Gifts from the Sentient Forest

Gifts from the Sentient Forest: Communication and Collaboration Between People and Trees in Northern Finland

In Northern Finland—comprising Finnish Lapland and urban Rovaniemi—the harvesting of old trees has resulted in the decline of boreal ecosystems. Disrupting interdependencies between people and trees in the country’s North, climate change will significantly alter existing forests. In this ecological context, Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) is a collaborative, transdisciplinary project that develops new perspectives on Northern Finland’s forests and the biocultural legacies surrounding them. At the centre of the project is forest sentience, a concept signifying the capacities of trees for sensing, communication, behaviour, learning, memory and other attributes associated with intelligence.

We position GSF broadly within the plant humanities, an area of ecohumanistic research focusing on the agencies of botanical life. Calling attention to the capacity of trees for creative resilience, the research formulates a set of methods to enhance the appreciation of tree sentience and multidimensional resonances of forests. More-than-human sentience supplies the groundwork for cultivating communication and collaboration, inspiring a transformation of awareness through art, music, poetry, prose, performance and other interventions in which arboreal life plays a central role. Through the lens of forest sentience, creativity becomes an emergent property of intelligent life forms engaged in generative exchange.

GSF develops a range of practical techniques for accessing forest sentience on an everyday, experiential basis. The first, pareidolia, refers to the perception of meaningful patterns in the environment ranging from the highly ephemeral (when perceived in water, snow, and ice) to the comparably stable (when perceived on trees and rocks). The perception of pareidoliac forms can inspire poetry, art, music and spiritual experience as well as greater identification with the more-than-human world. The second, interviewing trees, reflects the etymological basis of interview in the French term entrevue, “to see each other, visit each other briefly, have a glimpse of.” As anthropologist John Hartigan asks, “Why should they not be ethnographic subjects? […] Accounting for plants changed my approach to ethnographic description.” More specifically, the project’s interview method incorporates the Goethean idea of exact sensorial imagination as the concerted refiguring in one’s perception of nature.

The third method, remembering (with) trees, works with the premise that plants are endowed with the faculty of memory. They recall changes in light, temperature, pressure, stress, and other variables while also displaying multigenerational stress memory. The rhizosphere is a memory network orchestrated by sentinel trees that pass memories on to enhance the wellbeing of future generations. Making memories of trees entails making memories with trees. The fourth, sensory walking, calls attention to the capacity of hearing and smell to facilitate experiences of forest sentience in the urban landscape of Rovaniemi and surrounding areas.

The fifth, artistic engagements, views writing, sketching, painting, performing and filmmaking as specific modes of encountering forest sentience. In working with trees imaginatively, we access the intrinsic imagination of trees themselves. Accordingly, artistic pursuits are inherently collaborative and dialogical. Botanical materials become vibrant sources of the creativity shared between human and more-than-human beings.