Tim Flannery in the Foreword to The Hidden Lives of Trees by Peter Wohlleben contends that trees have many elaborate means of communication- from electrical impulses to the senses of smell and taste and are sentient and social just like human communities.
My paper would explore trees as sentient beings with reference to Indian classic epics like the Mahabharata, the folklore from Rajasthan and certain tree writings. In our mythology trees were supposed to be the givers of ‘Prana’ or life nurturing elixir and were considered sacred. The Mahabharata quotes that those who plant trees should look after them as they do their own sons. They are not inanimate. Trees like the peepul, the sal , the neem have all been traditionally worshipped in Indian folklore and are supposed to be the abode of divine beings. But in the Anthropocene loss of trees through biocolonisation and the race for rapacious exploitation of nature's resources by human beings has led to irreducible climate change globally. The pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, like the Arboreal Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices? Getting through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature as precisely as possible, but even more it requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them.