(gentle music) (crow cowing) (upbeat music) - Knees up, right hand up, stand, nice.

Are you kind of feeling like you're getting the rhythm?

Ah, I'm getting there, yeah.

Just keep doing this for another few hours.

(Lucy laughing) (cell phone ringing) Hi, I'm in a tree.

(laughing) I'll call you another time, okay.

(upbeat music) - Okay, Hannah?

- Yeah.

(Hannah grunting) - Ooh.

(Charles laughing) (tape squeaking) - I know it's a cliche, but you might be wondering how we got here.

My name's Charles Lloyd.

I'm a filmmaker who began to see that the California we grew up in is disappearing.

(upbeat music) Climate change demands new solutions and new stories.

My friends and I set out to find those narratives.

This episode is about plants, but I didn't really know anything about plants or feel a connection to it.

Plants don't seem to move or do very much.

It's hard for me to relate, but it turns out that plants move and do a lot.

(upbeat music) (crunch of moving dirt) Plants are awesome.

Let me show you.

- [Promoter] "Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San Francisco-based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment and medical science and innovation.

And by the community foundation of Sonoma County.

Additional support provided by donors to the Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

(upbeat music) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(light music) - To me, a forest was a cacophony of green with bursts of yellow and red in autumn, but basically gorgeous gibberish.

But I've learned that trees are an expression of beauty that's more than just bark deep.

For trees, form follows function And their bodies tell their life stories.

And to understand them, we may just need to turn our assumptions upside down.

This is Paco Calvo, author of "Planta Sapiens" and head of the Minimal Intelligence Lab or MintLab at the University of Murcia.

Paco's one of the world's leading experts in a burgeoning and controversial new field; plant intelligence.

Scientists are beginning to figure out just how smart plants are and what that means for the world.

It was midnight for us, but bright and early in Spain for him.

How did you get into plants?

- Once upon a time, I used to be a straight philosopher and I was interested in the human mind working artificial neural networks and surprise, surprise, what's the closest you can get to an artificial neural network?

Plants, right?

So they are fully decentralized.

No central nervous system, nobody sitting there at the wheel doing the driving.

- You wrote in the book that plans are active participants, they're not just passive tools.

- Plants have their own problems, they bring up their own solutions.

They are well adapted to the stuff they need to be doing.

And they don't need to go shopping because they make up their own food through photosynthesis.

It's not just that plants are actors, it's that we are both on stage, co-evolving and shaping each other.

- Humans owe a lot to plants.

Before plants were plants, a eukaryote swallowed a cyanobacteria, which took sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and created sugars and oxygen, photosynthesis.

Long before humans discovered quantum mechanics, plants did.

Research suggests that the energy transfer in photosynthesis involves something called quantum coherence.

And if you want me to explain how quantum mechanics works, I can't.

Just look it up.

(bright music) By the way, plants also use oxygen.

They just made so much, the rest of us evolved to use the surplus.

Plants are the original architects of our world.

They're rooted in place, but where there's a will, there's a way.

They move by growing towards the sun, towards water and nutrients and outwards.

And they have other mechanisms to get what they want.

Like teaming up with fungi or predicting the position of the sun or sending chemical signals to warn other plants of danger.

But how can you tell if plants are just reacting automatically to stimuli like robots or if they're responding intelligently like us?

(Jeremy laughing) You talked about how they learn, right?

- They need to behave in a goal-directive manner.

As you know, we say -- happens, right?

They need to be ready to change gear.

And that requires flexibility, not just following a routine that comes in your genes.

They need to learn, they need to connect the dots.

They are individuals with their own needs, their own will, their own subjective awareness.

And if so, intrinsically they deserve our respect, even if we didn't depend on them, even if we didn't breathe their oxygen.

- Suggesting that plants are intelligent has ended many a scientist's career.

Let's just say Paco's questioning the orthodoxy and the orthodoxy has some notes.

How do you deal with the skeptics?

- How much time do we have?

(laughing) Sometimes I deal with them by counting to 10, like to 10 million, I mean.

I always say, "Oh, let's just do the science.

Let's gather the evidence and let's consider all hypotheses."

If you are not curious, if you don't dare to think outside the box, you will never come out with those alternative hypotheses.

- True intelligence recognizes intelligence.

It's game recognizing game.

huh, again?

(bright music) But if I truly wanted to understand plants, first, I'd have to up my game, like learning how to identify them.

So I started using Seek, an app that helps you do just that.

(energetic music) Jeremy, Hannah and I went a little crazy with the app and we began seeking everywhere.

- I really want to know what this purple stuff is.

- [Jeremy] Oh, it's a common ivy, got it.

- This reminds me of when I was a kid, there was this huge oak tree at my elementary school and it was like growing through a fence.

So me and my friends pretended that like each one of those little crevices was like something that we'd take care of.

So like that one was yours and like that one was mine and we'd like decorate them.

- I think it sounds cool.

- There's the tree.

And they moved the fence forward, it looks like that way.

This is where I used to play though, down here.

Oh, there's still metal here too.

That's crazy.

But yeah, this is my tree.

Played here every recess, every day.

- [Charles] We like the app so much, we asked the people behind it if we could be their friends.

(upbeat music) They said yes, - Thanks.

- Oh, good shot.

- Yeah.

- you're good at this.

You should do something in audio visual stuff.

(group laughing) - [Charles] They make two apps, iNaturalist for experts and Seek for non-experts.

- What we're trying to do with iNaturalist to just get the public engaged, get the public connected.

And what I think is so cool about citizen science or crowdsourcing is that we're doing both of those at once.

- [Charles] Seek is fun and that's by design, Just ask Abhas Misraraj.

- Seek is designed to be kind of like a game.

I have been obsessed with Pokemon months since I was a kid, so I was like, how can I take inspiration from this and build that same excitement, curiosity for someone who doesn't know anything about nature?

And that's kind of how I designed Seek.

I added, you know, levels added badges.

I made it for my 5-year-old self, essentially.

(chuckling) It got me a genus, it got me a species too, for offline at least.

- [Charles] Cool, yeah.

Can I try the binoculars?

- Seek is really great for anybody who doesn't have that connection already to nature and is able to kind of just use it to play the game, to build that empathy.

Over time, those small empathetic connections to individual organisms become an ecosystem, become the earth.

Like, people in even the densest urban areas walk by thousands of plants a day, whether they're weeds going out a sidewalk or a tree that's been planted, but they'll never see them.

- [Charles] Some people call this plant blindness, but I think of it as plant illiteracy.

You can identify plants by their bark, their seeds and by the shapes of their leaves.

It's like identifying letters by their curves and lines, then words by their letters.

(off mic kids chattering) It reminded me of being a kid.

I would get pulled away from my friends to take English as a second language.

You struggle at first, until you can see the shapes, until you recognize the patterns, until you can read, and then the real questions begin.

If you want to understand a language, you need cultural context.

So we went to go see plants in their natural habitat.

Lucy Kerhoulas studies, tree physiology and ecology.

She and her husband Nick, a biologist, both teach at Cal Poly Humboldt.

- [Lucy] So you do have to watch your footing here.

- [Charles] We traveled up north to hang out with them, literally.

- [Lucy] Here's the tree we're going to climb.

- [Charles] You're not supposed to climb redwoods on public lands, it can harm them, unless you're with scientists doing research.

Thankfully, we found two of them.

(dynamic music) - [Lucy] Knees up, right hand up, stand, nice.

Are you kind of feeling like you're getting the rhythm?

Ah, I'm getting there, yeah.

Just keep doing this for another few hours.

(Lucy laughing) - [Charles] Plants literally reach for the star.

To harvest light, you need to grow tall, but you're working against gravity and trees figured out the trick using lignin.

It's what makes wood woody and strong enough for the tree to reach the light first before everyone else.

The shape of a tree is a record of its journey.

The changes it encountered, the chances it took, the mistakes it made, and the paths it found for its fair share of starlight.

- It's actually no small feat to pull water, 300 plus feet up the tree from the soil.

And what happens is the leaf structure changes as you go up the tree.

So the leaves become kind of smaller and more dense.

And that has effects on whole tree physiology.

That hydraulic gradient creates a water tension, like towards the treetop.

So we're here at like 70 ish meters.

These peripheral leaves are really good at photosynthesis.

But these axial leaves here, they're not so good at photosynthesis, but they're like rock stars at water uptake.

So there's sort of this division of labor, this specialization of leaf function within redwood leaves, which is really cool and sort of speaks to the long evolutionary history of this species.

Not just relying on soil water, way up at these great heights, but kind of sipping from the clouds.

- This kind of clever adaptation begs the question, what is it like to be a redwood?

- Well, that's a great question.

Actually, I cannot know.

You see, when people think what is it like to be Charles, Paco or a redwood, we think that we might somehow need to dig into the organism.

So I can try to peek into your head and say, "Hey, what is it like to be Charles?"

Right?

So you might try to do the same with a redwood, right?

And say, okay, let's see within the three and we shouldn't be playing that game because by doing that we are going back to this reductionist understanding of plant life in terms of plant physiology.

First thing you need to do is to forget about the redwood itself and look around it.

What does the world look like from its perspective?

One way we put it is like, it's not what's within the organism, but how the organism interacts with the surroundings.

- [Charles] This can be true at a big scale or at a small scale.

Redwood canopies are home to a ton of organisms, even other plants called epiphytes.

- On our climb up we saw some evergreen huckleberries, ferns and epiphytic hemlock tree that we noticed.

And so the fern mats are really cool because they create lots of habitat.

There's also lots of like lichens and mosses and leafy liver warts.

Epiphytes are really helping the host tree more than we give them credit for.

They hold so much water and I think that that changes the microclimate of the crown, kind of short cutting that soil-plant atmosphere continuum using these local water sources that the epiphytes have captured.

- There is a really a diverse life up here.

One thing is really neat is the wandering salamanders, and that's what we see these cover boards for around here.

It provides a nice habitat for the salamanders to get into.

And then you can then open the boards to survey for salamanders up in this area.

- [Charles] What's it like working together?

- I think it's really fun.

- Yeah, it's fun.

- It's fun to be up in a tree with your best friend, studying cool stuff and relying on each other and trusting each other, obviously.

- It's kind of fun 'cause it's like a date, like we're working, technically, but we also, it's like time away from our kids, which we love, but it's kind of fun to just hang out and get to do stuff that way.

- [Charles] This vast complex landscape is only a diminished version of what once was.

(upbeat music) Redwoods built California.

Rot resistant and strong.

We use their timber to build all kinds of things.

Our houses, our oil derricks, even the pipes that brought water to our cities.

Trees may have been the original architects of the world, but then they became part of our architecture.

What remains of the redwoods is a "Ghost Forest," the name of a book by Greg King.

- Redwoods survived virtually any kind of cataclysm you could think of, right, including the breaking up of the continent.

And then you had the European settlers and they saw the redwoods as a bank, an investment.

- Greg started writing about redwoods in the 80s and what he experienced changed the entire course of his life.

- So the journalism got me into activism.

I was offered the editor's position at a weekly newspaper in Mendocino County.

But at the time I was deep in the investigation of Maxxam and Pacific Lumber and the logging of the last ancient redwoods.

I'd went into the ancient redwood grove held by Pacific Lumber that Maxxam was targeting for liquidation.

No people really had ever been in this grove, so it still had that ancient life to it and I felt it.

It was a sizzling of life.

(pensive music) (birds chirping) And so the next day I turned down the offer.

- Was it hard making that decision?

- No, no, it was instant.

It was a communication really from a living entity to me, straight through the life of this forest.

That was the last of it, the very last.

And so I moved to Humboldt County to try and save these groves.

We occupied the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is me, 250 feet above the road, almost 500 feet above the water.

This logger pulled a shotgun on us and fired it and I almost impaled myself on these branches right here.

But nobody stopped.

Nobody stopped doing the work.

Maybe we were just kind of crazy at that point, I don't know.

This unfortunately, all got cut down.

Took millions of years for this to get here and a day for it to be gone, you know.

- [Charles] Some of us hear music that others can't.

These are the ones who help us find harmony in nature.

In places like the Arcata Community Forest.

- When the city does log here, it's a very light touch logging regimen.

So they'll take about 5% of a given few acres and they won't cut the biggest trees.

And so it is regaining old growth characteristics.

- [Charles] Arcata is inspiring, but it's relatively small scale.

How do we scale up?

- We completely fragmented our forests, including our redwood forests, preserved tiny little relics.

- John Reid's my neighbor, he's a really smart guy, especially on the benefits of intact forests.

He even wrote the book on it.

- Intact forests landscapes are areas of forests that don't have roads in the middle of them.

They don't have industrial agriculture, they don't have mining infrastructure.

So there's a biodiversity and wildlife abundance.

Here in California, over 75% of our forests are privately owned by timber companies.

I think we should move a more reasonable share of that forest into public ownership.

- How do you think we should make that transition?

- Well, buy one or two big timber companies.

They never let the trees get older than about 50 years.

We have a permanently adolescent forest.

We have extreme scarcity of the large landscape function that intact forest would provide.

- [Charles] John doesn't just focus on California, his work has taken him to forests around the world.

- Tropical forests in particular, they have this cycle where they're putting massive amounts of water up into the sky and then it's falling back down as rain.

It's constantly picked up and deposited again.

So you're getting local cooling and you're getting global cooling.

They're important also because they store way more carbon than a fragmented forest does.

- [Charles] Research by Lucy's mentor Stephen Sillett, and others, suggests that redwood forests are the most efficient form of carbon storage on the planet.

Climate change may be a big threat to plants, heat stress, mega fires, disease, other disruptions, but plants also provide climate solutions.

And this is a big one right in front of us.

(light music) - I'm always amazed with how aptly named sequoia sempervirens is, like to live forever, basically.

And it truly does seem to be resilient to many forest disturbances.

I think Redwood is a story of hope (laughing) on a lot of different levels.

- [Charles] Plants are smart, we just need to give them time and space to do their thing.

And if we do that, we'll have saved ourselves.

Now it's time for the weird questions, Paco.

- Okay, (laughing) let's go for it.

- I noticed in the book at the end you thanked your parents for giving you a book called "Platero y yo."

- For what?

- "Platero y yo."

- Oh, wow.

(laughing) - Which I understand is like a story of a donkey?

And it was a very meaningful book to you.

Like why did you mention that?

- Oh my God, do you know what?

This is the very first time ever somebody asked me that question.

So as a kid, you know, my mother, my father, they were like, "What can we do to make this guy read a book, instead of being out there all day long playing with sticks and stones and--around?"

So they thought, "Okay, maybe, what sort of book could we give him as a present?"

And that was "Platero y yo," right?

So "Platero y yo" is a wonderful book.

It's a book in which you can just enjoy every single word you can just take words as morsels and enjoy their taste.

This idea of watching plants with the naked eye might have started there with the idea of, "Hey, one morsel at a time, take it easy, chill out, relax, and enjoy the line you are reading right now.

Or enjoy the tendril as it's growing right now."

(gentle music) - Tell me if I'm wrong, but if there's one imperative I got from your book, it was to stay curious.

- Absolutely, I like to say that education is not the transmission of knowledge.

It's about making your curiosity contagious.

- It's important to not anthropomorphize plants, but it's also devastating to mechanize them.

Plants and trees are not things.

They are not here to serve humans or animals for that matter.

They are here to serve themselves.

It just so happens when we balance our interests with theirs, we can make our world run like trading partners.

Carbon, oxygen, sugar, a pretty sweet deal.

The equation is changing now, but we are still in this together whether we like it or not.

You know, I said I didn't feel any strong connection to plants, but I realized there was one tree, a mulberry tree, and I loved to climb it.

It was where I learned to overcome my fear of heights, where I learned to fall and get cut up and bruised and get back up again.

And whenever I had a tough day, I would lie in its solid embrace.

When our school started raising silkworms, it gave me mulberry leaves I could bring to class.

I had friends, but now I was no longer just the kid who talked funny with the broken English.

I was the kid who helped feed our silkworms.

I had something to offer.

It was me, this tree and our silkworms.

A human, plant, animal collaboration, all three of us of Chinese descent helping each other make it in this strange land they called America.

I wish I could take you to that tree now, but it's no longer here.

They cut it down.

I wonder, how many of us have memories of trees and plants that we've forgotten when they were background actors to our human drama?

Essential, but unnamed.

They weren't even at the bottom of the call sheet.

They were the call sheet.

How often have they guided us or helped us or sustained us without our notice?

And how often have we let them down?

To paraphrase Paco, know less, think more.

Admitting what we don't know helps us think more clearly.

So stay curious.

We just might find beauty.

We just might find, I don't know, that's the point.

Maybe the path to understanding is not knowing.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Promoter] You can visit our website for more information, related educational materials, and additional resources.

It's all at climatecalifornia.org.

- [Promoter] "Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San Francisco-based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment and medical science and innovation.

And by the community foundation of Sonoma County.

Additional support provided by donors to the Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

(upbeat music) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music)