The Forest and the Trees

Go take a close look at a tree. Notice the pattern its bark makes?

This is unlike any other tree’s bark pattern. It’s like a fingerprint for this particular tree. Different types of trees have different types of bark, but each of these individual pines and black locusts and oaks has its own individual barkprint as well.

Get a little closer and you’ll start to notice a whole world of flora and fauna thriving inside, around, and on this tree. Insects and spiders live their entire lives inside of this little ecosystem (little to us, anyway). Lichen—those incredible hybrids of fungus and cyanobacteria—find an amazing place to coexist with moss and fungi.

Here, a civilization of ants has set up shop underneath the bark of this tree. The ants fiercely defend their home world, and they help to keep other (more harmful) predators out, kind of like a little police force. There, termites burrow and form new holes for even smaller critters to traverse.

Inside, the tree is like a well oiled machine. If there’s something beginning to rot, bacteria quickly break down the substance, turning it back into useful nutrients and cycling it back into the soil… and into the tree itself.

Each tree is its own little world, and it can be easy to get lost studying a single tree. The only problem is that there’s a lot more going on that’s important to this tree. If you only look at the tree itself, you’re not going to understand the tree as well as if you also spend some time getting to know the forest, where millions of other trees coexist and cohabitate.

If trees are amazing, forests are absolutely incredible.

There are interconnected root systems, kind of like an internet for trees. If there’s something bad happening to a tree that could spread to other trees, well… the trees can kind of talk to one another. Here’s how I described this phenomenon:

Imagine a tree is being attacked by a swarm of insects. The tree releases chemicals—kind of like saying “ouch”—from their roots. In some cases, those little filaments from the fungus reach right in and penetrate the root’s cells, creating a direct connection.

I can’t help but think of this as something like plugging two computers in together with an ethernet cable, then exchanging data. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s too good for me to ignore. It’s imperfect (in part) because the sort of data that’s exchanged is more of a binary signal, not a complex mountain of ones and zeroes… but it’s still data.

This is where the common phrase comes into play: to see the forest for the trees. The language is a bit clumsy by modern standards, but it conveys the message not to focus too much on a single tree, and to see that there is a forest around it.

If you’re lost in the world of one tree, you’ll miss the vast interconnected web of fungal filaments called mycelium that run underneath the tree, connected to other trees in the forest by mycorrhizal fungal networks. If one tree is threatened, the other trees are able to prepare because of this communication.

That’s not all these networks can do, either. Sometimes larger trees that have more nutrients than they need can transfer these nutrients to younger seedlings, giving them a better chance at surviving. Some plants can even share water this way.

Not only are the mycorrhizal fungi the backbone of communication, they also help “partner plants” by helping the plants extract nutrients from the soil.

In the same way that one tree is a world if you look at it the right way, a forest makes up its own ecosystem. There’s the canopy at the top, where trees come together to protect the layers underneath from the Sun and rain, and the same sort of cycle of decomposition via bacteria takes place on an enormous scale.

We also know that forests play a massive role in our existence, thanks to all the oxygen they produce. Forests are an enormous part of the planet’s ecosystem, so they absorb excess carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

It’s important to see the details when you’re up close to something. On the flip side, it’s equally vital to get the context right, so you can see where your observations fit in with the larger picture.

Want to understand that one tree better? Better make sure you understand the forest first.