Shattering through sidewalk cement and lunging from the underworld of soil, trees are reminders of an Earth without us—a tale that began with their initial growth about 380 million years ago. If you traveled to New Zealand’s Waipoua Forest today, you could lay your hand along the bark of the Ta-ne Mahuta, a conifer that holds stories stretching beyond 2,000 years. Or, you can simply take a trip into your backyard—palms, pines, oaks, and trees of all kinds tell fascinating tales everywhere they grow. In his newest work, author and forester Peter Wohlleben discusses the inner workings of humans and plant life, compelling all readers to treat other creatures with kindness, courtesy, and equality.

It’s a common misconception that if humans were dropped onto some untouched stretch of land (and didn’t devolve into a Lord of the Flies dystopia), they would fare terribly. After all, where are all the charging ports on a deserted island? Though our political situation (both on and off barren islands) may be tenuous, countless studies are beginning to prove that the state of our senses isn’t as perilous—and it may even be equitable to that of animals. Our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and even touch, which were typically active in natural environments, aren’t absent, they’ve simply transformed to help us maneuver an increasingly artificial world.

The shape-shifting phenomenon of the human senses is apparent everywhere. For instance, picture a world without the color blue. This may be a difficult reality to envision, akin to imagining the Earth without a sky, but the 19th century thinker Lazarus Geiger saw things quite differently. Leafing through the pages of various ancient documents, including those of the Grecian poet Homer, Geiger saw a blue-less world. Contrary to what we may believe as we stroll and sit beneath an often baby blue sky, some of our predecessors’ languages held no label for the color. According to Geiger, a word for the hue grew in popularity only after people used it in the fabric industry. This doesn’t mean that many of our ancestors inhabited a pale world, though; rather, without a notion of blue, their sight was simply more sensitive to green. The atmosphere which engulfed them sharpened their senses to particularly relevant stimuli, blinding them to the excess, just as our own senses do now.

Similarly, the abilities of every living creature, from humans and trees to mice and bumblebees, fit snugly within their particular situation. Just as the sight of falcons is laser-focused to help them catch their prey, the eyesight of contemporary humans is situated to their target as well, which ironically, also happens to be a mouse—only, not the living kind but the kind that’s attached to a computer.

According to research on the recently deteriorating eyesight of young people in Taiwan, the number of near-sighted people ballooned as the world grew swamped by screens and similar stimuli. But, as the author discovered from his own experience with failing eyesight, increasing time outside, in areas that require you to peer up from your laptop, smartphone, or textbook, may give your eyesight a magnifying boost. The benefits might be hard to see at first, but over time, your senses might actually respond to your surroundings—whether that’s an office, a classroom, or a vast woodsy scene.

Humans may not be able to listen at 50,000 Hz like a dog or eat with 35,000 taste buds like a horse, but our abilities don’t fall that short of those found in other creatures—in fact, they make us close cousins. Though contemporary humans often forget to close the screen, glance out the window, and experience the many textures of nature, each of us can still refresh our senses in the surroundings in which they began.

If you aren’t awe-struck standing at the foot of a stretching redwood or a sprawling beech tree, perhaps you simply aren’t looking high enough? Or maybe, you’re just not seeing deeply enough? Peeling one’s eyes beyond bark to witness the nuanced experience of the everyday tree allows one to recognize an organism of long-held significance and nearly human tendencies. Like ballerinas, beech trees maintain their balance as they sense their crowns, the uppermost section of branches and leaves, tilting, yielding new wood on their sides to restabilize their growth. The deeper you go into the metaphorical and literal roots of trees, the more spectacular your findings become.

Since they first sprouted from dirt about 380 million years ago, trees have existed as crucial contributors to their environments. As forests gradually sprang into existence long ago, trees sucked the air clean of carbon dioxide and replaced it with oxygen, propelling the growth of gargantuan insects—imagine a centipede that’s 10 feet long (or maybe don’t, if that freaks you out). Compared to today’s 21 percent concentration of atmospheric oxygen, yesteryear’s 35 percent made it much easier for bugs to grow to horrifying sizes which are simply (and thankfully) impossible now. Suffice to say, trees both extracted and added to their environments in reality-altering ways.

Beyond what they continue to give to their environments, trees also display highly symbiotic relationships with one another and appear similar to those of animals and humans. Though the outer layer of a tree contains the mechanisms with which water is funneled toward the top, the majority of what you see when you stare at that redwood simply isn’t living. If you did a bit of digging, though, making your way toward the creature’s roots, you would get a much different story. A tree’s roots house a lot of action; they help the organism funnel sugars to other trees and pass along important cautionary signals when there’s some kind of intruder chewing on their leaves. Think of it like texting for plants. Even more shockingly, scientist and professor at the University of Bonn, František Baluška, discovered that plant life, including that of trees, experiences sensations of pain, triggering the release of mechanisms to fight against the blight.

Another pair of scientists, András Zlinszky and Anders Barfod, made a similarly fantastical discovery, one that led them to think that trees perhaps have something akin to a heartbeat. After witnessing various trees stretch their arms into the sky and lower them back into themselves every few hours, they were intrigued. Why were the trees doing this? What was their purpose? Aided by other findings that a tree’s trunk often follows a similar pattern, growing larger and then smaller by a tiny amount, the scientists proposed a possible answer to a mystery as dense as their beloved woods—an explanation for how trees transport water from their roots and toward the waiting hands of leaves.

Despite vast experimentation, these findings are often contentious in the science community; they seem far too spectacular to be true. And yet, the trees still continue to move, coaxed by a force humans may never get to the root of, however hard they dig.

Humans and their natural environments exert a highly complex, interwoven influence upon each other. Imagine one of the Earth’s first prehistoric campouts, located in South Africa’s 1.7-million-year-old Wonderwerk Cave. Research carried out at this early site reveals a world that’s already dependent upon nature’s gift of trees, just in a slightly different form. Fire fueled a lot of what early Homo sapiens needed to survive at the time, providing them with the heat they required to make food edible and to avoid freezing to death. While humans’ companionship with nature looks much different now (and most contemporary fires are used to roast marshmallows rather than insects), their union is just as impactful as it was at Wonderwerk.

Take a look around your house, patio, yard, or garden. Perhaps your space is bedecked with an elegant array of succulents, herbs, lilies, and maybe even an orchid or two. Beyond being simple, beautiful decorations for your own delight, many plants actually respond to their brush with humans. If you’re an avid gardener, you may have heard of a little thing called “thigmomorphogenesis.” Essentially, this occurs when young trees or tomato plants sense touch from a human, an animal, or wind, inevitably lengthening the time of their growth in order to bolster their stem’s strength. Studies show that some plants respond so well to touch that they’re actually better off for it.

The bog orchid, on the other hand, doesn’t care for human touch; rather, it’s far more interested in human smell. Growing throughout the region of the North American woods, an area without many bees, the bog orchid crafts its own variant of human smell to lure in mosquitoes for its pollination—a pretty scheming trick for a simple orchid to deploy.

But you don’t need to be an ecologist, a botanist, or even a gardener to know that a brief stroll between the trees is hugely beneficial for your health. When trees send signals to each other through their chemicals, humans walking in their midst are inevitably impacted. As long as those trees are typical to the particular area and aren’t newly planted, walkers will find their blood pressure decreasing and their immune systems strengthening as they meander under their leaves.

In an even more astounding discovery, research from the University of Chicago found that people don’t need to be enveloped in forests or submerged beneath trees to reap their organic goodness. Simply having one nearby is more than enough. In a wide study of Toronto neighborhoods, researchers concluded that areas that boasted 11 more trees than others hosted healthier inhabitants. In fact, these people were so healthy that the benefits they received were similar to the impact of a $20,000 lift in one’s yearly paycheck. So if your scenery is laden with concrete rather than greenery and you don’t have a forest in sight, it might do you some good to get to planting—even just a single leafy fellow might be a happy, healthful companion.

Even the most ardent nature-goers and home gardeners might be apprehensive to say that plants are somehow conscious. They may grow tall, respond to touch, and even “text” each other through their chemicals, but surely these traits don’t constitute the uniquely human phenomenon of consciousness? Equally cautious, the scientific community fails to recognize the increasing body of research that implies the opposite. Plants and humans are more alike than many people expect—a fact that might make you think twice before you forget to water your plant (yet again).

In his work of ecological philosophy entitled The Life of Plants, the thinker Emanuele Coccia aligns himself with this novel view, stating that the human claim to species superiority lacks an adequate scientific basis. As the author notes, “the ordering system we have today is not scientific but rather influenced by cultural, historical, and religious values,” and should be replaced by one that is more equitable and less inclined to view other species as inferior. Humans must learn to reevaluate themselves within nature as members on a horizontal plane rather than a vertical ladder.

The experimental work of scientist František Baluška provides additional justification for this claim, testing the behaviors of Venus fly traps through sedation and discovering a mechanism on South American vines that works a lot like an eyeball. Despite these revolutionary findings, Baluška’s work on what the author calls the “self-awareness of plants” has failed to gain popularity. According to him, words that imply that tricky notion of consciousness are out-of-bounds for plants simply because they’ve been used far too often for humans and animals. Plants might have some kind of consciousness, but the word itself is too cumbersome to employ as it’s usually reserved for human life—which can be harmful for every creature involved.

Journalists like George Monbiot encourage people to use new words to talk about plants, working to cultivate a more nuanced knowledge and genuine feeling of goodwill toward those green companions. Good-intentioned though they may be, lobbyists in Germany often do the exact opposite of what Monbiot recommends. When they consult policy-makers in an attempt to free forest areas to function as national parks, they call such spaces “decommissioned,” an overly clinical and somewhat misleading label that ultimately objectifies the environment. In discussions like these, the author prefers that officials use the simple term “forest” to discuss spaces that are to remain safe from the possible threat of human organizations.

Like the roots of an outstretched maple tree, human language is the funnel of cultural thought. Changing a few words around might not convince you that your house plant has a mind, but it may very well supply the nutrients that large scale environmental shifts need to grow.

In western Germany, the Hambach Forest draws its fair share of inhabitants—deciduous tree species such as oaks and beeches, unique Bechstein’s bats, and even a large number of similarly unusual protestors holding down their elevated forts. Despite its acclaim, with a little under one square mile left of its original 15, the Hambach Forest isn’t what it once was. Over time, as an acquisition of RWE, a company that turned many natural landscapes into empty craters as they mined for coal, the Hambach Forest dwindled. When the company began its final takeover, protestors took to the sky, creating tree fortresses to ensure their leafy relatives weren’t chopped to wither on the forest floor. The symbiotic plight of these protestors and the Hambach Forest along with the situation’s eventual outcome is just one example of the increasingly transformative abilities of simply respecting the Earth.

Before the protestors made their way out of the trees, though, there were various issues to address—problems that pervade ecological discussions even today. For instance, considerations surrounding global warming were central to the situation at the Hambach Forest. In 2018, many forests in Germany that were filled with human-planted pine trees, or what the author would call “plantations,” experienced waves of fire and released harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The essentially fire-proof and naturally occurring Hambach Forest, on the other hand, existed as a possible deterrent to this devastation; areas with older trees are more successful at holding carbon dioxide and are conducive to stalling global warming. In fact, the Hambach Forest retains an astonishing 200,000 tons of greenhouse gases, so chopping it down would be devastating for the environment. At the time, though, RWE pushed to mine the land for the highly pollutive lignite, completely disregarding the environmental truth of the situation.

The state of the Hambach Forest seemed as if it was destined for disaster. People on all fronts appeared as if they preferred ignorance over reality and were willing to sacrifice the woods in the meantime. Thankfully, the protestors held out, and eventually, officials’ minds shifted. Despite the continuous push-and-shove of RWE, the government, and those suspended in their trees, in February of 2019, the plight of the forest came to a happy and eventful close. In the end, the German coal commission axed all coal-mining efforts, and secured the safety of the Hambach Forest.

The situation in Germany may have missed calamity by an inch, but ultimately, it reveals that people can act wisely and thoughtfully toward humanity and its environment. The companionship between humans and the Earth, people and trees, is much more than a give-and-take exchange—it's a complimentary encounter between highly similar species.