#8 Lessons from trees

Imagining symbiotic solutions to social challenges

Dear friends,

I’m outside on a sunny morning, writing this letter below a Eucalyptus tree. Every twenty minutes or so I have to move my chair to follow the shrinking patch of shade around its trunk. It rained yesterday, so although the ground feels as hard and dry as ever, it is covered in millions of tiny craters, the impression of each raindrop where it hit the dusty earth and bounced off.

Scattered nearby are the chipped remains of three diseased trees that were recently felled. Sprouting from the sawdust are several saplings planted to take their place, their trunks barely thicker than the bamboo poles holding them up.

I’ve been looking at trees with fresh curiosity since reading The Overstory by Richard Powers – a novel about trees, which makes human stories and timescales feel small compared to the larger, slower stories unfolding around them.

The book follows a cast of human characters across several decades as they plant, study, live with, live in and fight to save redwoods, maples, elms, ginkgos, Douglas firs and chestnuts. The human stories are compelling, but it is ultimately the trees who steal the show. Reading the novel, the background slides into the foreground. Trees become freshly mysterious and fascinating: their lives and relationships, the way they conjure their food from light and air, the way they communicate, share with and heal one another, passing water, nutrients, medicine and messages through underground networks and airborne signals. Any sense of a tree as an isolated, inert entity starts to feel not just ludicrous, but insulting.

The Overstory dramatizes the way that the lives of trees are enmeshed with one another, with other beings, and with the human world. It is a novel written against separateness, monoculture, monolithic scale, mono anything. I found it vision-shifting and a beautiful example of how a great imaginative work can hold complexity, reframe reality and generate feelings of urgency, awe and care.

Alongside The Overstory I’ve been reading Entangled Life by the biologist Merlin Sheldrake. His book tells the stories of fungi, these mysterious beings that exist as networks and have sophisticated ways of communicating and making decisions across their vast extents – processes we are only just beginning to appreciate and understand. The two books enrich and illuminate each other. The fungal networks that Sheldrake describes mesh with the root systems of trees and enable the dynamic symbiosis described by Powers.

Perhaps it is this image of sophisticated symbiosis that makes these discoveries about trees and fungi so enticing and makes books like The Overstory and Entangled Life feel so urgent. Plants, as well as being essential for our survival, seem to hold out the promise of a different mode of organising societies and living with other people and beings. Their symbiosis looks like a metaphor we could live by.

The curious thing, though, is that symbiosis isn’t a metaphor for an alternative mode of existence – and the fact that it looks like one is revealing. As the ecologist Timothy Morton puts it, each of us is ‘already a symbiotic being entangled with other symbiotic beings’. Symbiosis is already the essence of our existence and the key to our survival – it’s just that we’ve created systems and institutions that often act as though this isn’t the case.

Merlin Sheldrake describes how, in his late teens, he realised that his fascination with fungi was also a fascination with symbiosis. When I read that, I felt a jolt of recognition. In my late teens, I had a near-identical realisation – although my interest is symbiosis within human, rather than plant, communities.

In Social Imagining #3, I wrote about my experience volunteering in a care home for older people when I was sixteen. I was uncomfortable with the way the residents were cut off from the wider community and had my first experience of how limiting it is to address care needs by isolating those who have them.

I remember walking back from the care home one wintry afternoon, a hard frost on the ground, and wondering why our approach to meeting different needs isn’t more symbiotic. I stepped cautiously along the slick pavements, cutting onto the crunchy grass where I could, the following questions running through my mind: 

Why do we support people in these hidden, hived-off spaces?

What would happen if we addressed multiple social challenges simultaneously?

What if, instead of thinking about people primarily in terms of what they need, we considered first what they have to offer?

How might we create spaces in which individuals with different needs can support and care for others in their distinct ways, while receiving the care and support they need in return?

These questions stayed with me and, a few years later, when I returned from a year as a carer at L’Arche (see Social Imagining #4), I sketched out some ideas for a symbiotic community.

Here’s part of what I wrote:

I’m imagining a community composed of individuals from different ‘marginalised’ groups, who would traditionally be supported in separate contexts. Everyone’s skills and gifts would be valued and jigsawed together into a reciprocal arrangement, a semi-organic symbiosis derived from the meshing of their different strengths and needs. 

This could involve older people, adults with learning disabilities, people getting back on their feet after homelessness/addiction/prison, people looking after very young children, young people facing challenges with education, behaviour, relationships, people who feel lonely and in need of connection.

Symbiotic relationships might not emerge straightforwardly from the collision of different needs, strengths and personalities. Guidance and skilful balancing would likely be required, along with an expectation and acceptance of eventual imperfection.

The community would need a context for this mutual care and support. It could function, for example, as a farm, bakery, workshop, community centre, art studio, theatre space, cafe, or some combination of those things. It would need a key focus and key skills that members could develop and refine in order to take as much responsibility as possible for the running. It would be financially self-sustaining as far as possible.

I still have the mental image that I had when this idea first came to me: a grassy courtyard, surrounded by buildings with big windows. There’s a group of adults playing with toddlers on the lawn, while their parents get on with things elsewhere. There are older people seated nearby, chatting and laughing with a few adults with learning disabilities, perhaps planning a community event together. There are some adults in a workshop making or repairing things. There’s the sound of the radio from the window of the community kitchen, where people are cooking together.

There is probably something too neat about this vision, but it has been a strikingly persistent dream across the past two decades – accompanied by the nagging sense that it is naïve and idealistic.

I’m slightly sensitive about the idea of being naïve or idealistic. For this reason, I’ve kept dreams like this in the background and spent my career to date doing practical, grounded work to better understand and address the issues I care about. And for this reason I was slightly startled to be described as ‘an idealistic young man’ in The Observer’s review of my new book, which considers how we might reimagine policing as a care role. ‘Young and idealistic’ is a description that hovers somewhere between complimentary and damning, a pat on the back for commendable but unrealistic aims. It was a small remark in a friendly review, but it got to me. It seemed to suggest that believing we can do things differently is a young person’s game: something to feel and then grow out of.

In recent years, I’ve started to examine my concern that it is naïve and idealistic to reimagine broken systems and institutions through a caring, ecological lens. My teenage dream of a symbiotic community may be thin, but the impulse behind it seems sound – the simple recognition that interconnected social issues should be dealt with in a connected way, and that the feeling of interdependence is more life-giving than the feeling of dependence.

But the main reason these ideas seem less idealistic to me now is the fact that I’ve seen and experienced places that think and work in symbiotic ways. Within our existing systems, there are plenty of places doing things differently.

I’ve already written about L’Arche. Others that inspire me include Reach Academy in Feltham, a school that has reimagined its role and enmeshed itself with its community, the Bromley by Bow Centre, a community centre that addresses health, wellbeing, employment and other issues within the same integrated space, Grapevine, who support communities in the West Midlands to meet one another’s needs. The whole fields of Community Organising and Place-Based Change have this flavour. I’ll share some specific stories in future letters.

Another growing area of symbiosis in social life is intergenerational work. My friend Iona recently travelled across Europe, documenting projects where people are supporting one another across generations. An example that stuck in my mind are the care homes for older people in Vienna, which reserve some of their rooms for younger people, who become part of the life and community of the home and receive, in return, not just affordable housing but also authentic, enriching relationships. Iona’s fascinating report contains this and many other examples.

We live within complex systems. What I find exciting about symbiotic approaches is the way they acknowledge and respond to the existing interconnections and interdependencies within societies and communities. They weave disrupted networks together and open possibilities for relationships, mutual support and care. This can sound idealistic, but it looks more rigorous and reality-based to me now than neater, unintegrated approaches.

I am still below the Eucalyptus tree, several metres from where I was when I began this letter, circling its trunk like a strange human sundial. I set out today thinking about the symbiosis within communities of trees and fungi. It’s an image I find helpful and exciting – not a metaphor, but a reminder of the entanglements and interdependence we exist within.

It feels good to write about these ideas after sitting with them for many years. If you have reactions in response to this letter or recommendations of people I should talk to, places I should visit, or things I should watch or read, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks to everyone who has left comments or been in touch so far – it’s making writing a far richer experience and I really appreciate it.

Warm wishes,

Matt