I rarely get to visit a large forest, but I have noticed even a small forest of a few acres seems to have a “presence” about it, like a hint of consciousness. Being in a forest can even give me the feeling of being watched. I don’t think this watchful presence feeling is from specific plants or animals in the forest, but maybe all of them together, possibly in combination with the land features as well. Or maybe it’s something else in the forest, something not visible.
Other people have apparently noticed similar feelings over the years. Various cultures include the concept of a “spirit of the forest” or maybe even a deity who specifically nurtures and protects the forest and all its living things. Not surprisingly, of the nature deities listed by Wikipedia, several are specifically for forests[1]. Also while researching this forest presence topic, I found that someone named Peter Engelmann has been involved in a related film project and has himself commented on the seemingly conscious forest and cultural references to it.[2]
I’m not going to debate whether that feeling is the presence of God, some psychological affect, or even the product of an overactive imagination. I’m more interested in whether a forest has what it takes (theoretically at least) to actually make decisions and take action in response to events affecting the forest. Can a forest really behave as a whole in a way that seems intelligent and also protect itself and its contents? Whether or not it can observe people or has consciousness is likely a matter of endless debate and is therefore out of scope for my question.
First of all, let’s apply Occam’s Razor and cut things down to the simplest explanation that fits the observations.[3] Realistically, intelligence as such isn’t even needed for a forest to appear to defend itself. Suppose someone enters a forest and is almost hit by a falling tree branch. From the person’s point of view, it might seem like the forest detected his presence and dropped a tree branch in its own defense. However, it may have been just a coincidence.
Or assuming that the person’s entrance into the forest did actually lead to the branch falling, maybe it was a series of simple random events strung together into something like a Rube Goldberg machine. Rube Goldberg, as you may know, was famous for designing ridiculously complex contraptions made of diverse everyday items, to accomplish relatively simple tasks.[4] Our hypothetical person entering the forest may have accidentally startled some birds, which caused some squirrels on a dead tree branch to panic and scurry to safety. The sudden movement of the squirrels may have broken the dead tree branch right at the moment they safely reached the tree trunk. The end result might be that the dead tree branch snapped and fell to the ground, close to where the person was walking.
But is it all coincidence, or are the animals and plants of the forest working together? Science already has some ideas about large numbers of organisms behaving like single larger organisms. On a global scale, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock suggests that living things interact with each other and their environment “to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”[5] This should make some sense, since self-regulating systems composed of cells, tissues, and organs are common enough in animals, including humans.
On a slightly smaller scale, some people believe that humanity or maybe a sufficiently large group of humans can be considered a superorganism, a well-organized, cooperative collection of organisms of the same species, that has synergistic behavior beyond the behavior of the individuals.[6] An ant colony might be a more accepted example of a superorganism, though probably without what we consider intelligence. Douglas Hofstadter, on the other hand, entertains the idea of an intelligent ant colony that can converse intelligently, in his book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.[7] Each ant in Hofstadter’s hypothetical ant colony contributes a very small part to the colony’s intelligence, similar to the role of a neuron in a human brain.
Maybe Hofstadter was onto something. While intelligence may not be strictly required for a collective reaction from a forest, I would not rule out its existence. What might it take to create something along the lines of human intelligence? For starters, the adult human brain reportedly has about 100 billion neurons.[8] This large number alone may help make us intelligent compared to other animals. Reportedly, our brain is 5-7 times larger compared to our body size than for other animals. This makes it easier to guess the ballpark amount of brain capacity of a forest. Suppose there are wolves in a given forest. My dog at home weighs just over 40 pounds (lb.), and wolves are bigger. Suppose 3 wolves weigh as much as me. If we optimistically require 5 times that many to reach my brain capacity, that’s 15 wolves. So a forest large enough for 15 wolves probably has enough brain mass to match the weight of a human brain.
Brain mass alone is probably not enough, since along with those billions of neurons in the human brain are many times more connections. Each neuron could potentially connect to thousands of others, presumably arriving at trillions of connections in the human brain. I seriously doubt that a forest could replicate such connectivity between separate organisms. However, not all decisions are made inside of brains. Ant colonies and bee colonies can exhibit organized behavior without connections between their brains. Ants happen to use chemical trails to help organize their behavior, and honeybees are known for communicating by dancing.
Can the different species in a forest work together in an organized way like the members of a single species do in a regular superorganism? There are of course various examples of symbiosis, a relationship where two dissimilar organisms somehow live together and at least one of them benefits.[9] But these occurrences might be limited to the two species involved. It turns out, trees seem to communicate to each other when injured and even help each other by providing nutrients.[10] The same or different tree species can cooperate, with nutrients flowing between even evergreens and deciduous trees as needed. Fungi help make this communication and sharing possible.
So in spite of discussion about animal brains and behavior, the question of whether a forest can protect itself and its residents is at least partly answered by the trees communicating and helping each other and other species. That seems only fitting, since it’s the trees that make the forest a forest. Clearly trees are not so passive as they seem. Maybe they are also providing food and shelter for the animals in order to somehow use them, just like we take care of animals on a farm so we can use those farm animals.
While the question of whether a forest can properly take care of itself and its constituents in a seemingly intelligent way may not yet be fully settled, it might be helpful to look at human technology to put things into perspective. According to the Phys.org (Science X) web site, the largest artificial intelligence (AI) network in June 2018 was the equivalent of a frog’s brain, which reportedly has around 16 million neurons.[11] Yet I suspect it can do some really impressive things. Granted, much of what makes AI useful is the meaning we assign to its results, so there is a lot of leverage of human intelligence in that AI. Industrial automation probably has less computing power in general but can in fact detect and react to circumstances fairly easily and quickly, such as rejecting bad products on a factory assembly line.
At this point, the relevant parts of the questions have basically been addressed. Chance alone could make it seem like a forest is protecting itself. More than coincidence, organisms can work together in multiple ways, and some people think groups of organisms can even behave collectively like single organisms. Comparing to human intelligence, there is probably enough brain mass in a sufficiently large forest to exceed the mass of a human brain. Connectivity and coordination between organisms can take different forms and can lead to organized behavior. Trees contribute to this connectivity and cooperate in interesting ways. Even human technology doesn’t require true intelligence in order to detect relevant conditions and trigger appropriate physical reactions.
Taking all this into account, I think the forest does take care of itself to some extent, and there may be some form of collective intelligence. As various organisms and species have had some time to adapt to each other in a forest, I suspect the appearance of a forest reacting almost immediately to various events is more at an autonomous level, just like reflexes in the human body. As for the “spirit of the forest” encompassing all this, is it something that we can communicate with? But maybe that’s what we feel when entering a forest anyhow. For all we know, we may already be communicating with the forest at a subconscious level.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nature_deities
[2] https://www.theforestdark.com/wordpress/the-fields-have-eyes-the-forest-has-ears/
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Occam%27s%20razor
[4] https://www.rubegoldberg.com/rube-the-artist/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
[7] Hofstadter . Douglas R. Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Newer edition found at Basic Books: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/douglas-r-hofstadter/godel-escher-bach/9780465026562/
[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/
[9] https://treesforlife.org.uk/forest/symbiosis/
[10] https://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other
[11] https://phys.org/news/2018-06-ai-method-power-artificial-neural.html
(c) Copyright 2019 by Mike Ferrell
Odd STEM 
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