I was cutting a mango from the tree in my garden when a thought stopped me mid-swing. What if this tree feels something? What if it knows what I am doing?
I stood there with the knife in my hand, looking at the branch, feeling foolish. Trees do not feel. Everyone knows this. They have no brain, no nervous system, no capacity for pain. I finished cutting and went inside. But the thought followed me.
What if we are wrong?
Scientists have discovered strange things about plants in recent years. When a tree is attacked by insects, it releases chemicals into the air—warning signals that neighboring trees detect. Those neighbors then produce their own defenses before the insects arrive. The trees are communicating. They are protecting each other. They are, in some primitive way, cooperating.
Underground, their roots form networks. A healthy tree will share nutrients with a struggling tree nearby. A dying tree will transfer its resources to its offspring before it goes. The forest is not a collection of individuals competing for survival. It is a community, connected in ways we are only beginning to understand.
This is not pain as we know it. There is no screaming, no visible suffering. But there is response. There is resistance. There is something that looks, if you squint, like the will to live.
I think about this more than I should.
We have built our entire moral framework on a simple principle: if it screams, it suffers. If it suffers, we should care. Cows scream when slaughtered, so we feel guilt—or at least, some of us do. We create laws about humane treatment. We debate the ethics of meat. We acknowledge that animals have something worth protecting.
But plants are silent. They cannot run. They cannot cry out. When we cut a forest, we hear only the sound of saws and falling wood. There is no protest we can recognize. So we feel nothing. We clear land without conscience. We harvest crops without hesitation. The silence gives us permission.
But what if silence is not the same as absence? What if pain exists wherever life resists death?
My grandmother used to talk to her plants. She would greet them in the morning, apologize when she pruned them, thank them when they flowered. We thought this was eccentricity, the charming foolishness of an old woman. But maybe she sensed something we did not. Maybe she understood, without scientific language, that these were living things deserving of acknowledgment.
The question that haunts me is this: if plants could scream, would we treat them differently?
Imagine walking through a forest and hearing it. Every step on fallen leaves, a small cry. Every broken branch, a shriek. Every cleared field, a chorus of agony. We would not be able to bear it. We would change everything—our agriculture, our cities, our entire relationship with the green world.
But the screams are silent. Or rather, they exist on frequencies we cannot detect. The chemical warnings, the electrical signals, the slow responses to damage—these are the screams. We simply do not have ears for them.
I am not saying plants are conscious in the way we are conscious. I am not saying they think or feel or suffer as animals do. I do not know what they experience. No one knows. The inner life of a tree, if it has one, is completely inaccessible to us.
But I am saying that our confidence in their unconsciousness is not earned. We assume they feel nothing because they do not respond in ways we recognize. This is not evidence. This is projection. We have decided that consciousness requires a brain, that pain requires a nervous system, that suffering requires a voice. These decisions are convenient. They allow us to use the plant world without moral complication.
What if they are wrong?
I read once about an experiment. Scientists played the sound of caterpillars chewing to plants that had never encountered caterpillars. The plants responded by producing defensive chemicals. They heard—through some mechanism we do not understand—and they prepared for attack. They recognized threat. They acted to protect themselves.
This is not random biological process. This is response to information. This is, in some sense, awareness.
I do not know what to do with this knowledge. I cannot stop eating. I cannot stop breathing the oxygen that plants produce. My survival depends on consuming life—plant life, if not animal life. There is no way out of this dependency. I am, as all humans are, a creature that lives by taking from others.
But perhaps I can take with more awareness. Perhaps I can acknowledge what I do not understand. Perhaps I can hold the possibility that the mango tree felt something when I cut its branch, even if I cannot know what it felt.
My daughter asked me once why we say sorry to people but not to plants. I did not have a good answer. I said something about plants not understanding language. But maybe that is not the point. Maybe the apology is not for the plant. Maybe it is for us. A way of staying humble. A way of remembering that we are not the only lives that matter.
In our garden now, I find myself hesitating before I prune. I take what I need, but I take less than I used to. I notice the trees in ways I did not notice before—the way they reach toward light, the way they heal over wounds, the way they communicate through roots I cannot see.
I do not know if this makes any difference to them. Probably it does not. But it makes a difference to me. It keeps me from the arrogance of assuming I understand what I do not understand. It keeps me aware that I am surrounded by life, all of it struggling to continue, all of it responding to the world in ways I may never comprehend.
The mango tree is still there. It produced fruit this season, despite my cutting. Life continues. It finds ways. It adapts, persists, reaches toward what it needs.
If that is not a kind of will, I do not know what to call it. If that is not a kind of being, I do not know what is.
I am not asking for answers. I have none to give. I am only asking for uncertainty. For the humility to admit that consciousness may be stranger and more widely distributed than we have assumed. For the openness to consider that pain might exist where we cannot hear it.
The forests are falling all over the world. The fields are planted and harvested, planted and harvested, in endless cycles. We do this because we must. We do this because the plants are silent.
But sometimes, in the quiet of the garden, I think I almost hear something. A frequency just beyond reach. A protest too soft to register.
The silent scream.
I cannot prove it exists.
But I can no longer be certain it does not.