Live-Tree Format

As part of Columbia University’s Arguments Lecture Series, historian Shannon Mattern, who studies big data and smart objects, led a wide-ranging conversation on how we conceptualize intelligence and what we can learn from trees. She talked about tree rings as progenitors of data collection and spoke of how in cities, tree canopy aligns with income, employment, race, age, and health factors, whereas in rural areas, it can hinder the already slow broadband internet or 5G, especially once trees grow into their summer foliage. She likened the “wood wide web”—the mycorrhizal network that connects forest trees and the fungi on their roots through an underground system of resource exchange (a theory a recent article in Nature called “largely disconnected from evidence”)—to the internet and human interactions. She critiqued half-hearted tree planting campaigns used as abatement measures by coal and gas interests to avoid reductions in emissions. Mattern conceded that her research is still only “a sapling of an idea” and described her talk as a series of as-of-yet loosely related branches, motivated by the recognition that “our cords and cables are entangled with roots and vines.”