Why arboreal sentience?

Forests support life on Earth by providing sustenance, enhancing water quality and mitigating climatic irregularities (FAO & UNEP, 2020, pp. 162–63). In addition to their ecological significance, old forests hold diverse aesthetic, cultural, emotional and spiritual values because of the powerful capacities that reside within them (Ryan & Giblett, Reference Ryan and Giblett2018). In this context, ethnobotanist José Tomás Ibarra and colleagues (Reference Ibarra, Petitpas, Barreau, Caviedes, Cortés, Orrego, Salazar, Altamirano and Wall2022) foreground how trees offer both “tangible goods (resin, bark, flowers, wood, fruits, medicines and seeds) and intangible values (aesthetic, artistic and religious character)” (p. 15). As natural and cultural nexuses, ancient trees, in particular, inspire personal and collective identities. The interwoven biocultural value of forests also extends to urban habitats where healthy, mature trees are integral to the wellbeing of humans and others (Mänttäri et al., Reference Mänttäri, Lindén and Tuhkanen2023; Turner-Skoff & Cavender, Reference Turner-Skoff and Cavender2019, p. 323).

Global deforestation, however, proceeds at a harrowing rate. Since 1990, approximately four-hundred million hectares of forests worldwide have been converted to agricultural, industrial and military uses (FAO & UNEP, 2020, p. xvi). As old forests disappear, the heritage associated with them is jeopardised (UNESCO, 2023). This precarity is evident around the globe including in relatively remote Northern Finland, a region touted as “one of Europe’s last wildernesses” (Lapland - Above Ordinary, 2024).Footnote ¹ Sparsely populated Northern Finland comprises Finnish Lapland, the provinces of Kainuu and North Ostrobothnia and the small cities of Oulu and Rovaniemi. Throughout the region, the clearing of trees for logging, mining and urbanisation has resulted in the decline of boreal habitats. The homogenisation of forest structures has precipitated the loss of salient ecological agents, such as large old trees, crucial for sustaining northern habitats (Aakala et al., Reference Aakala, Kulha and Kuuluvainen2023). Intensified by industrial-scale timber harvesting, the effects of climate change on Northern Finland are especially acute. During winter months, snowfall has diminished drastically while summer temperatures turn ever more volatile. A report by the Finnish Climate Change Panel warns that Lapland will experience catastrophic flooding as a consequence of ongoing climatic alteration (Salonen, Reference Salonen2021).

In Northern Finland, the disruption of forests fractures longstanding biocultural interdependencies between trees and people (Venäläinen et al., Reference Venäläinen, Lehtonen, Laapas, Ruosteenoja, Tikkanen, Viiri, Ikonen and Peltola2020). Due to centuries of settlement and industrialisation, much knowledge of Finnish trees and their myriad values has already vanished (Lummaa, Reference Lummaa2023). This biocultural loss is one root of the region’s climate emergency. Nevertheless, alongside the threats to the flourishing of Finnish forests lies a body of research articulating how trees respond intelligently to ecological contingencies. The science of “plant cognition” examines the faculties of communication, memory, kinship and altruism in plants, trees and forests (Baluška et al., Reference Baluška, Gagliano and Witzany2018; Baluška & Levin, Reference Baluška and Levin2016; Baluška & Mancuso, Reference Baluška and Mancuso2020). Characterised as “sentinels” (Ribeiro & da Silva Torres, Reference Ribeiro and Da Silva Torres2018) and “mother trees” (Simard, Reference Simard2021), old trees can recall ecological events and transmit memories to younger generations to enhance their kin’s resilience. The passing of experiential knowledge between generations through memory networks underscores the role of age and diversity in long-term forest health (Galviz et al., Reference Galviz, Ribeiro and Souza2020). At the same time, ubiquitous subterranean fungal systems known as mycorrhizal networks energise “the diverse intelligence present among humans and forests” (Simard, Reference Simard, Baluška, Gagliano and Witzany2018b, p. 197). In many ways, the notion of trees as cognitive beings accords with the Indigenous Sámi conception of Northern Finland as Sápmi and meahcit – as a locus of physical, psychological and spiritual encounters between humans and other sentient beings (Lehtola, Reference Lehtola2004, p. 88). Throughout Sápmi, Indigenous communities continue to experience the catastrophic impacts of mining, drought, land clearance and climate change on forests (Acosta & Öhman, Reference Acosta and Öhman2024; Ott, Reference Ott2025; Sirniö et al., Reference Sirniö, Andersson, Ek and Reid2025).

Gifts from the sentient forest: communication and collaboration

As global societies become more estranged from arboreal nature, what might the recognition of forest sentience contribute to botanical stewardship and tree-people relations? The term sentience here expresses the idea that forests possess the capacity to communicate, respond, feel, sense and remember. The noun sentience derives from the Latin participle sentiēns for “feeling”, referring to the ability to perceive through the senses. The adjective, sentient, signifies that one is “capable of sensing or feeling: conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting or smelling” (Merriam-Webster, 2024). Neuroscientist Lori Marino (Reference Marino, Breed and Moore2010) characterises sentience as “a multidimensional subjective phenomenon that refers to the depth of awareness an individual possesses” (p. 132). According to plant scientist Anthony Trewavas and colleagues (Reference Trewavas, Baluška, Mancuso and Calvo2020), sentience also implies an organism’s “awareness” of the environment (p. 216). The notion of forest sentience, therefore, points to a forest’s depth of awareness as a community of subjects.

The arts-based intervention Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) proffers a transdisciplinary framework – traversing the arts, humanities and sciences both epistemologically and methodologically – for promoting new perspectives on Northern Finland’s forests and their biocultural legacies. The project places “arboreal sentience” at the front and centre of enquiry. Understanding trees and forests as sentient is pivotal to addressing current environmental, social and cultural exigencies (Baluška & Mancuso, Reference Baluška and Mancuso2020; Popkin, Reference Popkin2019). Viewing arboreal sentience as a means to redress environmental degradation, František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso (Reference Baluška and Mancuso2020) foreground the idea’s “profound consequences not just for future climate scenarios but also for understanding [humanity’s] role and position within the Earth’s biosphere” (p. 1). GSF emphasises the value of engaging diverse publics in learning about arboreal sentience as a way to reconfigure entrenched perceptions of trees as commodities, resources and repositories. The project positions sentience as a galvanising agent for fostering creative practices predicated on communication and collaboration between life forms (Ryan, Reference Ryan2017).

Inspired by the potential of sentience, GSF innovates a spectrum of approaches to Northern Finland’s trees through insights synthesised from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. The research reflects the burgeoning of human-plant studies (HPS), a transdisciplinary field that unsettles epistemological biases towards botanical nature as insentient. Concerned with botanical agency, ethics and language, HPS offers a foundation for reconsidering vegetal life, problematising the dominant narratives of plants, rejuvenating human–flora relations and returning attention to the oftentimes marginalised significance of plants in everyday life (Ryan, Reference Ryan, Osterhoudt and Sivaramakrishnan2023). Fostering creative interactions with trees and their ecological communities, GSF formulates strategies for countering “plant blindness”, the inability to notice the flora of one’s surroundings exacerbated by the wider cultural neglect of plants’ multidimensional value (Balding & Williams, Reference Balding and Williams2016). Theorists of plant blindness and the more recently conceptualised premise of “plant awareness disparity” contend that our undervaluing of the flora of our immediate surroundings limits our appreciation and understanding of botanical nature (Parsley et al., Reference Parsley, Daigle, Sabel and Nehm2022).

GSF focuses on the arboreal communities of Northern Finland and, specifically, the spruce, pine, birch and aspen trees in Rovaniemi and outlying areas. Unlike ecological studies of Lapland, the project places emphasis on creative responses to environmental change in the region. Arboreal sentience cultivates people-tree-place interrelations. The approach aims to catalyse a transformation of spirituality, consciousness, awareness and values among the public. Accordingly, GSF considers the following types of questions: What does creative collaboration with the arboreal world involve? Which methods offer the most effective means to facilitate communication with trees? What gifts arise when we engage with trees as sentient beings? What creative, educational, social, personal, ecological and health-related benefits flow from our interactions with trees as collaborative kin?

GSF offers diverse educational programming focused on the sentience of trees in Northern Finland and reflecting the expertise of the project’s leaders. Originally from the United Kingdom, Francis Joy has lived in Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland for close to twenty years. He conducts research on Sámi religion and art at the University of Lapland’s Arctic Centre. Based at the Nulungu Indigenous Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, John C. Ryan is an international researcher in creative writing, plant studies and the environmental humanities. In 2024, in response to the ongoing decline of Lapland’s old forest communities, we formed a cohort of fifteen artists, writers and researchers from Finland and abroad interested in engaging creatively with arboreal sentience. During four two-day retreats held between 2024 and 2025 at venues in proximity to old-growth forests, we guided the group through practices of visualisation, meditation, writing, painting, movement, pattern recognition, memory retrieval and species identification. As the culmination of the cohort’s work together, we curated a two-month group exhibition at a gallery near the city centre (Ryan & Joy, Reference Ryan and Joy2025). In addition to the retreat-based learning cohort, we facilitated public workshops on arboreal sentience at sites in Rovaniemi and online, attracting about 800 additional participants. After each in-person and online event, we invited attendees to offer brief written narratives of their experiences. Delivered to participants by email, our feedback form consisted of broad, open-ended questions such as “Which of the approaches have you found helpful to developing your creative practice during this GSF event? Please elaborate”.Footnote ²

This article presents a critical account of the project’s core approaches. We begin by contextualising GSF as a response to ecological precarity in the Rovaniemi area. We then delineate three methods selected to amplify participants’ experiences of tree sentience physically in Rovaniemi and virtually through online seminars. The three interconnected methods – sensing trees, interviewing trees and remembering (with) trees – supplied an embodied medium for participants to express their encounters with arboreal sentience through poetry, songs, fiction, non-fiction, artworks, photography and performances. The three techniques constitute an eco-somatics, a framework merging ecology and somatics to generate practices deepening awareness of arboreal nature through embodied interactions (Barbour, Reference Barbour, Fraleigh and Riley2024). In the form of narrative feedback and creative artefacts, the project outcomes accord with the aims of practice-based methodologies (Dwyer et al., Reference Dwyer, Davis and Emerald2017). Examples of the cohort’s work and excerpts from participants’ written responses enhance our account of the methods.

Rovaniemi, Finland: an arctic city in crisis

Known internationally for the aurora borealis, reindeer farms and wilderness tourism, Rovaniemi lies six kilometres south of the Arctic Circle at the confluence of the Kemi River and its primary tributary, the Ounas River (Figure 1). At 7,500 square kilometres, Rovaniemi ranks as Europe’s largest city by land area and Northern Finland’s second largest city by population after Oulu about 225 km south. According to recent estimates, Rovaniemi’s population stands at about 65,000 (Arctic Mayors’ Forum, 2024). The small city serves as the administrative capital of Lapland, the geographically largest yet least populated region of Finland with around 180,000 inhabitants. Lapland’s subarctic climate is characterised by cold winters with heavy snowfall and mild summers. Marketed as a Christmas holiday destination, the city thrives on winter tourism from November through January. Accordingly, Rovaniemi is promoted to tourists within and outside the region as a place to experience boreal wilderness. In Finland and nearby Nordic countries, wilderness has historically undergone intensive contestation especially vis-à-vis climate change (Saarinen, Reference Saarinen2003). Studies estimate that, by 2100, Lapland winters will be five degrees and summers two–three degrees Celsius warmer compared to baseline climatic conditions recorded between 1961 and 1990 (Tervo-Kankare et al., Reference Tervo-Kankare, Hall and Saarinen2013, p. 300). In addition to the impacts of climate change, the Lapland War of 1944 resulted in the annihilation of Rovaniemi’s infrastructure by retreating German forces.

Figure 1.

Rovaniemi is located in Northern Finland about eight-hundred kilometres north of Helsinki. Image credit: Fenn-O-maniC, CC BY-SA 3.0. <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia commons.

Predating the city, the old trees of Rovaniemi are a vibrant element of its biocultural heritage. Due to the devastation of the city eight decades ago, the birches, pines, spruces, poplars and aspens that have survived embody a persistent sense of rootedness to pre-war history. An essential function of urban trees is to connect people with the more-than-human world (Turner-Skoff & Cavender, Reference Turner-Skoff and Cavender2019). Correspondingly, one of the ways people begin to think about revivifying the habitats around them is through experiences of trees. In Rovaniemi, however, the few heritage trees remaining near the city centre are at constant risk of being lost to redevelopment. For instance, a proposal to construct an apartment complex by the Kemi River continues to imperil an area known as Sairaalanniemi or ‘Hospital Peninsula’, the site of an old health centre. Earlier generations travelled by boat on the Kemi River from other parts of Rovaniemi to Sairaalanniemi’s beach. The heritage of the constructed landscape, signified by a church, cemetery and vacant hospital buildings, interweaves with the sylvan histories of old firs, pines, birches, larches, rowans, cherries and poplars located near the riverbank. Many trees are conspicuously larger than their counterparts elsewhere in the city. Some birches have begun to decay due to their age. Part of the defunct health campus, unoccupied buildings are festooned with graffiti, bringing the old and the contemporary into contrast. Popular with pedestrians, bicyclists and skiers, the place attracts Rovaniemi residents and visitors who often visit a traditional wooden shelter, or lavvu, where they can cook, rest and socialise (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Large, old trees begin to appear on the path to Sairaalanniemi. Image credit: John Ryan.

An article by Rovaniemi residents Kaisa and Heikki Annanpalo (Reference Annanpalo and Annanpalo2020) raises concerns about the future of Sairaalanniemi’s arboreal heritage:

The citizens lament that “apartment buildings are being planned for the area, which cannot be built without destroying its trees” (Annanpalo & Annanpalo, Reference Annanpalo and Annanpalo2020, para. 3). In their view, Rovaniemi risks losing its heritage born over many centuries including the legacies of poplars. A considerably large and historically significant poplar at Sairaalanniemi beach features in Green Giants (Finnish Dendrological Society, Reference Society2021). A review of the book comments that “in Lapland, the trees do not grow to record sizes, but there are still handsome trees here that arouse interest” (Ekman, Reference Ekman2021, para. 5). Ruhtinaanpoppeli, or prince’s poplar (Populus x rasumowskiana), a cross of laurel poplar (P. laurifolia) and black poplar (P. nigra), is the sole Rovaniemi specimen nationally recognised as an arboreal giant. Arriving in Finland from Russia in the nineteenth century, prince’s poplar was planted widely in urban areas. Notwithstanding its heritage value – as a hybrid “rarely seen outside the Tsarist Russian empire” – the poplar yields a profusion of white cottony seed hairs that spread everywhere, causing an inconvenience “so embarrassing that some trees have been removed from city centres” throughout Finland (Lauharo, Reference Lauharo2024, para. 1).

As GSF emphasises, trees share their gifts when treated with respect. Rather than eradicating Sairaalanniemi’s poplars and pines, local communities and governments should place value on their arboreal wisdom and ecological interconnectivity. To promote awareness of Rovaniemi’s arboreal heritage, the exhibition “Trees, Parks, People” took place at the Regional Museum of Lapland in 2023. A photographic composition by artist and activist Mari Mäkiranta juxtaposes a woman’s face against a conifer’s branches, interlacing human and sylvan forms. The curators’ text accompanying Mäkiranta’s image underscores how old trees bear witness to history and stimulate urban identities. For people emotionally attached to old trees, the loss of individuals, such as the stately prince’s poplar of Sairaalanniemi, induces a sense of mourning:

Witnessing the city’s transformation over time, Rovaniemi’s trees have developed robust resilience. That the Sairaalanniemi area was the site of a healthcare facility further demonstrates that earlier generations recognised the peninsula’s healing atmosphere nurtured by the river and trees.

Method II: interviewing trees

If plants are sentient, is it possible to interview them as a way to forge dialogue? How might we become more receptive to the language of forests? Similarly, anthropologist John Hartigan (Reference Hartigan2017) asks, if plants make sense of their environments, “why should they not be ethnographic subjects?” (p. 256). The second method we offered to participants reflects a view of trees as interlocutors. This technique highlights the etymological basis of interview in the French term entrevue – “to see each other, visit each other briefly” – stemming from entre (‘between’) and voir (‘to see’) (Harper, Reference Harper2025). We conceptualise interviewing as a dialogical process – as a sharing of perspective and knowledge. Hartigan (Reference Hartigan2017) encourages researchers to “narrate life – that is, describe and analyze life forms in their social relations” (253). Crucial to narrating life, in Hartigan’s (2017) work, is “accounting for plants”, a process not limited to “highlighting them as a basis of human sustenance and contestation” but that strives to think and theorise with them (p. 281). Describing his attempt to interview flora, he clarifies that “the plants and I will not be “speaking,” as I’m foregoing linguistic models of data and analysis as much as possible” (Hartigan, Reference Hartigan2017, p. 261). For guidance, Hartigan turns to the phenomenological approach of “exact sensorial imagination” involving the systematic reconfiguring of one’s perceptions (Holdrege, Reference Holdrege2005).

In addition to Hartigan’s example, we drew inspiration from Indigenous, poetic and performative practices of speaking with vegetal beings. In contrast to the avoidance of “linguistic models”, Indigenous practices often address plants to establish relations with them. Mary Siisip Geniusz and colleagues (Reference Geniusz, Geniusz and Geniusz2015) maintain that we “have to talk to the plants if we want to obtain their help in the healing of ourselves or of another being” (p. 22). The Cree and Métis ethnobotanists underscore the value of respectful discourse:

Their emphasis on vocalisation echoes American writer Wendy Burk’s approach in Tree Talks (2016), a poetic text integrating transcriptions of interviews with eight trees. Burk’s questions aimed to reveal trees’ insights into time, history and ecology. Interviewing a pine, the poet-ethnographer asks, “What is it like to withstand a fire?” to which the tree replies, “HHHhhhhhhhhsssssss” (Burk, Reference Burk2016, p. 15). Burk’s interviews embraced the signifying power of non-linguistic utterance. For further illustration, Finnish performance artist and cohort member Annette Arlander holds conversations with pines as a foundation for collaborative research. The artist dialogues with trees through letters, asking, for instance, “How could I sensitise myself to be able to listen to you, to take in your perspective?” (Arlander, Reference Arlander2025, p. 9) (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

During a retreat in Northern Finland, Annette Arlander wrote a letter to a tree for her performance “With a Pine at Äkäslompolo” (2025). Image credit: Annette Arlander.

With these examples in mind, we invited participants to interview trees. Our second method complements the first, sensing trees. A major distinction, however, is our understanding of an interview as a meaningful verbal, non-verbal or embodied interchange with trees. The second method emphasises the phenomenological alternation between focused (fixed) and open (unfixed) attention. Although offering guidance, we encouraged participants to improvise by deciding how to engage with their subjects and what questions to pose. To begin with, we asked participants to stroll in any direction and select their trees. Next, they requested permission from their subjects to conduct the interviews without becoming distracted by the trees’ common or scientific names. Practicing phenomenological fixed attention, they observed their subjects carefully from one perspective. In keeping with this technique, they concentrated on buds, seeds and other small features. We then encouraged participants to sketch what they observed and write down all words or phrases that sprang to mind. During the next part, they redirected their attention from fixed to open (unfixed) and then circled their interviewees to apprehend variations in form, colour and light. As they moved, they listened to the trees, becoming aware of wind, birds, insects, pedestrians, cyclists and machines. They noted fragrant or pungent odours emitted by the trees and their habitats.

Conditions permitting, workshop attendees touched, hugged and rested against their trees. They continued sketching, photographing, filming and jotting down their impressions, sensations and intuitions, whether received in linguistic or non-linguistic forms. Dancer Dagmara Masłowska (pers. comm., October 1, 2024) stressed how the experience inspired her to explore a “conversational routine with the same tree on the same days and at the same time of day”. At first, she encountered difficulty discerning between the tree’s voice and the enunciations of its environment: “It doesn’t seem to be the tree talking. I pause and turn to the sounds I am hearing instead. Leaves. Birds. Cars. People walking. More leaves. And more wind”. Eventually, nevertheless, she reached an internal equipoise from which dialogue could manifest. Musician Mira Sunnari, moreover, interviewed a pine scheduled to be cut down. Opening the conversation by asking permission, she “looked at it standing there, spreading its branches like it was spinning around with swaying skirt hems and with its arms reaching to the side. I touched its body and the very soft needles. I looked closely at the ground near it and at its roots” (pers. comm., October 1, 2024). Falling silent after some initial conversation, she suddenly sensed a warmth culminating in a song gifted from the tree: “I thanked the tree. There had been no sorrow. It was a gentle and meaningful encounter” (M. Sunnari, pers. comm., October 1, 2024). This feedback suggests that interviewing trees can prompt a sense of mutual identification across species boundaries.