Yesterday our book group discussed three tree-related books including Suzanne Simard’s autobiography, Finding the Mother Tree, which I read and blogged about when it was published last year. As a reminder, Simard is known for discovering, or perhaps re-discovering for modern times, that trees are linked underground via their own roots and fungal mycelium, allowing them to share nutrients, including extra support for a young or dying member; communicate information on topics such as pests and other threats; and make collective decisions, including whether to produce seed or to wait for a more optimal year. Multiple species share info and resources. Trees don’t compete for light: they share it.

This pioneering research has sprouted offspring, with many books now available on these topics for the lay reader. The power and wonder of this concept–hundreds of individuals of diverse species cooperating for the health of all–should humble every one of us, since it is something humans are apparently completely incapable of accomplishing.

I also read and blogged about Frans de Waal’s Different, about chimps and bonobos, humans’ two closest–equally close–ancestors, one patriarchal and more likely to start wars or engage in relatively violent behavior, the other matriarchal and more likely to resolve issues with social behaviors, including sex, every member being exactly bisexual. So humans could have gone either way.

But you don’t have to look at non-naked apes or even believe in evolution to find cooperative primate societies managing nature non-destructively, providing plenty of sustenance and leisure for all members. A few lucky humans have always managed to live that way, including in cities of over 100,000. Many of these are described in The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, and golly, I think I blogged about that one as well.

Those humans are lucky until they get destroyed by guns, germs, and steel (shout out to Jared Diamond). It occurs to me that if a bunch of clothes-wearing, gun-toting, religion-obsessed Europeans with utter disrespect for savages, aka any human society not characterized by repression, destruction, and hierarchy, hadn’t managed to hijack the historical context of what turned out to be the dominant nation-states of our time, life would be much better for 99% of us.

I blame Darwin.

Although he got some things right, characterizing genetic evolution as a struggle among species, “survival of the fittest,” is not one of them. I could cite some books here….NVM. Humans, who love fiction and somehow believe anything that “makes sense” to us must be true, locked onto this nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw thing and propagated it.

In other words, there is no reason for us to be struggling for a rung on the “ladder” of prosperity except for a false paradigm, spread by force. Is there hope for a restart? I don’t see any way that isn’t horrendous, such as a much more serious pandemic. Paradigm-related myopia?