as a younger person I'd sometimes get overwhelmed with the violence of the world, not just human violence but the violence done to animals and by animals, the innate violence of being an animal. because an animal is, by definition, an organism that must consume other organisms to live. and this would lodge in my spiraling young adult mind, the tragedy that to live, to be a creature, is to cause harm. that life is sustained by consuming life.
eventually I got older (and medicated), but in the meantime spending time in woodland really helped. it comforted me to be around plantlife, which feeds not on life but on sunlight, and therefore causes no harm.
anyway now I'm reading The Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (incredible book) and it turns out that was a big fat LIE. forests are violent as FUCK
life as a tree is fucking BRUTAL. ok no they don't actually eat each other (well, not until they've been broken down and digested by microorganisms first) but competition is FIERCE. sunlight and water are finite resources. survival rates are dismal. a tree can release a million seeds in a lifetime and have only one offspring live to maturity. some species evolved ways of stealing sunlight from trees who got there first, bidding their time as a sapling then shooting out from under older canopies to hog as as much light as possible. next-door neighbors? fuck em, let em starve.
then you get shit like epiphytes that decided to just grow on top of other plants. strangler fig vines, for instance, which decided well fuck, im just gonna cling to this tree trunk and let it do the support work. maybe entangle our roots and envelope my host completely over time. oopsie my host died? that's ok I'll just cling to its corpse for eternity
equally horrifying is the honeysuckle, which preys on young trees boa-constrictor style, squeezing the life out of saplings, which grow with permanent deformities before dying prematurely (makes for a neat walking stick though)
then you get out and proud parasites like mistletoe who are happy to attach themselves to tree canopies and suck their blood extract water and nutrients. so yeah some plants do eat each other actually. gives ya some perspective on the old christmas tradition of hunting mistletoe with guns (yes that's a thing, shooting them down out of trees like squirrels. yes, unlike squirrels they deserve it). as for the romance angle, who doesn't want to kiss a lover beneath the dying corpse of a parasitic trophy kill? sexy as heck.
in conclusion, PLANTS ARE VIOLENT AS FUCK, and that's not even getting into the eternal chemical warfare they are forced to wage against insects, fungi, microbes and other enemies.
one day soon the forests will turn on us, and when that day comes I'm cheerfully betraying humanity and skipping away to cross enemy lines π«‘
kofi
to those who thought this post was heading in a heartwarming direction, i do NOT apologize and i DO hope the forest and its creeping mycelium tendrils crawl their way into your nightmares
