Re-emergence, or how the tallest trees in the Amazon can teach us to be more human

Ceiba pentandra is known to English-speakers as giant kapok and in the Amazon as lupuna. Elsewhere it’s called ceibo or even palo borracho, drunken tree. It’s found in city parks throughout the tropics, from Argentina to Uganda. It’s native to both wet and dry tropical forests of South America, including the Amazon.

by Robin Van Loon, Executive Director of Camino Verde



Trees that Emerge from the Forest like Antennae 

Standing at the base of a giant kapok tree leaves you feeling small and insignificant.  Letting your eye be led by one of the characteristic rows of bumps that vertically stripe the trunk’s bark like meridiens, you can go from the soil to the hundred foot (forty meter) high crown by following what may very well be a route traveled by trains of leafcutter ants ascending into the canopy, descending with their cargo.  Tracing your glance slowly up the height of this elder, one of the Amazon rainforest’s largest trees, you will pass the hulking haunches of its buttress roots before reaching the dangling jeweled earrings of bromeliads and orchids that adorn its main branches, each as thick as a respectable tree trunk. Depending on the time of year, you might find at your feet and above you the pink and white flowers that smell faintly of jasmine and cinnamon. Or some months later you’d be lucky to spot the cotton pod-like fruits starting to dry out and pop open under the exacting tropical sun, loosing to the skies a silken, snow white, long-fibered kapok in the attempt to float the oily, edible seeds somewhere far away.  

The delicate flowers of Ceiba pentandra.

Called Ceiba pentandra by science, the tree is known to Peruvians as lupuna (loo-poo-nah) and is understood by some to be the home of the mother of the forest.  The morphology of its trunk gives the occasional tree a swollen shape reminiscent of a pregnant belly, and this is where a forest guardian spirit is said to live.  Several Amazonian tribes hold taboos against the tree’s destruction.  In Tambopata, Peru, elders in native communities have told us that it is really preferable to say your polite greetings outloud when passing by a particularly large one.  You wouldn’t want to come off as disrespectful, not to a lupuna.  These trees used to be left standing when farms were slashed, burnt from the forest.  This deference was born out of the fear that the tree’s powerful spirit could get you sick if you caused it harm.  

Around the globe, from the Amazon to the Old World, it’s only somewhat recently that human taboos strayed from emphasizing encoded naturalist knowledge.  Almost since we started walking upright, social taboos have helped keep rivers free from pollution and bird populations robust – and in this way they could be said to be a social technology, a software, of the human role in the ecosystem.  Taboos have helped to keep the great trees alive, with their special ecological role to play.  A forest without its largest, most ancient trees is simply... different.  

For the Camino Verde team, work in reforestation and conservation comes from a personal connection to the forest and its trees. Here Olivia is embraced by another spectacular example of lupuna or Ceiba pentandra. Photo by Shahrzade Ehya.

It is some trees’ nature to stand above the rest.  The dense multilayer structure of rainforests includes mycelium, herbs, brambles, vines, and shrubs.  Above these, palms, woody lianas, and young trees make up the mid range, and then the canopy trees form, well, the canopy, replete with epiphytic microlayers of life stacked on life.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s where the biological elevator stops its ascent, but instead there are trees beyond the canopy that stand head and shoulders above their peers.  These forest giants are called emergent trees, as in emerging above, and their crowns extend into the heights where others do not.  In the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere, emergent trees play a key role, positioned as they are at the literal physical apex of all that green.  

Emergent trees stand head and shoulders above other trees, taking advantage to stretch out above the rest. Some individuals of Ceiba pentandra seem to be attempting to reach as far horizontally as vertically.

When we talk about the ecology of a forest, and the ecology for example of a tree species, we’re talking about anatomy and physiology, form and function. But when we say function, you could also say we’re talking about purpose – what unique role does this species play for the ecosystem that no other can fulfill in precisely this way?

Among biology students (and professors for that matter), it’s still common to see Survival of the Fittest style thinking superimposed onto our ecological models in frankly inaccurate ways. We get to imagining that each tree stands where it stands because it is the most apt competitor within the forest for that particular spot, who was able to specialize to a certain soil type and microclimatic characteristics better than others and thereby earn itself a continuing slot in the musical chairs game of life.  

But in practice, in the field, there are many species that fit any given site – and a variety of sites where a certain kind of tree can grow happily.  Few species succeed and persist as a product of elbowing out competitors.  Rather, species achieve longevity through relevance.  They do something useful, they are productive and helpful, maybe more so than they have to be, and the forest in turn “invests” in them.  You could say this investment comes in the form of dependence.  The way that a forest shows its support of a creature is by tying other species to it in interdependent relationships.  Successful species aren’t the loners who outrun the pack.  Rather, the winners are the ones with the highest number of actively vibrating strands in the web of forest connectivity.  Make yourself useful to many, and there will be many hoping for you to succeed. 

Think of the squirrels, looking out for the chestnut trees by dispersing and planting their seeds.  The squirrels celebrate the generosity of the chestnuts in this way and practice reciprocity each time a stashed nut is forgotten and allowed to become a tree.  The species that survive are not the species who do it better, to the detriment of the weak others.  The species that persist are the ones that make themselves useful, feed and shelter others, becoming keystone elements within their landscape.  And so the squirrel is a willing servant of the chestnut, thanks to the chestnut’s incredible generosity.  More than acting as a servant, in fact the squirrel is a beneficiary.  And thus the chestnut’s mission becomes the squirrel’s mission. 

A Sloanea tree at Camino Verde’s reforestation center in the Peruvian Amazon holds a variety of lianas and epiphytes aloft. Photo by Jason Edwards / National Geographic.

Apex Predators and Apex Providers 

There are many superlative examples of generous providers as keystone species.  In the Amazon forest, the lupuna and the rest of the emergent tree species all share the trait of being mega-abundant fruiters.  Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) is not just economically significant but is also the tallest and one of the longest lived trees in the part of Southwestern Amazonia where it is native.  Researchers have found the productive life of Brazil nuts to surpass 800 years.  Similarly, when millenary hardwoods like chihuahuaco (Dipteryx micrantha) go to flower, the surrounding forest is abuzz with bees and expectation, for their seeds to be broadcast to the winds and showered over the other trees like so much edible confetti.  Quinilla (Manilkara bidentata) gives a hailstorm of sweet, sticky fruits related to the original chewing gum tree or chicle.  Birds and mammals alike delight in the abundance provided by these amazing producers year after year.  What animal doesn’t delight in a source of reliably plentiful food?  From fruit bats above to flightless birds below, the emergent trees recruit a squad of dispersers to invigorate and extend their reach and range.  This isn’t a capitalist system – the seed dispersers are paid handsomely for their services, so much so that one wonders if “the point” of the trees’ productivity is in fact to scatter seeds or rather to feed the animals.  

Forests rely on diversity to survive. This glimpse of the canopy of a secondary forest in the Peruvian Amazon shows dozens of species of trees.

Meanwhile, the actual bodies of these largest of rainforest trees form important habitat for creatures ranging from harpy eagles through the full rainbow of parrots, on to the monkeys and other arboreal mammals, from the sloth to the giant anteater.  Even mountain lions sleep in trees.  Hanging gardens of epiphytes, dangling aerial roots, and woody lianas anchor or loop themselves over these, the most structurally stable of all terrestrial organisms.  Fungus beneficially infect the trees underground, delivering minerals in exchange for photosynthetically engineered sugars.  And when the giants must fall, it is the fungus that blanket the old bodies in honorable funerary garments before returning their growth to the forest in a feast of renewal.

Let’s leave aside the emergent trees for a moment, because it’s not just the “charismatic megaflora,” the keystone species, that survive through service to others.  In a resilient forest, all the trees have their role to play.  Each has its specialist expertise, some in a less conspicuous way.  There are those who invisibly fix nitrogen from the air through associations with bacteria living in their roots and feed this key nutrient into the forest as a whole via leaf drop and the mycelial mat.   Some trees and herbs pull up harmful minerals and store them, away from others who are more susceptible.  And practically all species of trees in a forest such as the Amazon invest sugars and minerals via soil fungal webs to tree seedlings in the shadowy understory, regardless of species, ensuring the presence of new young to replace any falling old.  Meanwhile strangler figs thin the pack of the infirm, bringing weak and sick trees down, thus creating light gaps where young trees get the chance to spring up into the canopy.

Orchids like Vanilla pompona grow on top of other plants. Without orchids (and the bees that pollinate them) Brazil nut trees cannot produce.

Learning the Language of the Forest

In the Amazon it’s common to refer to the madre, or mother, to mean the spirit that dwells within a plant or tree, a river or a claylick frequented by the fauna.  Each tree species has its madre, and many of these “spirits of the trees” are colorful figures in the local folklore.  To understand what is called in some cultures the “medicine” of a tree, something of its personality and character, the flavor of its wisdom and the tone of its melody, studying its ecology is an excellent place to begin.  For many non-indigenous and Western people it’s frankly daunting to try to imagine how to get in touch with non-human life, to communicate with plants as some humans, some entire cultures, purport to be able to do.  It’s easy to think that this knowledge has been lost from a lack of practice.  But if we can entertain the notion that it’s possible for humans to get closer to life, to nature, to the consciousness of non-human life, then studying the way a species contributes to its ecosystem in tangible terms is an excellent place to start.  The chamomile tea calming a child before bed is one example of the beneficial interspecies ecology of a plant.  Ginger helping you fight off a cold is another, human-centric as this may be.  

Ecology is about relationships, about the intersection of benefits to beings belonging to different kingdoms and phylums.  Ecology tells us about what a language spoken across species might sound like, about how a “superorganism” like a forest thinks: in three dimensions.  

To look at one example, the towering Amazonian ironwood or chihuahuaco produces delicious edible seeds that are sometimes dispersed but more often are depredated (eaten) by a rodent called the agouti.  This is the same agouti that disperses other species’ seeds so helpfully.  Given that there are dozens of seeds to a Brazil nut pod, it’s rare for this guinea pig-like creature to finish them all off, so many are left behind and thereby “planted.”  But chihuahuaco produces only one seed per pod, and so the agouti rarely carries it anywhere, preferring to eat the one seed per pod in a single gulp.  This is a clear recipe for over-consumption of the almond-like seeds and a resulting dearth of regenerative germplasm – bad for the chihuahuaco.  

But the chihuahuaco is wise so to speak, and has developed a fuzzy, resinous coating over its seed pods that is attractive to giant fruit bats for superficial chewing and sucking that doesn’t damage the seeds inside.  Because these large flying mammals are in turn attractive as prey for owls, the bats usually carry the fruits to a secluded perch for peaceful enjoyment – which is first rate seed disperser behavior.  For whatever reason the saliva of the bats renders the seed pods unattractive to the agouti, who no longer crunches through the hard shell to get to the almond.  As a result, small nursery beds of chihuahuaco seedlings spring up on the forest floor below, always a clear indicator of where a bat has perched to eat.  By spotting the seedlings, you know the bat was there.  You are reading something of the language of the forest.  And thus we learn that the bat has a purpose to play with regard to the chihuahuaco and the agouti.  We see a relationship that we otherwise would not have suspected, and so we learn something about the important role the fruit bat plays in the forest.

And this brings us to a critical question, perhaps the most important question for our culture to ask.  What is the ecology of humans?  What is the role for which we are uniquely cast?  What is our function, our purpose on Earth? Why would life need an animal like us?  If we think of the unique gifts of humans as having been endowed to us by nature in order to fulfill a vital function, we are doing more than confirming the conclusions of countless indigenous creation myths, not to mention the book of Genesis.  We are also shifting our cultural orientation around how we see humans in the ecosystems where we’re found.  Our present cultures largely take it for granted that humans will interact with nature mostly out of self-interest and to achieve satisfaction of our material needs.  In other words, we have become convinced that what drives people to interact with nature is profit and gain.  It’s a zero sum game in which we’re extracting value in a way that subtracts value from the landscape.  This is a far cry from the stewardship entrusted to Adam and Eve.  

A Camino Verde partner farmer regards a healthy Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa), several centuries of age at least and producing hundreds of kilos of brazil nut year after year.

So much can come from engaging our intellectual curiosity with the simple idea of a helpful role in the landscape for a species like humans.  It’s a potentially useful practice to take time when in the forest to think about how remarkable it is that nature crafted a being like humans that can alter landscapes at will, for good and for ill.  And let’s remember, the landscape is living too.  Plants and fungi and the soil are the stable foundation of the forest and nothing would be possible without them.  The trees and the plants are the structure and are our ancestors.  They form the forest, within which animals are the messengers, bobbing through the trees like synapses conducting neurotransmitters, relaying information in the form of nutrients transferred and seeds dispersed.  And in an added layer of subtlety, humans are the ones to not just participate as equals, not just messengers but also regulators, the ones with the ability to see and measure what’s going on in the ecosystem and even make adjustments.  Just as the introduction of animals enhanced life’s locomotive dynamism, the introduction of humans represented an additional opportunity to build complexity.  Life’s natural tendency is toward just this kind of complexity, or as Ernst Gotsch puts it, syntropy rather than entropy.

Practicing Regeneration 

The more time we spend in the state of mind in which humans are limited actors working within and in service of the broader web of life, the more human we become.  In believing ourselves godlike and apart, we have trashed the sandbox, stomped across the playground, and played out our adolescent rebellion toward mother life, father life, with devastating consequences for many a river and many a bird species.  It is a proof of life’s unconditional love toward us young newcomers that we have been allowed so much freedom to learn through our mistakes.  We are equipped with an extraordinarily high tolerance for the poisons we emit into the waters and soils and skies.  Nature has given us resilience to learn and keep going, and we can only be grateful for the ongoing pardoning we receive.  But now we know too much to ignore the reality that we’re disintegrating ourselves as we dismantle our planet’s web of life.

Chihuahuaco (Dipteryx micrantha) or Amazonian ironwood is one of the tallest and oldest lived trees of the Amazon. Photograph by Joyce George.

This is why it becomes more than just an artistic endeavor or flight of fancy to make a sincere attempt to get in the mindset of most of the biological humans ever to have lived.  A mindset of dynamic apprenticeship with nature is vital if we are to cultivate the ability to engage as stewards of life, and in so doing save our skins.  But how do we “get in the mindset” of being ecological actors?  Here are two things that we have found most helpful as a sort of daily practice, accessible to anyone who qualifies as a biological human.  

First, when in a natural landscape such as a forest, take time to remind yourself that the trees are actually alive.  Take time to feel them and perceive them as living beings. Imagine yourself surrounded by animals or people rather than trees.  Imagine the possibility of universal human access to the clarity of the mystic or shaman who sees the trees breathing and hears their voices.  Take a moment to actively abstain from a closed mind, simply suspending doubt for long enough to see what it feels like.  Try to remember the trees as the living beings they are – and push back against the tendency to see them as inert, inanimate matter.

Second, and this takes some greater intellectual flexibility, practice thinking from a perspective that is one lens aperture setting wider, broader, than the norm of thinking of yourself as an individual person.  If we locate identity one order of magnitude higher than the individual, we can actually have the experience of “thinking like a forest” and in so doing, thinking for the forest in the way that must precede stewardship. Examples of this include learning from the landscape through observation, asking why a mushroom sprouted from this stump but not that stump, thus becoming a student of the forest and thereby contemplating what would be good for the ecosystem rather than simply what is good for humans.  We can learn to perceive that the chihuahuacos will suffer if there aren’t enough fruit bats around.  It’s the type of strategic engagement that allows us to see the value of bringing wolves back into landscapes where they were once present, despite our self-interested ambivalence toward having wolves around.  

Humans are a different kind of emergent species.  In the proverbial rainforest that is the diversity of life on Earth, humans have the ability to function as both apex predators and apex providers.  We can help ecosystems and landscapes maintain a dynamic balance and polychromatic harmony.  Or we can bring ourselves crashing down to the ground, abolishing an inordinate amount of life in the process.  Given that all forest resources are renewable, we should be embarrassed at the squandering but also at the lack of thoughtful replacement.  We’ve had all the time in the world to plant more trees, and we haven’t, and now we experience the shortage.  

Our species has been given the tools, physically and intellectually, to sustain ourselves in active co-creation with nature.  Unique animal that we are, we could emerge as a distinctive, generous feature of the landscape not unlike a lupuna or a Brazil nut tree.  Maybe it’s time we stop rebelling like teenagers and act like grown ups, as indigenous people have done for upwards of a hundred thousand years.  With today’s technology and our astonishing human ingenuity in service of the effort, it is imaginable to achieve the regeneration of our Earth’s life-sustaining systems.  Remarkably, the only things stopping us from doing so are our entrenched economic systems and our unwillingness to change course.  It appears that we still have much to learn from the forest.  How fortunate we are that the forest is still willing to teach us.