Suzanne Simard: How Trees Talk To Each Other | TED Talk

[Dekalb_Blues]

 Uh-oh...



http://www.ecology.com/2012/10/08/trees-communicate/

  (Univ. of California Press, 2013) http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520276116

Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human—and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction–one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.

Eduardo Kohn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University and winner of the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize. He is best known for the book, How Forests Think, which has been described by Cambridge Professor of Anthropology Marilyn Strathern as "thought-leaping in the most creative sense," and "[a] supreme artifact of the human skill in symbolic thinking." The work draws upon four years ethnographic fieldwork with the Runa in the Upper Amazon in order to challenge the most basic assumptions of anthropological thought. Using the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, Kohn proposes that all life forms, not only humans, engage in processes of signification and therefore should be considered as able to think and learn. Arguing that selfhood does not solely belong to humans, Kohn proposes that any entity which communicates through the use of signs can be considered a self, leading to a complex 'ecology of selves' of which humans and nonhumans are both a part. Kohn's work builds upon a growing body of literature, from authors such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which seeks to take the social sciences beyond the limits of strictly human relations.

In 2014 HAU included an entire section based on a book symposium discussing How Forests Think,  including contributions from Bruno Latour and  Philippe Descola. http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/...2.016/1131

http://en.booksee.org/book/2250802



http://wearesonar.org/2016/03/09/how-for...ersonhood/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...Holobionts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climax_community
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...is-fungus/
http://kk.org/mt-files/outofcontrol/ch6-c.html
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140701...fing-earth

Incidentally, the Sufis from days of old have planted gardens (especially herbal gardens) comprising numerous unrelated plant species in certain close proximities to each other. They found in ancient times that certain ecologically precise constellations of terrestrial plants, tended in a certain way, synergetically communicate certain essences which mutually augment their vitality and growth in sometimes extraordinary ways. Imagine the extension of this type of expertise to, say, a carefully chosen and overseen group of sufficiently varying examples of homo sapiens...