Some years ago, I was invited to give a talk at a conference in Germany organised by esteemed physicist Anastassia Makarieva. I had interviewed Anastassia, when Planet: Critical was in its infancy, about the biotic pump theory that she helped originate. The biotic pump hypothesises that forests are key to Earth’s water cycles by driving atmospheric moisture and rainfall patterns over land—in other words, they pull moisture from the ocean, causing rain to fall on their own soils. The biotic pump upturns everything we thought we once knew about how water circulates in Earth’s atmosphere, upsetting atmospheric scientists all over the world. But does it not make perfect sense? We describe forests as Earth’s lungs for oxygenating the planet; why should they not also draw in what they need?

The conference focussed on the biotic pump, although I was one of many invited to present their own outlying work to get a sense of the bigger picture which is forcing ecological degradation. Whilst I was honoured by the invitation to present, I jumped at the chance to attend simply to meet Anastassia whose intelligence and humility had left a distinct mark on me. She was even more amazing to witness in person, and I marvelled at her capacity to hold disparate threads of expertise and weave them into a cohesive understanding, before using that to collectively strategise. Her power of listening was as remarkable as her thinking, and she was so attuned to her goal—figuring out what can be done to protect Earth’s forest cover and thus the planet’s water cycle—that she paid no heed to the frictions that arise when experts come together.

Bavaria, where the conference was held, is filled with managed forests. One day, we were taken out into the woods by the employees of the Bavarian State Forest Enterprise who explained their policies, their strategies, and impressed the importance of wood as a renewable resource. Towards the end of the tour, they walked us towards a tree that had been cordoned off with ropes and explained that we were to watch it being cut down. Sadly, I cannot remember the species of the tree, which feels like a betrayal, but they were tall, straight and lustrous. They did not tremble when the chainsaw’s whine filled the air, nor when it bit deep into their flesh. I watched for a few seconds before looking around at my colleagues’ reactions. Only then did I notice that Anastassia had disappeared. 

I found her in the large bus that was ferrying us around for the day with her back facing the window that looked out onto the tree being cut down. I asked if she was all right. She said: “I cannot watch it, I don’t understand how they can do it. That tree is alive. I don’t understand how anyone can watch it be killed.”

Since witnessing Anastassia’s grief I have made a concerted effort to see trees for what they are: strong, interconnected, often ancient beings. I thank them whenever I enter a forest, placing a palm on one. I gaze upon them with an imaginative awareness and envision what they may be thinking, feeling, grieving. Doing this, I have learned to cry seeing vat swathes of monocultures where rainforest once stood and I have learned to wince watching children smack trunks with logs and I have learned be grateful when taking the life of a creature to fulfil a human need. We learned on our travels in Colombia that to love a thing you have to know it. Similarly, one of my favourite interviewees recently, Tyson Yunkaporta, said that to know a thing you have to live it, and to live it you have to know it. These philosophies have stayed with me and helped me understand why investigating the rampant destruction of forests and the inner worlds of trees have allowed me to join Anastassia in the bus, turning away from gratuitous destruction.

Just two months ago, I found myself swimming over a mass grave of bleached coral in Samoa. It would have been the biggest reef I had ever seen, except instead of flashing colours and teeming hotspots of life, I was met with a blanket of white stretching into an eery mistiness in all directions. I swam out as far as I was willing and still all I could see was a thicket of ghosts. I had never before thought of the term “mass grave” in reference to more-than-humans but it was the first description that came to mind, and the most apt I have come to since. I was swimming across the bodies of millions, perhaps billions, of dead and dying beings. Yet no flags hung at half-mast and no wail of grief hung in the air. Visitors splashed in the shallows, laughing beside the mass grave. I thought of Gaza. I hoped I would cry. I did not. 

I knew the severity of what I was witnessing and understood how much death lay before me, and yet I could not find the emotional horror that I would no doubt have felt swimming over a mass grave of humans—or perhaps a mass grave of forest. I spent an hour under the water searching for that ready identification with these spiky, curled, stony bodies. Instead, I was met with an internal panic about the effects of warming oceans. My mind blazed while my heart beat steadily with the waves, unfeeling of what I could see.

I berated my ignorant heart that day, and yet, in the weeks since, thinking back on it, I have come to realise that my ignorance was in assuming that my learned love for trees would facilitate a blanket application of empathy to everything else. The great irony of this ignorance is its profound anthropomorphism; I do now expect to know, or even care for, all human beings by knowing one, so why would knowledge for and time spent with one species amount to knowledge of and care for all? The tears I was trying to conjure underwater looking over the mass grave failed me not because I did not yet know how to grieve what I looked upon because I did not know what I looked upon. This is what separates sympathy from empathy; what separates disembodied intellectual exercises from tightness in the chest.

We have to learn to care. Rather, we have to unlearn. Christine Webb explained a few months ago that children under the age of four readily identify with the more-than-human world, seeing no difference between homo sapiens and all other creatures. Our preference for our own kind by devaluing others is learned behaviour. We see this in violent peaks of history between groups of humans. The Nazis ran incessant propaganda campaigns demonising and de-humanising Jews, and, today, Palestinians are the victims of eerily similar campaigns ordered by a Jewish state. Hatred and cruelty are learned reactions. So, too, is loving.

I do not often feel hopeful, nor do I think it a particularly worthy emotional endeavour, but this experience has given me a sense of peace for the future that far outstrips my lifetime. That we learn to love by knowing of and living with—that intimacy and entanglement are the interconnected thrusts of life and meaning—means we will always be able to do better. There is a future in which we know the world and love it for what it is, a world in which the mass grave of any species causes us to drop to our knees, a world in which our brothers and sisters are the folk with whom we share space, not genes. Such a world is not brought about by self-care, spontaneous enlightenment or sitting still for hours each day. It is brought about by study, and by moving the body, and living what we learn so that we can know it truly, and then loving what is revealed to us. It is brought about by living with, by sharing with, by opening to.

We already live in a world where we are perfectly capable of forgetting where our own limbs end and another’s begins. This is the embodiment of our entangled world. For a bright future, the best we can do with ourselves is get tangled up in one another, in one another and all.