Oak culture and humans

Humans can brag about their ability to control nature, but the reality is we’re powerless in the face of heatwaves, floods, wildfires and natural phenomena. Survival needs collective strategies against threats – and mutual aid goes beyond the species barrier.

That’s what forests show us. Collaborate amid competition. Collaborate across species. But humankind, writes Laurent Tillon in Being An Oak: Life as a Tree , “resists co-evolutionwith the microbes that have shaped us into our species, consciously risking gradual decline in collective immunity through isolation and excessive sterilisation.”

But we get ahead of the story – the story of Tillon’s oak, his friend and confidant. Of discovering who the tree – at least 240 years old – is, in forest Silva, near Paris. The tree that showed Tillon the nature of nature – challenges in sourcing nutrients, the fight to grow tall, keeping the canopy safe, and competing and coexisting with a million creatures – plant, animal and microbe. It’s never easy. It’s never hopeless either.

An intricate lattice of stories with incredible detail shows the oak’s relationships with other trees, beetles, woodpeckers, salamanders, foragers, lizards, wolves, and humans. “Trees that live in a community make up a super organism whose powers are immeasurable,” Tillon writes.

By the 17th century, oaks provided wood for building boats, to meet maritime ambitions of King Louis XVI, also the first to engage in ‘forest management’. Over centuries, railways, cities, industry – all needed wood from the forest. This oak’s life was at risk from the minute it was born, around 1780, an acorn, with a plantlet and a radicle inside, organs provided by the parent oak.

A fieldmouse grabs and runs with the acorn as it falls to the ground as winter loot – only to forget about it. A good crop of acorns means fieldmice eat up all the acorns, damaging them, the abundance driving them nuts. So the oaks pull back on producing acorns the next season. Rodents’ population plunges – the plant world, says the book, outwits/fools the animal – a phenomenon called ‘masting’. That’s just one strategy.

Once the acorn strikes root, it is rooted for the rest of its life. Tillon’s oak can’t move at all. “This will be his calling for the rest of his life.” Roots don’t grow randomly – “the tip of each is a veritable homing device. Nothing happens by chance.” It’s not that the oak gives an order, but in chemical and electrical messages still a secret to scientists, stimuli are received for roots to head downwards and a plantlet to vie towards light. Caterpillars time their emergence from eggs when the oak is about to bud. Yet the oak’s branches too appear to hold off on budding – to make it harder for caterpillars to attack.

The young oak knows the approach of fungi is an act of aggression, but local “bacterial diplomacy” ensures all three strike up a relationship of nutrient and information exchange, to signal deficiency and danger, for all time to come. These early “breach in defences” only help the oak mount an efficient immune response against attacks through its life. Collaboration and a perpetual learning of strategies – relationships within competition.
That’s the lesson for humans.