And trees almost certainly feel pain. During extreme droughts, the trunks can begin to vibrate softly in the plants’ version of vocal cords. Sonic tests have confirmed these vibrations inside distressed trees—what some believe are the arboreal equivalent of screams.

I want to save the forest as much as anyone, but this is really pushing it.

Could we hear, at a subconscious level, the “screaming” vibrations of trunks over the years during increasingly strange stretches of drought? Could we hear the pain, too, as the big oaks died from the effects of extreme rain?

This author has a vivid imagination.

Lisa grew up in a family of fishermen and hunters. She reveres the natural world.

But not the beings who inhabit it? Trees are valuable only in terms of what they provide to sentient beings. “The natural world” is an unfeeling mass of atoms smashing into each other and has no concept of value.

And when the tree died, an arborist estimated that several hundred life-forms had inhabited its massive crown—from ravens and rat snakes to cicadas and tiny aphids

Let’s focus more on helping others like them by protecting their habitats.

It’s amazing how, in my neighborhood, when big trees come down, gardens go up. And solar panels happen. You’d be quite prosperous if you got a dollar each time a big tree disappeared here and solar panels went onto the pitched roof of a nearby household or the flat top of a commercial building. We’re adapting.

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My neighbor Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, has another idea. He wants to achieve negative emissions by burying billions of the world’s dying trees, including those on my street, in low-oxygen clay soil. This will slow their decay for a thousand years or more. “Reverse coal,” he calls it.

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Of course, the act of planting trees, instead of burying them, is a form of negative emissions too. As they grow, hardwood trees can absorb and store as much as a ton of CO2 by age 40, and many nations worldwide have pledged to plant a combined 1 trillion new trees in coming years. The city of Takoma Park is planting more trees than ever, and in late 2023, two “climate smart” species went into my own yard: a swamp white oak in the front and a bald cypress in the back. Each is highly tolerant of both droughts and deluges.

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If all of the land currently used by animal agriculture were converted (back) into forest, that would solve the CO₂ emissions problem within decades. Be vegan, and keep planting.