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The landscape keeps shifting. Humanity is trying to navigate through unmapped territories. The truth is the old world is no more, and we have collectively entered terra incognita.
Faced with challenges of gargantuan and global proportions, we feel disorientated and powerless. Humanity finds itself in multiple crises at once - environmental, political, and social, all flowing at an accelerating pace. The rush of technology is faster than our cognitive processes can evolve. And now, AI-driven tributaries are swelling, flooding, threatening to burst their banks.
Our legal, cultural, and political systems are failing to keep up. How can we stop feeling overwhelmed and swept away? Let's pose, close our eyes. Take a deep breath.
Nature is a generous teacher, if only we can manage to slow down and listen to its hidden wisdom, its underlying heartbeat. The forest speaks in a language we're only just beginning to discover. Social media feels like such an inextricable part of our existence, that we forget the internet is merely a few decades old.
But the mycorrhizal network, or fungal internet, of ancient woodlands has been operating since long before the dawn of our civilisation. On digital platforms words have become weapons that fracture and polarise. But beneath the forest floor, trees employ the complex fungal networks to share resources, information, and knowledge. Interconnectivity should stimulate co-operation and understanding, not exacerbate division and isolation.
Like the forests, democracy is a delicately balanced ecosystem of mutually-dependent institutions. The ballot box, in itself, is not enough to render a system a democracy. For a true democracy to survive and thrive you need the sunlight of a free media driving out the shadows of corruption with transparency. And there must be an interplay between the rule of law, separation of powers, independent academia, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, minority rights, and the protection of the environment.
How can democracy survive when democratic norms and institutions are eroding, and the climate crisis threatens the very existence of societies around the globe? Trees remind us that we're all interconnected. Our lives and stories, our joys and sufferings are interlinked.
Our recent studies might also inspire us to think of identity in a new and radical way, identity not as a singular or static entity, but as layers of multiple belongings, like concentric circles inside a tree. I can have a deep attachment to a place or my ancestral heritage or an ethnicity or nationality, and so on, but at the same time be cognizant of the fact that I am a member of the human race, a citizen of humanity. It is possible to be from here and elsewhere and, at the same time, care about life everywhere.
We have arrived at a historic crossroads, where populist demagoguery wants to divide everyone into clashing polarities of us versus them. But precisely for that reason, it is worth defending multiplicity and pluralism and the nuanced way of thinking. The forest reminds us that even in this age of existential angst, we all exist within complex webs of interdependence. We are each other's branches of support and sisterhood. We are each other's roots.
