Interlude: Smart Forests

Smart forests represent a techno-utopic future where nature, including forests, is monitored carefully by sensors that can collect data such as the moisture or temperature of dirt. Nature is positioned, then, as a resource to be managed and controlled efficiently. This interlude argues that the same technology may be employed to redirect our way of thinking about plants and trees as living, learning from the ways that they perceive the world and their survival strategies. We may indeed trust the intelligence of trees and their communal strategies of being and becoming instead of trying to outsmart them, control them, or use them, assuming that we will not be affected by the devastation we cause along the way.