Green-Dreaming in the Redwoods

A fictional story of one alternate future decades from now

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Welcome back Mother E readers!

Here’s a first for this newsletter.

I’m writing some fiction in the genre called Solar Punk. If you haven’t heard the term before, it’s a sub-genre of science fiction/ futurism. It tends to be community-minded and hopeful, offering a path towards a more harmonious future living with nature.

Solarpunk is a sci-fi sub genre and social movement that emerged from the internet in 2008. Solarpunk’s aesthetic visualizes collectivist, ecological utopias where nature and technology grow in harmony.

https://builtin.com/greentech/solarpunk#

Why fiction? Sometimes using the medium of art and story-telling helps us envision new ways of living or relating to our world. Also, I wanted to try something new. It’s my fledgling attempt at fiction, so if it doesn’t flow like you might expect, that’s part of my learning curve. Feel free to leave constructive comments afterwards. 😊

I will be taking a writing break next month to take care of family business, but Mother E will be back the first Sunday in May.

P.S. This story is longer (4247 words) than most of my posts, so read time is about 15 minutes. I’m giving you the full story, but if your email program shortens it, you can always view it and past posts on the Mother E website here.

Robin Applegarth

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CORA SLURPED HER FIRST-MEAL DRINK and prepared to head out for the day.

She stepped in front of the mirror by the door to fasten a burgundy helioscarf over her thick black hair, a feature from her Native Pomo ancestors. The head cover would gather sunlight to power her devices as she worked outside.

Auntie Lark poked her head through the flap of a curtained door where she and two other residents were cleaning up after first-meal. "Where are you going today?"

"I'm part of the team going to the Siskiyou forest. We'll be up there for a couple of days looking for gremanders and doing research in the redwood grove."

Cora picked up her bio pack, which had everything she'd need for the next couple of days, and passed her wrist in front of the scanner by the door. She was ready for this trip and some new sights.

She hugged her aunt with a pang of worry. Cora's parents and brother had died in the Great Heat decade, and her aunt was her last family member living. It was already 2059, and Cora was hopeful that the next year—and decade— would bring some respite from the warm, humid air that was all she had known most of her life.

She left her even-temperature underground residence and walked up the ramp. The walls of the wide ramp were terraced with trailing vegetable plants, and insects buzzed in the sheltered garden. Two small orange trees anchored the street-level entry. Cora blinked as she stepped up into the brighter sunlight.

She walked a block, then hopped onto one of the electric trams moving through the city to the Q terminal where she was to meet with the rest of the team, some of whom she didn't know yet.

The group's profile showed that this flex team had five people from the Eco Renew platform, which helped match people researching and restoring ecosystems. The goal was to learn from the natural world and help it regenerate. They also looked for biomimicry opportunities— ways to copy nature to solve human challenges.

Cora was thankful for the universal income everyone received, as it gave her some flexibility to work where she wanted. She stepped off the tram and found an esca-ramp that floated her to Level Two. Her friend Gremma was waiting and smiled as she saw Cora. Gremma was a plant physiologist who worked on most of Cora's same projects since they had both trained in plant science.

Standing with Gremma were three new people. Cora stepped up to the group and nodded hello, stretching out her wrist to scan everyone's information. The tall, mocha-skinned young man glanced at his wrist display and then back at her with a questioning look.

"I'm in Plant Comm," Cora explained. "I'll be downloading and interpreting communication from the trees. It's something my Pomo relatives taught me," she added, glancing into his gold-flecked brown eyes.

He nodded. "I'm Rory, with CRR, the Center for Redwood Research." He turned slightly, gesturing to the person next to him. "Jade just started with CRR and is a Fungus Reader." Jade grinned, "My first trip to these redwoods."

The other woman in the group was fit, silver-haired, and at least 20 years older than the rest of them. She wore an artistic helioscarf that reminded Cora of Amish quilts she had seen in pictures. The woman stuck out her pale wrist for a scan. "I'm Betts, a tetrapod invertebrate scientist, which just means I study salamanders. I can help you locate gremanders if there are any up there."

As the group turned to go to the levi-rail that would take them out of the city, a young man bounded up breathlessly with a larger bio pack.

"Oh, there you are!" He nodded at Gremma and Cora and scanned wrists with the three people he didn't know. "Sorry I'm late. I'm Eitan—they scheduled me as your security guide since you've got five people and there’s a weather alert for later today." He reviewed his wrist scanner. "I see our group is a flex team."

---

The trip to the Siskiyou forest took only a couple of hours traveling by levi-rail at 200 kilometers per hour. The sudden storms or weather disruptions that often delayed transportation did not bother them on this trip. They disembarked at the small town of Rainmure on time and with the sun shining through a few scattered clouds.

They arranged for e-bikes to take them the last seven kilometers to the nearest stand of redwood forest, where they parked under a shelter and plugged in their bikes. Around them loomed giants of trees, the fabled coastal redwood species Sequoia sempervirens, meaning "always flourishing."

Cora had seen groves like this a couple of times in her life but forgot how they made her feel--like she was walking through a sacred place, a tall cathedral of trunks grown with rain, fog and sunlight. A soft greenish light reflected inside the grove.

She remembered her Pomo grandmother had told her the redwoods were spirit people who gathered coastal fog to drink. Their long life spans of 1000-2000 years or more made them a living bridge between ancient and modern times.

Cora had been raised to think of trees as her relations and elders, and she held a deep respect for their survival skills through the last century. Her love for trees was what drew her into Plant Communication. Most of the ancient trees were gone now, cut down in the greed of the last two centuries before we knew trees could communicate and teach us things.

Everyone gazed upwards at the dappled green canopy of frilled branches attached to cinnamon-colored bark. The upper reaches of these giant trees held miniature worlds—ecosystems of insects, plants, and reptiles that treated the redwoods almost as a separate world unto themselves.

Narrow light beams filtered down to the forest floor, where sword ferns and pink-tipped huckleberry bushes grew in clusters. The forest was serenely quiet, with thick layers of damp humus carpeting the earth and hushing the sounds. They took a few minutes to absorb the atmosphere around them.

Eitan spoke up first, “I know you’re all working on different projects, but please stay near one or two others so no one gets lost. Let's all meet back here in three hours. I'll stay with the bikes in case anything comes up or you need me."

Jade pulled out her growth probe to look for fungus and read their electrical pulses, which had been translated into over 400 fungal “words” so far. Betts began carefully tipping up decaying wood to search underneath for the elusive brown gremander, a recently discovered invertebrate which lived only in redwood groves near streams.

Cora, her friend Gremma, and Rory set off on a trail deeper into the forest where the tallest redwoods grew. They walked along the path, savoring the hushed silence as if they moved in a timeless spell.

Rory led the way as this was one of the forests his institute monitored. After fifteen minutes of walking, a solitary doe darted suddenly across the path, and Rory put up his hand for a stop.

Around the next bend in the trail was a large circle of thick-trunked redwood trees surrounding a central stump almost three meters wide. This fabled "Seven Sisters" group was a fairy ring of trees sprouting up like a reverent circle around the mother tree’s body of a stump, cut down a couple of centuries ago.

Rory moved to the far side of the circle of redwoods and put on his Qi glasses to scan for tiny life forms on the layered bark.

Cora gazed at the ring of trees, feeling a slight buzz in her ears. She glanced at Gremma and nodded, then set her bio pack down next to one of the sister trees and took out a small pouch. She carefully extracted a green wafer of visioning plants and chewed it slowly, sipping some water to help it go down.

Gremma watched her friend, then shifted to a nearby downed log to sit, reflecting that she and Cora made a good team. Gremma looked out for Cora when she did her tree communication. Cora helped Gremma when they monitored plant transpiration and phytosemiotics—how plants sent messages through their tissues.

The field of plant perception had taken off in the mid-'30s when plants had been stressed over rising heat, and people were searching for ways to help them.

Some people called the plant communication Cora was doing “green dreaming” but Gremma knew there was much more to it. People could spend lifetimes learning from the plant world. She let her mind drift back to other trips as she watched her friend. She could fit in some reading while she kept an eye on Cora.

Cora found the buzzing in her ears increasing, and a visioning song started rising in her mind. She sang it softly to herself as she patted one of the trees growing into the trunk of the redwood next to it. It was fused into a single mass at the bottom but separated into two towering trees above like twin sisters.

Cora leaned forward and laid her forehead and hands on the spongy bark for a couple of minutes, touching the tree in the three-point contact method she liked to use. She felt the familiar resonant deep well of slow energy and tranquility she always noticed with trees. This one, older than most that she communicated with, had an added layer of… something else.

A cloud passed over them, and the light in the grove turned greener, giving the place a murky feeling of being underwater. A raven cawed far overhead. Cora shifted to sit right next to the redwood trunk.

After a few more minutes, a sensation of danger or menace came to her. A rhythmic, rasping sound filled her head, and she felt a sharp pain in her back. Trauma? Was the tree telling her about the logging that cut down the central mother tree, a memory stored in the roots and passed around through the mycelium in the soil? She shivered as she sensed the impact of tons of live tree crashing to the ground and fracturing, an ancient life cut down with the bite of a saw.

Cora let the painful sensation pass through her like a shadow as she slid back in time to the early life of the matriarch tree over a thousand years ago. That young tree watched her own human ancestors moving freely through a region rich with elk, spotted owls, and myriads of other animals and birds.

In that vision of a distant past, Cora saw insects she had never seen before, flitting through shafts of light. A white-winged butterfly with yellow spots danced in the sunlight. The air was deliciously cooler, the smells different, as if the richness of the plant world sent out its own leafy perfume. This thousand-years-ago forest felt stable, timeless.

She reluctantly pulled herself back from the past. She had a question today for these trees. What could she learn of resilience from this grove, holding one of Earth's oldest species? How had these redwoods weathered over twenty million years of earth changes in this spot— adapting, surviving fires, growing new life?

Cora let herself slow down and started soma breathing. She knew that trees and humans had a profoundly different scale of time, which made communication challenging. She let her thoughts drift, setting her intention silently, then waiting. Experience had taught her that sometimes the answers came days later or arrived through a dream.

An image floated into her mind of a network of capillaries carrying fluids throughout the structure of the towering redwood. Inside the capillaries were silver glints of infinite pathways and billions of cells sparkling with life. The tree was passing information around in a complex biochemical wave. It was constantly sensing the environment, both in the air above and in the darkness below ground, then adjusting itself accordingly.

Cora knew a tree's constant information gathering was then shared with nearby trees, plants, and fungi through the soil mycorrhiza. Just a handful of dark earth was alive with more organisms than all the people who lived on earth. A tree could pass messages to its neighbors fifty meters away through this rich network, alerting them of dangers or opportunities.

Could this generosity of sharing, this cooperation, be a crucial part of resilience? She suspected it was. Many individuals looking out for each other were considerably stronger than an isolated one standing alone.

Cora slipped deeper into a trance of awareness as she opened herself to the tree. A light wind passed through the top of the forest, stirring the layers of branches, while a blue jay screeched to its mate from a nearby perch. Cora’s normally active mind dipped into a timeless sea free of thought. The sun shifted further to the west as she became lost in a different dimension.

Later, she drifted back to the present moment, becoming aware that Rory had finished his work and was sitting on the log near Gremma.

Cora stretched her arms up and drew in a deep breath. A small frond of the lacy redwood branch had fallen onto her lap, and she picked it up and pocketed it to take with her. Having a piece of the tree often helped her receive communications later.

The trio headed back to join the others as the wind swirled through the branches. Rory walked up to her side. "How did it go?” he asked gently, sensing her mind was still pulling back to the present. She looked up at him, taking in his curly dark hair, slight beard shadow, and even features.

"It went OK. Things don't always come to me right away. It's like I sense the tree's presence and energy and try to listen in. You know how when you meet a new person, you get impressions and then sort some of them out later? It's like that."

Rory's mouth quirked. "Yea, I see what you mean. I'd love to know what you find from the redwoods, though. We don't have a Plant Comm person at the Center, so that's a missing part of our research." He looked over at Cora thoughtfully.

After ten minutes of walking, they returned to the grove's edge beside the bike shelter. Jade was taking images of a yellow slime mold, and Betts was zipping up her bio pack as more clouds gathered overhead. Eitan was reading his wrist scanner and had a furrow on his brow.

"We've got a cyclo-storm coming, so we need to head to a shelter. I've found a safe-dome about a kilometer away that we can use, but we need to hurry."

They all mounted their e-bikes and followed him. Dark clouds were gathering quickly above them now, and the wind picked up. Cora felt its thrusting pressure as she put her e-bike on max engine. The temperature dropped, and she shivered. Gremma pedaled up next to her and said something Cora couldn't hear with the rising wind. Gremma's helioscarf was gone, and her long brown hair was whipping across her face.

The group raced on, following Eitan in the dimming light. Finally, he turned off to the left on a small dirt road, and a minute later, the white safe-dome appeared, one of several in the region for anyone caught out in storms. Branches were breaking off trees and blowing around, and one knocked into Cora's helmet with a loud crack, making her jump.

"Bring the bikes inside!" Eitan yelled as he punched in a code, and the wide door swung open. They piled inside, dragging the bikes with them just as a heavy pine limb fell outside the door with a loud crack. Eitan slammed the door shut, and the six of them stood panting in shock at the speed with which the storm had overtaken them.

Betts' face was pale with fear, but she was the first to speak. "I was in a cyclo-storm about ten years ago, before the climate started stabilizing. I thought we were done with them." She shook her head while they all pushed the e-bikes into an alcove.

---

After they had all entered the safe dome, Eitan opened his bio pack. "Is everyone OK?" he asked as he looked around at each face. “Anyone get hurt?…We need to get some hot food into us, then we'll spend the night here. I'll send our location to your contacts and family."

He moved to the kitchen area and rummaged through the food pantry to get something to heat up. A little while later, they were all sitting around the redwood plank table, spooning up a steaming mushroom and lentil stew. Cora grunted with the pleasure of the warm food hitting her empty stomach.

At the end of the meal, Betts went over to her biopack and dug around for a minute, proudly lifting out a chocolate bar wrapped in the distinctive paper of the indigenous-produced candy from the Amazon, the last region where chocolate could grow.

“Oooh”, Cora breathed, “I haven’t had chocolate in years.” The others eagerly gathered around and Betts carefully broke the rare treat into smaller pieces to share. Cora’s mouth watered with the taste of the smooth, sweet-and-bitter morsel of dark chocolate. Her eyes met Rory’s and she noticed how the firelight reflected in them.

After savoring the chocolate bar and cleaning up from dinner, they set about laying out their bedding for the evening. Cora and Gremma put their sleep sacs next to each other, with bio packs at their feet.

The skylight showed darkness outside now, and the thick walls of the safe-dome muted part of the intense storm noise. Eitan checked the spec meter on the wall to see what the winds and conditions outside were doing.

Betts lit a blaze in the pellet stove to warm the room up as their group settled down to wait out the storm. The golden glow flickered off the white dome walls, chasing away the shadows. The six people instinctively gathered closer around the fire.

"You know," Jade ventured, "if we got stuck outside, it might have been hard to survive this storm."

Rory nodded, "Thanks for finding this place, Eitan. That was a close call." He paused. "I'm worried about the redwoods, though. They're so tall and have shallow roots, so high winds could bring them down."

Cora looked up. "If the storm is gone tomorrow, we should go back to see how the grove managed. We're only a kilometer away."

Everyone stared into the blaze for a while. Betts chuckled softly, "This reminds me of campfires with my family when I was a kid. We used to go up into the Sierras every summer and hike and camp out. I remember seeing black bears, red-tailed hawks, deer….and rivers. It was beautiful up there. I miss that." Her voice trailed off in wistful remembrance.

Cora said, "Yea, I remember my grandmother telling me about all the animals and birds—our Pomo relatives. We have a creation story about a coyote that—." She was interrupted by a loud, booming crash outside, which shook the dome.

Both Eitan and Betts jumped up to check the sensors to see if the dome had been damaged. Eitan came back and grimaced, "A tree hit the bermed side, but I think we're OK for now." He looked worried. The mood in the room grew somber as they listened to the wind howling outside. Betts added more wood pellets to the fire.

The 21st century had been a long, hard lesson in cooperation, from the famous Thousand Day Challenge, which called for a seismic shift in how we lived on the planet up to the present year.

Almost half the people left living on Earth now participated in restoration efforts. Much had been lost, but much had been gained too. Society had shifted its values towards building better communities and supporting people and ecosystems rather than just profit-making and pleasure-seeking.

As the wind roared through the darkness outside, Jade got up to rummage through her bio pack, pulling out a harmonica and a small tambourine. She held the tambourine out to the group, and Cora reached for it.

"How about some music?" Jade offered. "I know some songs from my home group." She started a familiar tune, and Cora tapped the tambourine in rhythm. The dancing flames played over them all, a mix of light and dark faces turned toward the fire's glow.

Rory scooted closer to watch Jade and Cora play, then he raised his baritone voice to sing, and others joined in. Jade's long side bangs bobbed as her harmonica led them through a dozen more songs, the music covering the thrashing noise of the storm until their mood lightened.

The group grew silent again while Eitan checked the sensors. "The wind's slowing, but we might get some icy rain that follows. We can use the thermal feature on our bio packs if we need more heat." Several heads nodded, and the group scooted closer together for warmth. Rory’s leg settled next to Cora’s as they shifted closer.

Gremma turned slightly to look at Betts next to her, whose short hair shone silver in the firelight. "Will you tell us more about your trips to the Sierras when you were younger? What was it like back then?"

Betts sighed. "Talking about the Sierra's just makes me want to go there again. But it was the reason I became a scientist like my mom. What you love pulls you forward. I always liked to find rivers and creeks in the mountains. While my mom was sitting on the banks with a fishing rod, I'd look for salamanders and tadpoles. Sometimes, all I found was colored rocks, but there was a thrill in wading through running water looking for things that moved."

Betts raised her face from gazing at the fire to look around at their group. Her voice broke as she added, "I'm hoping that if my granddaughter Andra has kids, they can do that too after our restoration efforts bring back more river life."

Gremma leaned over to lay her hand on Betts's arm. Cora found herself unexpectedly tearing up, and the rest of them nodded in sympathy. A camaraderie embraced their circle as each of them reflected on their own hopes for the future.

They knew they were part of a long chain of human restoration teams, and that they might not witness much difference in their lifetimes. It could take hundreds of years to heal some of the severe damage of the last century. Humanity now had to take the Long View, rather than plan for shorter, human time frames. The older people called it “Cathedral Thinking”.

The wind finally died down, but a layer of sleet now covered the skylight, sealing them inside for the night.

Betts yawned, "I need some sleep." The rest of the group stirred from gazing into the lowering blaze to getting ready for bed.

Cora stood up, feeling a bond with this team. Her First People ancestors had lived in a close community, and working with groups like this satisfied her need for connection with others who shared her deep kinship with nature.

As they prepared for sleep, shifting their sleep sacs away from the colder exterior wall and closer to the center of the space, the room quieted to slow murmurs and the occasional settling of the coals as the flames winked out.

Cora lay on her back and gazed up at the shadowy ceiling of the dome. She fingered the redwood frond in her pocket and her mind drifted back to the grove. She wondered how the trees coped with this fierce gale. After centuries of living through stormy weather, most of them would bend with the winds, knowing that survival meant adjusting rather than resisting. Their long but shallow roots were deeply intertwined and woven together into a net of support. The redwoods evolved to be stronger growing together.

As Cora’s thoughts slowed and her eyes closed, she sensed the presence of the trees again. Deep blue shadows merged into dark emerald foliage as she drifted off to sleep.

Cora dreamed of a pulsing energy connection between the redwoods and the nearby plants, trees, and animals. Each species played a supporting role in the dance of life, evolving into greater complexity yet more efficiency. Cora felt like a learner at the feet of a maestro. Life wanted to create more life, and these trees—relics of deep time— knew how to support that quest.

The storm passed over while the group slept, and the night became frosty and still. A silvery half-moon inched across the sky, and a solitary great horned owl swooped over the treetops looking for prey. A blanket of peaceful calm again descended over the forest.

Hours later, the first rays of morning sun lit the skylight, and the people inside started awakening. Ice slid noisily down the curve of the dome outside, but there was a promise of joy in the bright morning hours and a remembrance of shared experiences. As they packed away their sleeping sacs and gear, they had an indefinable sense that they were survivors, both of the storm and of a lineage of people of Earth.

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I love to hear from readers!

Can you envision a future several decades from now where half of Earth’s people are involved with restoration efforts? Would you like to hear more about a person who practices plant communication?

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