It was Earth Day, April 2021. One year into the pandemic. And I found myself returning to something Isaac Asimov had written — a sentence I had carried for years without quite knowing where to put it: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
I thought I understood that sentence before 2020. The pandemic taught me I had only read it.
What I kept thinking about, in those long months when the world went quiet in all the wrong ways, was the forest. Specifically, the research of Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, who spent decades studying what trees actually do when left to themselves. What she found overturned almost everything we assumed about competition as nature’s primary law. Trees, Simard discovered, live side by side in a state of continuous awareness—perceiving one another, learning, adapting their behaviour, recognising neighbours, and remembering the past. They warn each other. They defend each other. They compete, yes—but they also cooperate, with a sophistication that we had always believed belonged exclusively to human intelligence. The traits, she said, that are the essence of civil societies.
A forest on fire does not simply burn. It begins a process of maintaining its own health—drawing on root systems that run deeper than the fire reaches, redistributing what remains toward what can still grow. It does not abandon its weakest trees to die alone. It shares.
Wordsworth wrote that the mind is a garden, and the harvest can be either flowers or weeds. I have been thinking that Gaia is the gardener—and that it has been trying to tell us something for a very long time. We have not always been good at listening.
The pandemic was not, in the end, a mystery. It was a mirror. It reflected back to us the cost of the “Me First” model—the economics of competition and over-consumption that had governed so many of our institutions for so long. Within a year, scientists had developed a vaccine. Knowledge moved fast, exactly as Asimov said it would. But wisdom—the kind that would have made that vaccine a global commons rather than a commercial asset, freely licensed to every nation rather than rationed by purchasing power—moved much slower. And people paid for the gap with their lives.
What the forest knows, and what we are still learning, is that the survival of the whole depends on the willingness of each part to share what it has. Not as a moral aspiration. As a biological fact. Trees do not share their resources because they are virtuous. They share because the network only functions when every node contributes to it. Remove the cooperation, and the forest weakens. Introduce a threat, and the trees that are still connected to the system have a better chance than those that have cut themselves off.
The question the pandemic left us with—and that the ecological crisis is now asking more urgently—is whether we are capable of learning what the forest has known for millennia. Not in slogans. In structures. In the actual architecture of how we distribute knowledge, resources, care, and accountability across the communities we belong to.
As Marshall McLuhan said, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”
The crew do not survive by competing for the lifeboats. They survive by knowing the ship—and by knowing each other.
