When Trees Learn Bigotry

Have you ever stared at a pine forest while on a road trip? The lines are perfect. The spacing is exact. It looks less like nature and more like a botanical regiment. But have you ever wondered about the social life inside that plantation?

In these monocultures, diversity is a crime. Any young sapling that doesn't fit the mold is rejected, choked out by the “tree police" or starved by elders who have been deeply conditioned by the uniformity. To them, a different leaf shape isn't just ugly; it's dangerous.

The behavior thrives into a phase of distinct discrimination. Imagine pine tree parents forbidding their seedlings from playing with the “Oak people" because “they aren't like us" or accusing the maples of “coming here to steal our mycelium."

These pines, in their arrogance, don't realize that their soil is dying. They have rejected the millions of diverse organisms that once worked to keep the land fertile. They don't know that by segregating their habitat, they are shortening their own lifespans.

But the ultimate irony is their ignorance of the Master. The trees believe their purity makes them superior, having no clue they are merely products. They are being fattened up to build decks, pressed into cheap tables, or bled for their resin. They are proud of a system that was built to kill them.

This is the legacy of colonization, mirrored in nature. From the Spanish replacing Cuban forests with tobacco to the French stripping Haiti for sugar, empires have always replaced complex ecosystems with profitable, segregated lines. We taught the earth to discriminate, and now, the trees are just following orders.

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