A tree fell in the forest.
I know, because I was there. It happened the other day while I was walking on a trail in the woods near my home. It was a gusty day, the perfect weather for a bone-dry, sapless old sentinel to give up its long vigil and surrender to gravity.
When the tree fell in the forest, did it make a sound? It did, but not the sound I would have imagined. First I heard a knocking, like someone rapping their knuckles against hollow wood. Followed by a thrashing as if something was bounding through the underbrush toward me. I turned to look. The noise was coming from a tall old tree whose upper branches were shivering, and not from the wind. What was going on? A white wound suddenly appeared on the trunk, halfway up amid the nearly leafless branches. It took me an instant to realize this was the inner flesh of the tree appearing as it split and the upper part toppled.
I was a few dozen yards away, so there was no danger to me but I jumped anyhow because of the noise (which at first, as I say, sounded like something – god knows what – charging at me through the bushes). As the tree broke in half my first thought was that this someone must be over there with a chainsaw. Someone employed by the city or the parks service or whatever, whose job is to bring down old timber before it falls on someone’s head and leads to a lawsuit.
But there was nobody to be seen near the tree. And I hadn’t heard a chainsaw. It was a testament to how detached a city-dweller like me has gotten from the natural world that it took me a moment to realize the tree had actually fallen all on its own. Nature had done it without any help from her most restlessly interfering creation, Homo conturbator. Man the Troublemaker.
Of course I thought of the old conundrum about trees falling in the forest. And I knew that the answer is yes. Even when no one is around, falling trees produce sound waves. It’s just that there are no ears present to pick up on them. Or at least not human ears, which are apparently the only ones that matter. The more interesting question, I learned that day, was when a tree falls in the forest, just what kind of sound does it make?
And because the whole thing happened so fast I didn’t have time to take a photo, it raises another important question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one posts about it on social media, did it really happen?
But this of course negates that the tree itself has a point of view about its own falling. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to anthropomorphize it, does it still experience something?
But these days we must also question whether anything really happens the way it seems to, if we weren’t there to see it. If I see an image of a tree falling in a forest, is it AI?
We also have to fact check “forest.” Where I was walking was actually a few salvaged acres of uncut bush and boggy creek bottom on the south side of Edmonton, surrounded by subdivisions of big brand-new houses where no living soul is to be seen at this time of day because they’re all working hard to make the money to pay off these massive houses overlooking the “natural area” that they don’t have time to explore.
It doesn’t sound quite as resonant to ask what happens to a tree falling in a natural area. A natural area is what’s left over when too many trees have already fallen.
If a tree falls, are there still forests for it to fall in?
Where would I have to go to find an actual, living, breathing forest?
[Image ID: nameless unfallen trees and a shaft of sunlight, photo by the author]