the stories we tell.

radical love letter #79

Early this month The New York Times ran a story intent on disproving the theory that trees communicate with each other through fungal networks below ground. The article features several pictures of very concerned-looking scientists, all quoted with arguments against the trendy idea of the “wood-wide web.”  Lamenting the mention of it on Ted Lasso, Dr. Jason Hoeksema argued that there is simply not enough research to conclude that fungi distribute resources to significantly “increase the fitness of the receiving trees.” Hoeksema and other scientists like him are part of a backlash against the growing popularity of a cooperative rather than competitive forest, says the Times. 

If my annoyance isn’t apparent, let me state clearly that I rolled my eyes all throughout the whole piece. Not because I don’t believe the research, but because they are choosing to tell a particular story of a many-sided tale. I understand that the supposed trendiness of fungi can have adverse consequences: making ecosystem blueprints based on mycelium that may not exist as plentifully in different kinds of forests can be disastrous, for example. But the crux of this piece is invested in dispelling what Peter Kropotkin first coined in 1902 as a “mutual aid”-rooted natural world. And, more importantly, it is ignoring that the belief in a symbiotic plant and animal world is something that has been suggested by indigenous communities for centuries. I am frustrated by both the absence of Kropotkin and indigenous wisdom (and others, like Lynn Margulis), as well as the implications of those absences. 

It is potentially dangerous to say something so simple, but I will say it anyway: our entire social world is built on stories. One reason I no longer identify as a Marxist is because I don’t actually believe materialist analysis provides the whole picture– certainly it is true that class conditions of working people create conflict that shifts history, but I disagree that discourse and consciousness are always-already a product of class struggle. I want to acknowledge the importance of taking seriously the role of the material and structural– white supremacy, for example, is not just a ‘story,’ it is an entrenched, centuries-old system that impacts people of color no matter how far away we get from slavery, colonization, and acute genocidal moments in history. So the material conditions matter, but stories matter too, and whether they came before or after a proletarian crisis is less important to me than how they function to reify particular constructs of the future. 

That got a little in the woods, so let me backup and return to our concrete example of the forest. It is important, for the most part, to take science seriously. It is also important to understand that everything we consume is given to us in a frame. The research presented by the scientists in the Times article is surely legitimate, but it doesn’t tell the story of 1) the legitimacy of scientific studies that do confirm how some fungal networks demonstrate a cooperative ecosystem; 2) any epistemology that isn’t ‘peer-reviewed’, such as indigenous, pagan, or other Earth-based spiritualities; 3) the political-economic history of scientific narratives alongside the geo-political landscape and funding sources. Who does this frame benefit? is a question we must always ask ourselves when engaging with media.

There is a reason that Social Darwinism became a taken-for-granted norm in contemporary society, and it’s not because Darwinism had a flawlessly cross-applicable idea – it was because that theory served contemporary capitalism. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the majority of theories about the natural world —indigenous and not—suggested it to be a congenial arena of reciprocity. But as wealthy factory barons prospered and working people toiled, the rich needed more stories to secure their new lot. Enter Thomas Malthus, a prominent voice of the time who began writing eugenicist texts arguing that human overpopulation was the reason resources were scarce, not wealth hoarding. Darwin was a fan of Malthus and incorporated his ideas into his ‘scientific’ writing, making an argument that would eventually be short-handed to “survival of the fittest.” 

In her compelling new book Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity in the Natural World, Kristin Ohlson writes: 

“metaphors of constant struggle and greed convince us that justice is likely to be thwarted, that benevolence is suspect, and that we—as the supposed apex organisms in this long churn of evolutionary history–are only fulfilling our biological destiny as we eat up the rest of the planet.” 

What new metaphors might we make? What new truths could we affirm instead?

In one of my favorite essays, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about the night that Harriet Tubman dreamed that Black people were no longer enslaved. “That morning she woke up joyful and all day long she repeated the truth: ‘My people are free.’” Pauline Gumbs continues: 

“She repeated the phrase in the present tense. Even though slavery was alive and well. Even though a major portion of the country was rising up in war to defend slavery.  Even though many of her loved ones were enslaved at that very moment.  She spoke in the present tense. Not “my people will be free,” but “my people are free.”

Harriet Tubman repeated and affirmed the reality that her dream and her faith gave her access to. Her people were already free, but the state and the property owners simply were not acting in accordance with the reality of human freedom.”

The stories we tell shape our movements and our lives. Not because the material truth doesn’t exist, but because we get to tell transformative stories about it. 

“We are in an imagination battle,” adrienne maree brown has said before. We are living, overwhelmingly, in the imagination of those in power, a version of the world to which we never consented. We can create new stories, new myths. “New stories lead to new actions, new possibilities.” 

I prefer to focus on the story of nature that reminds us of the absolutely real forms of care that emerge in the worldmaking of our non-human kin. I also prefer to focus on competition, predatory killings, and the reality of ostensibly non-reciprocal relationships as nuanced realities that deserve better than becoming fodder for a capitalist narrative of ‘survival of the fittest.’ Instead of taking those truths at face value, we might consider that competitive examples in nature do not cancel out the cooperative ones; that the life/death/life cycle is a gift and not something to be feared; and that symbiosis exists on a spectrum: “symbiosis…represents a continuum from parasitism to mutualism, or commensalism,” says eco-spiritual writer Sophie Strand. “Most beings will ride along that continuum their whole life. And sometimes they'll be antagonizing each other, sometimes they'll be helping each other. And it just depends on when you take a snapshot on that continuum, what it looks like.” 

The forest is greedy and it is generous. Fungi are vital and they are just one thing among an entire ecosystem of vital kin. Squirrels devour acorns, but they also bury them, helping new oaks to grow. We are a people who go to war and a people who take care of our neighbors in the wake of a storm. 

The stories I will pay attention to are the ones that will keep getting me out of bed for another day. For humans and the forest, ‘we keep us safe’ is a story that is only true sometimes; but it’s a story I’m going to keep telling.