primarily to be exploited and profited from, with the aid of technology and science. Yet even the sciences are now struggling to keep pace with the hidden forces that are manifesting themselves in climatic events of unprecedented violence and consequence. As these events intensify, they add ever greater resonance to voices that have stubbornly continued to insist that non-humans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that nonhuman voices be restored to our stories.
The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it.
Conclusion
Hope is One of the Rewards for Painfully but Patiently and Persistently
Bearing Witness
In its simplicity and power, the idea of protecting “all our relatives” may well be the key to creating bridges between peoples across the globe. The re-emergence of this simple concept could mark the most important reset in human understanding of the planet upon which we live since the mechanistic worldview came into existence during the renaissance 500 years ago.
In this context, I return to what I have been saying since Barry Lopez gave me the idea in 2019 in Horizon, the final work in his lifetime. What we urgently need now is a second, new and very different, Enlightenment. But no Enlightenment can proceed without a renaissance. We, all of us, need to be that that renaissance. We, all of us, need to be that new and wiser beginning, that next great story.
A better world is possible. Let us create that world. But we need to hurry. We are witnessing a great bonfire of our forest heritage. Things are being lost that have not yet been found. We need to find them before they, and we, are gone.
I have been greatly rewarded with stunning new knowledge and a changed world view as a result of patiently awaiting and absorbing new scientific knowledge. One of the larger rewards for painfully but persistently bearing witness to what has happened to our planet, particularly during the course of the pandemic is the faith that humanity can and will extinguish the bonfire of our own vanities and that humanity still has time to create a bright future. My challenge, and my life’s work in the remaining time I have left is to translate the hard won-rewards of patiently bearing witness into effective action.
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Robert (Bob) Sandford has 45 years of experience interpreting natural and human history for general audiences. In the last two decades his focus has been on translating scientific research outcomes into language the average person can understand and that decision-makers at all levels can use to craft timely and durable public and private sector policies. To this end, Bob is also senior advisor on water issues for the Interaction Council of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, a global public policy forum composed of more than 30 former Heads of State including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, U.S. President Bill Clinton and the former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland.
Bob is a Fellow of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan and a Fellow of the Biogeoscience Institute at the University of Calgary. He is a senior policy advisor for the Adaptation to Climate Change team at Simon Fraser University and is also a member of the Forum for Leadership on Water (FLOW), a national water policy research group centred in Toronto. In 2011, Bob was honoured with the Premier’s award for his collaboration on the Northwest Territories water stewardship strategy.
Robert is author or co-author of a number of books on a range of Canadian and global water issues, including Cold Matters: The State & Fate of Canada’s Snow and Ice; Flood Forecast: Climate Risk & Resilience in Canada; The Columbia River Treaty: A Primer, The Climate Nexus: Water, Food, Energy and Biodiversity and Storm Warning: Water & Climate Security in a Changing Canada. In 2013, Alberta Ventures magazine recognized Bob as one of the year’s 50 most influential Albertans.