This is an age of many minds, it would seem. Oddly, it took grappling with new technology – the internet, artificial intelligence – for us to see intellectual capacities in our oldest companions, trees. In this new light, they appear much more like us, or perhaps us as we would wish to be. There is a form of redemption on offer: having for centuries treated trees as timber, we are now invited to embrace them as kin. Both books share an unlikely source. In 1997, a young Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard (the model for Powers’ character) published with five co-authors a study in Nature describing resources passing between trees, apparently via fungi. Trees don’t just supply sugars to each other, Simard has further argued; they can also transmit distress signals, and they shunt resources to neighbours in need. “We used to believe that trees competed with each other,” explains a football coach on the US hit television show Ted Lasso. But thanks to “Suzanne Simard’s fieldwork”, he continues, “we now realise that the forest is a socialist community”

Whereas researchers must usually toil in respectable obscurity for decades before their ideas attract notice, the intelligent-plant notion is moving at top speed. Public demand, as much as peer review, is driving the train, with popular books reporting excitedly on studies that scientists are still debating – sometimes outracing the science entirely. It’s worth asking what makes us so eager to ascribe human qualities to the arboreal world. Might we be missing something important when we gaze into the wooden mirror and see only ourselves? The title of Simard’s 1997 Nature article was almost impeccably dry – “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field” – and a casual observer might have missed the study’s significance. Botanists have long understood that fungi called mycorrhizae formed symbiotic relationships with trees, exchanging water and nutrients for photosynthesised sugars. What Simard and her co-authors showed is that the sugars made their way not just to the fungi but to other trees in the forest, seemingly travelling through the fungi. The journal’s editors sensed promise. They made it Nature’s cover story, commissioned a foreword by a leading botanist, and affixed an indelible pun: this was the “wood-wide web”. It wasn’t Simard’s metaphor, but she has pounced on it. The forest, she has written, is “like the internet”: a system of “centres and satellites, where the old trees were the biggest communication hubs and the smaller ones the less busy nodes, with messages transmitting back and forth through the fungal links”. Rather than rivals scrabbling over resources, connected trees are what Simard calls “supercooperators”.....read on- there's a lot more in this fascinating story.      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/23/mother-trees-and-socialist-forests-is-the-wood-wide-web-a-fantasy

“The land was giving us hints of what was to come,” says Richard Gordon, a senior ranger “Days before, we found all these puddles of clear water. But it hadn’t rained at all in days; you look up and see nothing but blue sky. “Now we know: all of that ice in the permafrost had melted. The signs were there. We just didn’t know.” Over the next two weeks, the landslides happened again and again. Throughout the small island, the tundra sheared off in more than 700 different locations. Some collapses were quick, soil ripping from the land with a damp thunderclap. Others were slow, with land “rippling and rolling like a carpet” down the slope, says Isla Myers-Smith, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia. It’s hard not to get emotionally invested because you are studying and witnessing irreversible changes Isla Myers-Smith, ecologist. In one case, the team was devastated to learn that one of their monitoring sites, where the data they collected had given a three decade-long glimpse into the island’s shifting ecology, had vanished into the ocean. “Each time you lose a dataset, you lose understanding of how the island is changing,” says Myers-Smith. “It’s hard not to get emotionally invested in the work you do and in this place because you know you’re studying and witnessing irreversible changes.”

For more than a decade, Myers-Smith and her “Team Shrub” graduate students have studied those dramatic changes unfolding on Qikiqtaruk (also known as Herschel Island). Armed with a fleet of drones and working closely with Indigenous Inuvialuit rangers, the team has revealed a rapid reshaping of the tundra with little precedent. As they race to understand what those changes might mean, a combination of rising seas, landslides and flooding mean the landscape is literally collapsing around them, making it harder to study an island that reflects the tumultuous future of the western Arctic.

Lying just off the Canadian mainland, Qikiqtaruk is a mass of sediment and permafrost piled up during the last ice age. Despite its small size, the island is packed with immense ecological richness, with waters teeming with beluga whales and trout-like Dolly Varden char. On land, it is one of the few places on Earth where black, grizzly and polar bears cross paths. Musk ox and caribou browse the lichen. The land is thickly carpeted with more than 200 species of wildflowers, grasses and shrubs.For the Inuvialuit, the island continues to be a hunting and fishing ground that for nearly a thousand years sustained communities through dark and bitter winters.I can’t imagine the fear and stress animals feel as everything changes so fast. We’re supposed to be guardians of the land. But we’ve let them down-Richard Gordon, ranger.

When they negotiated a land claim agreement with the Canadian government in 1984, Inuvialuit elders used their new powers to protect Qikiqtaruk by establishing the Herschel Island–Qikiqtaruk territorial park, fearful that industry and outsiders would destroy a place that held deep cultural value. When he was a child, Gordon’s family would make the multi-day trek to Qikiqtaruk in a small boat, crossing hundreds of kilometres of brackish delta. He spent summers on the island, running through the remains of weather-beaten buildings, built during the region’s whaling era at the turn of the last century. Returning with a cohort of elders before the agreement, he saw “how meaningful the land was, how intertwined it was with our oral histories, our culture; I understood the power it had”, Gordon says. “I understood why they wanted so much for it to be protected.”

While the elders envisioned a space protected from destructive outside forces, in two decades as park ranger at Herschel Island–Qikiqtaruk territorial park, Gordon has watched as the island has morphed into something unrecognisable. In early August the first faint blush of autumn is visible in the shrubs of the tundra. Taking advantage of a brief window of favourable weather, Myers-Smith and a group of researchers pile into a helicopter, to be dropped off throughout Qikiqtaruk to monitor its changes, deploying trail cameras, scouring wetlands and piloting drones. The work is tiring and often pushes late into the night. They sometimes eat dinner close to midnight, enjoying the pink hues of a sky where the sun does not fully set. The team’s research has shown an island ecosystem in rapid flux.... the tundra is “greening” at an incredible rate as shrubs such as willow push north and grow taller. In doing so, they push out the cottongrass, mosses and lichens that take hundreds – sometimes thousands – of years to grow. 

Buoyed up by higher temperatures and lengthened growing seasons, the number and diversity of plants will keep growing, Myers-Smith says. This is seemingly a bright spot amid a global biodiversity crisis: more plants and animals are making the tundra their home. And yet a lush, greening Arctic will come at a cost: upending the lives of animals that rely on seasonal rhythm and predictability. Herds of caribou are among the most likely casualties, as bare spots on the tundra, favoured by the lichen that they like to eat, are overtaken by shrubs. The American golden plover, a shorebird that flies yearly from the Arctic to the southern reaches of South America, will find its habitat disappearing as plants grow thicker, crowding out the bald patches of land it prefers.....corporate oil greed wins, climate and the land loses,,,,read on     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/21/canada-arctic-herschel-island-qikiqtaruk-climate-permafrost-tundra-ecology-aoe

Behind it, the space for a school that burned down, was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the villages is dying”.Thousands of similar villages are scattered across Bulgaria. After the fall of communism, people flocked to the cities in search of work, and over the next 30 years many villages emptied to the point of obliteration. As of the 2021 census, almost 300 villages were completely abandoned, and more than 1,000 had populations below 30 – most of them very elderly. With its low birthrates and high rates of emigration, Bulgaria has been emptying out for decades. Its population has dropped from close to 9 million in 1989, to fewer than 6.5 million – one of the worst peacetime population declines in modern history. Bulgaria lies at the extreme end of this kind of demographic change, but the forces reshaping it are acting everywhere. Over the past half century, the global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third. Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. In many countries, birth rates are dropping steadily, and while the global population is projected to keep growing until 2080, around half of that growth is being driven by fewer than 10 countries. As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements. This world-altering shift has drawn remarkably little attention. “It has been there all the time – but we did not really describe it,” says Prof He Yin of Kent State University, one of the scientists now using remote sensing to create global maps of abandoned land. “We talk about expansion,” he said, referring to development of land. “Yes, absolutely that’s important. But there’s this other side – abandonment – that people don’t really talk about.”Alongside this story of depopulation is another story – of what happens to the land left behind. To preserve a livable planet, it is crucial to preserve and expand forests, grasslands, healthy ecosystems and wild places. Huge expanses of abandoned land represent an opportunity but also a question, an ongoing experiment without clearly predictable outcomes. For thousands of years, humans have dramatically shaped the places where they live, transforming the Earth’s face. So what happens to the natural world when people disappear? 

When a member of the household dies in Bulgaria, it is traditional to mark their passing with a notice. The A4 printouts featured a name, photograph, date of death and a brief tribute. Each noted how long ago the loved one had died: six months, a year, a decade, 22 years. In villages across the country, these posters often also mark the end of human habitation. “If you walk around, you’ll see it’s like this clock that’s ticking, measuring the time since those people have left us,” Daskalova said. “On a human level, that’s very sad. But that clock, it’s also measuring the end of human impact, and the onset of environmental change afterwards.” Daskalova specialises in global change ecology: how large-scale human activity is reshaping the natural world. She is in the middle of an ambitious research project, studying 30 villages across the Bulgarian countryside in different stages of abandonment. Along with collaborators and students, she is gathering a huge range of data: using aerial drones to map the return of forests, block-by-block botany surveys to see what plants are growing, audio recorders on trees to capture shifts in the density and volume of birdsong. Over time, she hopes to compare the ecology of derelict villages with those where some people remain, providing a comprehensive picture of how nature responds when humans leave.

Tyurkmen was not a randomly selected research site – it is the place she grew up. Like many of her generation, as a young child Daskalova was largely raised by grandparents while her parents went to work in the nearest city. Eventually, she left for university. “For a decade, I was one of the people who left the village and only returned occasionally, and every time I came back, there were less and less people living on my street,” she said.  For the first few years of her career, Daskalova worked in far-flung places, including the arctic tundra. But she remembered the great depopulation she had lived through, and recognised that it was part of something wider, with scope to reshape the future of thousands of species. Abandoned places are not the most alluring research sites: “They’re not the rainforests, not the gorillas,” said Daskalova. Individually, each research site is just a village, like thousands of others. “But in a way that’s what makes it special,” she continued, “because depopulation is happening at a really big scale.” And what comes after abandonment is often not what we expect. ews that great swathes of our planet are being abandoned can excite visions of a rewilded Eden in the ruins of humanity. In the absence of humans, nature will come roaring back. Deer will roam the streets of crumbling cities, vines will crack the concrete, football fields will give way to forests. The skies will clear and species will flourish. In 2020, lockdowns gave many people a taste of what semi-abandonment might look like. As humans were forced indoors, wild creatures returned to some urban streets and suburban gardens. “Humans are the virus,” observers declared, in a mixture of earnest commentary and internet punchlines. In their absence, “nature is healing”.

Visions of humans as a pox upon the natural world – and of paradise sprouting in our absence – are intertwined with some of ecology’s oldest ideas. In the late 19th century, botanist Frederick Clements helped popularise succession theory, the idea that left to its own devices, any disturbed landscape will follow a step-by-step progression. A ploughed field, for instance, will be overtaken first by fast-growing grasses and weeds, then shrubs, which finally thicken into trees and forest. Clements argued that any place would move through succession to a “climax” state of stable equilibrium. The final result could differ according to climate and geography, an alpine forest being different from a swamp or desert. But the essential trajectory was always the same: a “universal law”, Clements wrote, of ecosystems climbing toward climax like an animal progressing through infancy toward adulthood. No matter how dramatic the disturbance – whether the retreat of a glacier or the razing of a forest for farmland – nature’s capacity to return remained. That ideal climax state would rest like a substrate beneath the soil, lying dormant even as the land above was tilled or excavated or burned or paved. To return, all it needed was time and benign neglect. Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists. “Many popular ideas about the environment are premised on the conviction that nature is … capable of preserving its natural balance more or less indefinitely if only humans can avoid disturbing it,” ecological historian William Cronon wrote in 1995. “These stories are ours, not nature’s. The natural world does not organise itself into parables.” In practice, scientists have found that humanity’s relationship to the natural world is far more complex than we often assume. This is one of Daskalova’s more counterintuitive findings: rather than always being antithetical to nature, human presence can help make life possible for a vast array of species. Even more surprisingly, total abandonment can sometimes have worse consequences for biodiversity than landscapes where some people remain......fascinating!......read on     https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria