As UN talks begin to agree the first global treaty to reduce soaring plastic waste, the chair of the meetings has said he is confident countries will come together to secure an agreement.

Luis Vayas Valdivieso, the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK, admitted it would be a challenge to overcome an impasse that has emerged between countries which produce plastic and others that have ambitions to tackle plastic pollution over its whole life. But Valdivieso, who will chair the UN intergovernmental negotiations on a future international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada, this week, said: “We have to face those challenges and work with them. Compromise is an important word that we need to take into account.

“This is a negotiation, there are regions and countries with a specific position that we understand. We know plastic pollution is affecting the environment, we know it’s affecting human health because of the substances in plastics.

“It is very important we are negotiating this treaty now. The world is in a triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. But while there are agreements in place for the first two, we have no legislation, no global agreement on plastic pollution.”

Plastic pollution is a critical global concern, with about 400m tonnes produced every year, much of which ends up in our oceans or in landfill. Beyond the crisis of pollution, there is also a growing body of science exploring the rapid way that microplastics are affecting human health; a recent US study looked at 62 human placentas and found microplastics in every single one.

In a historic agreement in March 2022 countries adopted a mandate opening negotiations for a global, legally binding treaty to address the whole life cycle of plastics.

Previous negotiations in Nairobi stalled last November when oil-producing nations proposed to focus on waste management rather than scaling down production of plastic. Most – 98% – of single-use plastics are made from fossil fuels, and the top seven plastic-producing companies are fossil fuel companies, according to data from 2021.

Graham Forbes, the global plastic projects leader at Greenpeace USA, said: “You cannot solve the pollution crisis unless you constrain, reduce and restrict plastic production.”’

Valdivieso, however, said he had not stopped working since the Nairobi talks in his attempt to forge a pathway to the first legally binding agreement on plastic waste. “It is crucial now to bring the treaty back on track, because it has been delayed now,” he told the Guardian.

“We are going to face some challenges and we will face more, because we are talking about plastics that are a big part of the world’s economy. So there are challenges when you need to regulate pollution from those products.

“Our mandate is the whole life cycle of plastic. The challenge is to define that.

“But what is clear is we cannot manage the amount of plastic we are producing. Only 10% of it gets recycled, something needs to be done and that is why these negotiations are so important. We need to have the whole life cycle approach.”

Valdivieso said he was confident the talks would lead to the signing next year of the first legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, in a Paris-style agreement. The talks this week in Ottawa will be followed by talks in Korea at the end of the year and he said the text would be ready for all countries to sign for the treaty declaration next year.

Ecuador is one of four countries bidding to host the diplomatic conference – where the treaty would be signed, and wants to hold the event in the Galápagos Islands, where the waters are designated a Unesco heritage site but are suffering from plastic pollution.

Part of the discussions this week in Ottawa will be to decide where the treaty will be signed.

Valdivieso said: “Everyone is suffering from the impact of plastic pollution. Not only developing nations, and island nations, but everyone. If we don’t do something we will leave this problem to future generations.

“I became a grandfather recently and we need this tool, this incredible tool to end plastic pollution. I am confident that we will do it.”

A doctor who went to jail after a series of climate protests has been taken off the medical register for five months – and still faces being permanently struck off.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) – the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC) – suspended Dr Sarah Benn on Tuesday, having found last week that her fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

Benn was the first of three GPs who could face being struck off for climate activism at disciplinary tribunals this year. She was referred to the MPTS after being found guilty of contempt of court for breaching a civil injunction at Kingsbury oil terminal as part of a Just Stop Oil campaign. This action led to her spending 32 days in prison.

In its decision, the tribunal noted that Benn’s actions did not give rise to concerns about patient safety, and there was evidence that she was an experienced doctor.

But it said there had been “no acknowledgement from Dr Benn that what she has done by breaking the law was wrong and no evidence that she has taken steps to remediate her actions”. And it found there was a “strong likelihood of repetition”, after Benn explicitly said she would continue with her actions.

Her case will be reviewed shortly before the suspension lapses. “They’ve given me essentially five months to offer apologies and regret and an undertaking to not do it again,” Benn told the Guardian. “But I’ve made my position very clear and really nothing is going to be any different in five months’ time.”

“They’ve just kicked the can down the road,” she said.

In its presentation to the tribunal last week, the GMC argued that Benn’s actions risked undermining the public’s trust in and respect for the medical profession. The lawyer Faye Rolfe, representing the organisation, said doctors submitted themselves to the rule of law and should uphold an even higher standard than ordinary citizens.

Benn contested this, telling the tribunal there was no evidence that she had caused patients to lose trust in her as a doctor or the wider public to lose trust in the profession. “It’s complex but we could credit the public with some common sense and integrity, and a desire to find the truth,” she said.

As part of her evidence, Benn submitted a statement by the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, who earlier this year condemned the UK’s crackdown on environmental protest.

Forst said in his statement that developments over the past few months, including the professional tribunals of medical doctors, suggested the situation was deteriorating. “It is important for me to stress that professional sanctions can definitely be considered as a form of penalisation, persecution or harassment,” he said.

Benn, who is now retired, told the tribunal that as a doctor she had a “moral duty to take action”.

“The climate emergency is a health emergency; not a potential future one, but here and now. If I know all this and I choose to stay quiet, I am failing in my obligations. I am breaching the guidance in good medical practice to make my patients’ health my first concern.”

The tribunal acknowledged Benn’s sincere beliefs and said it respected her right to express them. It also said there was a broad spectrum of views among the general public about climate change, and the pace of action needed, and that there would likely be “considerable sympathy” for her concerns.

But it concluded that the “overwhelming majority of the public would not condone breaking the law in the repeated way in which Dr Benn did, especially given the impact, on the final occasion, to the wider public resources involved”.

Benn has received support from medical practitioners and doctors’ organisations. Dr Emma Runswick, the deputy chair of the British Medical Association council, said there was “no possible public or patient interest” in these kinds of proceedings, while the Doctors’ Association UK said it strongly believed that peaceful protest should not be viewed as condemnable professional misconduct “but as commendable public health advocacy”.

During the tribunal, Benn noted that the GMC had recently apologised to gay doctors struck off the medical register because of their sexuality. “In years to come, when events unfold and tipping points tip, and systems unravel, my prediction is that the reputation of those who tried their best to protect patients, the public, and future generations will be enhanced, not reduced,” she said.

As our small fishing boat slows to a halt in a shallow bay south-east of Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz, in the Galápagos Islands, a green turtle surfaces next to us, followed by a second, then a third a few metres away. A spotted eagle ray glides underneath the vessel.

The skipper, Don Nelson, steps on to the black volcanic reef, slippery with algae. We follow, past exposed mangrove roots and up on to higher ground. Pelicans swooping into the trees and small birds, perching on branches, ignore our approach.

This remote archipelago still hosts the unique species such as giant tortoises and finches that inspired the naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution almost two centuries ago, and it is impossible not to be struck by the apparent harmony with which animals coexist with humans here.

But then, up ahead, a jarring sight: a marine iguana, a notable Galápagos species found nowhere else in the world, sits atop a mound of plastic litter – fishing buoys, oil drums, household containers and drinks bottles – pushed on to the reef by high spring tides. The prehistoric-looking reptile, classed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is among the species here most at risk from plastic.

“These reefs are resting places for pelicans and marine iguanas,” says Mariana Vera, Galápagos programme manager of Conservation International. “There are a lot of turtles because it is the nesting season. It is overwhelming and sad to see them full of plastic.”

Research has found that most of the plastic washed up here comes from Peru, Ecuador and China. Plastic originating in Asia is unlikely to have reached the Galápagos by ocean currents, according to a 2019 study, which suggests that items with Asian labels are likely to have come from nearby fishing boats.

Globally, about 20% of plastic pollution in the ocean comes from maritime sources, but in the Galápagos, although estimates vary greatly, that figure could be as high as 40%, according to research due to be published by the Galápagos marine reserve and the Galápagos Conservation Trust.

It has been four years since news of a massive fishing fleet of hundreds of mostly Chinese vessels surrounding the edge of this reserve shocked the world. It led to a vow, from the then president of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, to protect what he described as “a seedbed of life for the entire planet”, and various diplomatic agreements between the countries.

Since then, the Chinese fishing fleet has reportedly kept a greater distance from Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), an area extending 200 nautical miles beyond its coast, throughout which it has jurisdiction over marine resources.

But the illegal dumping of plastic waste from its fishing vessels in the high seas – outside the EEZ – along with the other plastic from mainland Latin America, continues. “The problem is constant,” says Rodrigo Robalino, the Galápagos national park’s environmental manager, who accompanies us.

The islands are the second most important nesting and feeding area for marine turtles, listed as endangered by the IUCN, after Mexico.

“We find pollution like this on all the islands but there are hotspots where the tides and currents gather,” says Robalino. The windward shores have a heavier burden of plastic.

We walk past huge columns of cactus to a further tideline of sun-bleached mangrove roots, strewn with mainly clear plastic drinks bottles.

The pollution is recent, Robalino says, because it is clear, with no barnacles attached. We count 21 bottles in all, among strands of fishing line. Six, including a soap dispenser, have Asian labels; three are Peruvian, with brands including Inca Kola, a joint Peruvian and Coca-Cola brand, and Sporade, made by AJE and sold all over Latin America. Those with labels include international brands including Dasani, made by Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo’s Gatorade.

“These plastic bottles are coming from other countries in the region,” says Robalino. “But also from international fishing fleets, including the Chinese fleet that surrounds the marine reserve.”Twice a week, the reserve organises clean-ups of the four inhabited islands: Isabela, Floreana, San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz. Plastic is shipped to Guayaquil, 600 miles away in Ecuador, to be recycled or landfilled.

Last year, they collected 13m tonnes. For the more remote islands (there are 13 major islands and many more smaller ones), only occasional clean-ups are possible. They are more difficult to access and it can cost up to $2,000 (£1,600) and take up to 15 days to get there, clean up the beaches and return. From May to November, weather conditions make it impossible to reach many islands. For Robalino, Vera and the fishers and community volunteers who take part, the clean ups are a sisyphean task. But they have no choice.

“If we don’t do it, the plastic breaks down into fibres that birds often use for nests, and then into microplastics, which can be carried by the wind or go into the ocean,” says Robalino. Contaminated with chemicals, microplastics can be toxic and cause genetic damage to marine life and humans when ingested.

The waters around the Galápagos islands, which were designated a Unesco heritage site in 1978, are among the richest on Earth for biodiversity, partly due to their location amid three major ocean currents. The largest, the Humboldt current, sweeps cold, nutrient-rich water from Antarctica along the coasts of Chile and Peru, before turning west to the islands.

Thanks to the protection offered by the marine reserve, biodiversity on the islands, 97% of which are uninhabited, remains relatively undisturbed. But the currents, with their rich nutrients, have led to two of the largest threats: overfishing and plastic pollution.

“Currents are a source of life in the Galápagos,” says Nicolás Moity, a marine ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation on Santa Cruz. “They brought the species here at the beginning. The early giant tortoises came from the mainland as small tortoises and evolved here.

“You have warm and cold currents intermingling, creating an amazing plethora of life. You have penguins and corals in the same place.

“But now, in this globalised world, the currents are bringing plastics to the Galápagos,” he says.

Moity, who is working with the reserve and environmental organisations to identify how the plastic accumulation sites affect biodiversity so they can better target clean-ups, says that after some plastic-picking trips, “you come back three days later and you see the same”.

Three years ago, Moity examined sea urchins and found that 75% of them had ingested microplastics. “Microplastics get ingested by everything from zooplankton to bigger animals – and we don’t know the effect,” he says.

Many of the animals most at risk from plastic entanglement or ingestion are also under threat from other human activities, including degraded habitats and climate breakdown: the critically endangered Santa Cruz giant tortoises, endangered green turtles, vulnerable marine iguanas, endangered Galápagos sea lions and whale sharks, according to a paper in 2023. Earlier this year, another study showed giant tortoises were eating plastic, mistaking it for food, with
up to 86% of the debris found in tortoise faeces being plastic.

Ecuador has bid to host the signing of the UN plastics treaty, the first legally binding global treaty to halt plastic waste, in the Galápagos. The latest talks towards the treaty are under way this week in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, until 29 April. The aim is to complete negotiations by the end of 2024 and for the treaty to be signed in 2025.

Dr Jen Jones, chief executive of the UK-based Galápagos Conservation Trust, is working with the marine reserve to finalise a five-year study on plastic pollution. She expects to present some of the findings at this week’s talks.

“We have looked at multi-year datasets from clean-ups, looking at all plastics, bottles fishing gear, such as ropes and other items,” says Jones. She found a higher percentage of the plastic – “at least 40%” – came from maritime sources than previous research on plastic bottles suggested, which put the figure at about 13%.

The trust is also hosting a mini-summit for small islands in the Pacific, which suffer a similarly unfair burden of plastic pollution as the Galápagos, to highlight the islanders’ role in protecting the world’s biodiversity and to urge more powerful nations to address the unfair burden of plastic pollution.

“This is a social justice issue,” says Jones.

Senegal, Peru and Rwanda have also put forward bids to the UN at the treaty negotiations to have the resultant agreement signed in their countries.

The incoming chair of the talks in Canada, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, who is also the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK, has an impartial role in the negotiations. But Valdivieso, who has recently returned from Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, a Chilean territory in Polynesia, where he witnessed plastic pollution, says he understands the unfair burden islanders and small-island nations face.

“I see the concern from the islands and the people from the islands,” he says. “They are making huge efforts. In the Galápagos and other islands they have special legislation – they don’t use single-use plastics, but still they are seeing pollution.

“You can have the best national legislation in the world, to ban plastics. But if you don’t have a global agreement, it won’t work.”

Two days before Trudi Warner faced court under threat of a contempt of court prosecution, she fell off her bike and ruptured the tendons in her hand.

Now the hand is black and blue, tightly bandaged, and requires surgery. It is an indication that 69-year-old Warner, who spent her working life as a child social worker and has committed her retirement to climate action, is not as tough and unflappable as her demeanour suggests.

“I cycled back from a friend’s house and all this was going through my head,” she said. “My mind wasn’t really focused on what I was doing. I was very tired, all of this was weighing on me, and I came off the bike.”

For a year government lawyers pursued Warner, determined to prosecute her for contempt of court – which carries a maximum two-year jail sentence – for a lone, silent protest in March last year in which she held up a placard highlighting the independence of juries.

It was a protest outside a London court that was born out of the increasing restrictions being placed on defendants in climate trials, which in effect removed their ability to explain their motivations for their peaceful but disruptive actions to a jury.

In a series of trials, individuals have been banned from mentioning to the jury the words “climate change”, the history of the civil rights movement or the issue of fuel poverty.

Those individuals who ignored the restrictions imposed by Judge Silas Reid at inner London crown court were sent to jail for contempt of court as a result.

“The state had been losing these climate cases until this point, and I think these restrictions were a pushback,” said Warner. “They left individuals with no defence in court.

“I just felt that this was an abuse of power, a miscarriage of justice. I thought, why are we having jury trials where defendants are supposed to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and not letting defendants speak to the jury about their actions? It made no sense. It felt like a scam. I wanted to challenge that.”

Her challenge last March was solitary, and mute. Its aim was to highlight a principle in UK law that juries can acquit defendants on their conscience, even in the face of facts that suggest their guilt and a judge’s direction.

Known as jury equity, its most famous enactment was in 1670 at the central criminal court in the Bushel case, when a jury refused a judge’s orders to convict two Quakers of unlawful assembly despite being jailed and denied food and water by the judge. It was a case that cemented the independence of juries and is celebrated with a marble plaque in the corridors of the Old Bailey.

In a hat tip to the Bushel case, Warner made a handwritten sign which read: “Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience,” and stood outside the side entrance to inner London crown court on the opening day of a trial of Insulate Britain campaigners.

“I was like a human billboard. I said nothing, I didn’t engage with anyone, even if they came up and asked me questions,” she said.

But the protest had been noted by court officials who reported her to Reid. The following day Warner was handcuffed, locked up in the court’s custody unit, and later taken into the dock to face the judge.

Rather than make the decision himself, Reid referred her case to the government’s highest law officer, the attorney general, for a decision on whether to charge her with contempt of court.

Over the weeks and months that followed, Warner says, she felt like David facing Goliath in a battle that pitched a team of government law officers, paid for by taxpayers, against a lone woman in her late 60s.

“I got letters saying: ‘His Majesty’s solicitor general versus Trudi Ann Warner,’” she told the Guardian. “They sent a 133-page indictment on me. A hundred and thirty-three pages … all those government lawyers working on this for months – I mean just how much public money have the government spent?”

As the weeks of waiting went on, in May last year Warner fulfilled a promise to help a sheep farmer in Scotland with lambing. Living on the Isle of Eigg in a farmhouse with no wifi, she was contacted by a friend who suggested she find an internet connection and check her phone the following day.

“I went to the village hall and used their wifi the next day. When I checked my phone I saw an image of about 20 people outside inner London crown court. They were all holding placards saying: ‘If you prosecute Trudi, prosecute us too.’ When I saw that I broke down, to see all those people prepared to be prosecuted for contempt of court as well. It was an astonishing and moving act of solidarity,” she said.

It is the support of others involved in climate action that has helped Warner as she faced a possible prison term for contempt for her actions. As the case against her was thrown out on Monday, ensuring her liberty and rejecting the government argument to prosecute her, supporters were again outside court.

“This decision is empowering for people who have cases coming to court,” said Warner. “It is a victory in one battle. It has restored my faith a little in British justice. I was lucky, I had a balanced, independent and deeply thoughtful judge and I am grateful to him.”

There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought.

And yet, humans are not Earth’s chief occupants. Trees are. There are three trillion of them, with a collective biomass thousands of times that of humanity. But although they are the preponderant beings on Earth – outnumbering us by nearly 400 to one – they’re easy to miss. Show someone a photograph of a forest with a doe peeking out from behind a maple and ask what they see. “A deer,” they’ll triumphantly exclaim, as if the green matter occupying most of the frame were mere scenery. “Plant blindness” is the name for this. It describes the many who can confidently distinguish hybrid dog breeds – chiweenies, cavapoos, pomskies – yet cannot identify an apple tree.

Admittedly, trees do not draw our attention. Apart from plopping the occasional fruit upon the head of a pondering physicist, they achieve little that is of narrative interest. They are “sessile” – the botanist’s term meaning incapable of locomotion. Books about trees often have a sessile quality, too; they are informative yet aimless affairs, heavy on serenity, light on plot.

Or, at least, they were until recently. The German forester Peter Wohlleben’s surprise bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees (published in English in 2016), has inaugurated a new tree discourse, which sees them not as inert objects but intelligent subjects. Trees have thoughts and desires, Wohlleben writes, and they converse via fungi that connect their roots “like fibre-optic internet cables”. The same idea pervades The Overstory, Richard Powers’ celebrated 2018 novel, in which a forest scientist upends her field by demonstrating that fungal connections “link trees into gigantic, smart communities”.

Both books share an unlikely source. In 1997, a young Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard (the model for Powers’ character) published with five co-authors a study in Nature describing resources passing between trees, apparently via fungi. Trees don’t just supply sugars to each other, Simard has further argued; they can also transmit distress signals, and they shunt resources to neighbours in need. “We used to believe that trees competed with each other,” explains a football coach on the US hit television show Ted Lasso. But thanks to “Suzanne Simard’s fieldwork”, he continues, “we now realise that the forest is a socialist community”.

The idea of trees as intelligent and cooperative has moved swiftly from research articles to “did you know?” cocktail chatter to children’s book fare. There is more botanical revisionism to come. “We are standing at the precipice of a new understanding of plant life,” the journalist Zoë Schlanger writes. Her captivating new book, The Light Eaters, describes a set of researchers studying plant sensing and behaviour, who have come to regard their subjects as conscious. Just as artificial intelligence champions note that neural networks, despite lacking actual neurons, can nevertheless perform strikingly brain-like functions, some botanists conjure notions of vegetal intelligence.

This is an age of many minds, it would seem. Oddly, it took grappling with new technology – the internet, artificial intelligence – for us to see intellectual capacities in our oldest companions, trees. In this new light, they appear much more like us, or perhaps us as we would wish to be. There is a form of redemption on offer: having for centuries treated trees as timber, we are now invited to embrace them as kin.

But before enfolding their rough barks in our soft arms, it may do to pause a beat. Whereas researchers must usually toil in respectable obscurity for decades before their ideas attract notice, the intelligent-plant notion is moving at top speed. Public demand, as much as peer review, is driving the train, with popular books reporting excitedly on studies that scientists are still debating – sometimes outracing the science entirely. It’s worth asking what makes us so eager to ascribe human qualities to the arboreal world. Might we be missing something important when we gaze into the wooden mirror and see only ourselves?

The title of Simard’s 1997 Nature article was almost impeccably dry – Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field – and a casual observer might have missed the study’s significance. Botanists have long understood that fungi called mycorrhizae formed symbiotic relationships with trees, exchanging water and nutrients for photosynthesised sugars. What Simard and her co-authors showed is that the sugars made their way not just to the fungi but to other trees in the forest, seemingly travelling through the fungi. The journal’s editors sensed promise. They made it Nature’s cover story, commissioned a foreword by a leading botanist, and affixed an indelible pun: this was the “wood-wide web”.

It wasn’t Simard’s metaphor, but she has pounced on it. The forest, she has written, is “like the internet”: a system of “centres and satellites, where the old trees were the biggest communication hubs and the smaller ones the less busy nodes, with messages transmitting back and forth through the fungal links”. Rather than rivals scrabbling over resources, connected trees are what Simard calls “supercooperators”.

Simard’s fellow foresters were initially unmoved by her idea of the harmonious forest. Simard describes, after publishing, having her government research budget threatened and her findings mocked. “No other animal closes ranks faster than Homo sapiens,” Powers wrote in his fictionalised account of the episode. But the problem wasn’t the whole species so much as its male members, in Simard’s telling. “Miss Birch” is what the men called her within earshot – just a Scrabble tile away from what they called her outside it.

Much-needed support came from women. Simard has singled out the mycorrhiza expert Melanie Jones, who sat on Simard’s doctoral committee and co-authored the Nature article, and several female companions who accompanied her on her research. All this suggested another metaphor to Simard: maternity. Although the conifers she studied had both male and female organs, the way mature trees aided seedlings via fungal networks “felt like mothering to me”. She imagined “the flow of energy from the Mother Trees as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child”.

There has been, indeed, something unstoppable about the idea of networked mother trees. In her memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, Simard writes that her ideas inspired James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, in which all forest life connects via a biological network to large trees (the film also features an ecologically sensitive female scientist). It is unclear how much Cameron, who was already at work on Avatar before the “wood-wide web” paper appeared, knew of Simard’s research. Still, the resemblance between her theory and Cameron’s fantasy – in what somehow remains the highest-grossing film in history – attests to the idea’s exquisite zeitgeistiness.

The idea became even more zeitgeisty in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election. That was when Simard gave her much-watched Ted Talk, How Trees Talk to Each Other (approaching 8m views), and appeared with Wohlleben in the documentary Intelligent Trees. It was also when Wohlleben’s phenomenally popular Hidden Life of Trees was published in English, with an appreciative afterword by Simard. Wohlleben, who cannot pass by a tree without attributing human qualities to it, described trees as learning, disciplining their offspring and forming powerful friendships. Simard’s research, he explained, revealed their “maternal instincts … You might even say they are nursing their babies.”

Wohlleben’s book has sold more than 3m copies in more than 35 editions. Powers’ The Overstory, featuring its Simardian character, won the 2019 Pulitzer prize for fiction. This year, Time magazine named Simard one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Amy Adams’ and Jake Gyllenhaal’s production companies have bought the film rights to Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, with the intention that Adams would play Simard.

It is rare for academic ideas to reach the Amy Adams stage without drawing scholarly fire. Since 2023, three articles have appeared in scientific journals, with 45 authors in all, arguing that the claims made on behalf of the wood-wide web have far outstripped the evidence. The objections are numerous. Many studies of inter-tree transfers have found only minuscule amounts of sugars shuttling between the trees – “statistically significant” but not necessarily “biologically significant”, one group of authors says – and most don’t rule out the possibility that the resources travelled through the air or soil rather than fungally. Despite Wohlleben’s insistence in Hidden Life that in a mycorrhizally conjoined forest “it is not possible for trees to grow too close to each other”, studies have not generally shown that seedlings ensconced in fungal networks do better when close to older trees (they often do worse). And although many trees are colonised by mycorrhizae, there is debate about whether those mycorrhizae actually form a durable network through which nutrients and signals could pass.

Nature, the original venue for Simard’s research, recently ran an explosive news feature by Aisling Irwin on the “groundswell of unease” among ecologists with public discussions of mycorrhizal networks. Irwin reports on the scientists’ general scepticism and on a particular episode that has raised concerns. In her memoirs, Simard makes much of the idea that “mother trees” favour their kin. She describes in detail field research by her graduate student showing that seedlings placed in a fungal network “survived better and were noticeably bigger” if they were genetically related to nearby older trees. But that field study, the critics have noted, actually showed the opposite: the related seedlings were likelier to die, though the trend was not statistically significant. (Simard says that other studies by the student, from the laboratory, support her claims and she’d merely made a narrative choice to describe the results as emanating from the forest. “I do not, and would never, imply anything misleading when presenting research,” she told Irwin.)

What makes the recent criticisms of Simard’s work so striking is that some come from her former colleagues and admirers. The first critical review of evidence was by three scientists – Justine Karst, Melanie Jones and Jason Hoeksema – who had all co-authored papers with Simard. The lead author, Karst, has discussed how she was inspired by Simard’s research to become a mycorrhizal ecologist. The second, Melanie Jones, appears in Simard’s memoirs as a hero who supported Simard when few others would. Jones co-authored the 1997 “wood-wide web” article, though she no longer stands fully by it. It was the cultural obsession with intelligent trees, from television shows to airport books, that impelled Karst, Jones and Hoeksema to reconsider their own earlier work.

Simard, who is preparing detailed replies, regards these in-the-weeds debates as distracting from the urgent task of protecting forests. She has described the attention that Karst, Jones and Hoeksema’s criticisms have received as “an injustice to the whole world”. Perhaps, but it is exceedingly hard to read the recent reviews of evidence and retain faith in the wood-wide web as settled scientific fact.

“Why do we so badly want this to be true?” Karst has asked. Maybe the unrelenting news of global warming and its attendant catastrophes – wildfires, hurricanes – has driven readers for respite toward calmer environmental stories. Or perhaps recent political cruelties have led us to seek reassurance that, in nature, beings are thoughtful and kind. The connective aspect seems important, too, as if trees’ fungal friendships could release us from our phone-checking isolation. Fairly or not, we’ve loaded our aspirations on to the forest: be the tree you want to see in the world.

The literary scholar Rob Nixon sees the wood-wide web as an economic parable. Most often, he notes, popular understandings of nature connect to politics, as people look to the natural order to legitimate the social one. In the 1970s, when free markets were gaining support, books like Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) highlighting capitalist dynamics in nature won large audiences. If you see society as fundamentally competitive, you’re primed to see biology that way, too. But since the 2007-8 financial crash, Nixon explains, prevailing economic instincts have tilted in the other direction. It’s satisfying, for the leftishly inclined, to imagine connected forests as what Wohlleben calls “gigantic redistribution mechanisms”.

The wood-wide web narrative, Nixon believes, transcends science. Beyond the peer-reviewed research, there is something about the concept that, to many, just feels instinctively right. It gives us the trees for our times: anti-capitalist, feminist and extremely online.

The Hidden Life of Trees is the title of Peter Wohlleben’s book. This must not be confused with The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge, which also tells the mycorrhizal story. Nor should either be confused with The Secret Forest, the book that the Suzanne Simard character writes in The Overstory.

Such titles are just one or two words away from the title of the most notorious botany book ever written: The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 bestseller by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. That book, like Wohlleben’s, rejected the idea of plants as “senseless automata” and sought to portray them as perceptive, energetic and intelligent. Plants, like animals, transmit electrical pulses through their bodies. Such pulses, Tompkins and Bird believed, could reveal plants’ thoughts.

A series of wild experiments ensued, which can serve as a reminder both of the importance of peer review and of how fun the 1970s were. If people had sex on holiday, would their plants back at home know? All it took to find out was a begonia, electrodes and a lakeside cottage. “Chapter 1: Plants and ESP,” was the book’s auspicious beginning, and from there matters moved swiftly on to energy fields, faster-than-light communication and aliens.

The book inaugurated an odd era of people talking to their houseplants and playing them classical music. The CIA and US army funded research into vegetal perception (plants could be deployed in airports to detect the “turbulent emotions” of would-be hijackers, Tompkins and Bird suggested). Stevie Wonder, fresh off an extraordinary streak of innovative hit albums, infuriated his label by releasing a double LP titled Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. “Most felt it was mad to conceive,” he sang, “that plants thought, felt and moved quite like we.”

It was not Wonder’s finest lyric, and, in hindsight, the whole episode seems fairly preposterous – the intellectual counterpart to the age’s waterbeds and extra-wide neckties. After the plant-talking fad receded, Tompkins moved on to his next enthusiasm: finding the lost land of Atlantis. But The Secret Life of Plants hung heavily over botany for decades as an admonition against excess. Research on plant sensation and reaction was hindered. “The twin gatekeepers of science funding boards and peer review boards – always conservative institutions – closed the doors,” Zoë Schlanger writes.

This was unfortunate, Schlanger feels, because plants really are capable of remarkable things. Alongside the wood-wide web idea has come a surge of new plant writing, including Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke the Plant (foreword by Suzanne Simard), Paco Calvo and Natalie Lawrence’s Planta Sapiens, Daniel Chamovitz’s What a Plant Knows and Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, all chronicling uncanny plant behaviour. Maybe The Secret Life of Plants, absurd in its particulars, nevertheless got the general idea right.

Schlanger describes today’s plant scientists as walking a fine line. They want to tout their findings but understandably fear overdoing it. For many, to speak of “plant sensing” is all right, but “plant behaviour” is iffy, “plant intelligence” is treacherous and “plant consciousness” is the sky falling. The anthropologist Natasha Myers has reported a “wavering between enchantment and disenchantment” among botanists. Among themselves, they speak animatedly of plants’ desires, but when they publish they “remove all reference to the plants as active agents”.

And yet they move. Most plants do so slowly in the expected ways – leaves reaching for light, roots for moisture – but some, like climbing vines, move with unexpected agility. Viewed in real time, vines are innocently immobile. Sped up via time-lapse photography, they become tiny, nefarious krakens, their tendrils methodically probing for targets to latch on to.

The most intriguing research concerns dodder vines, which cannot photosynthesise and thus must quickly find other plants to parasitise. Researchers have found that they can detect qualities of potential hosts – species, distance, even health – before making contact, and they aim toward the best prey, such as tomato plants. They can pick up chemical trails in the air, and they will even grow more toward LED lights that are arranged in the shape of suitable hosts, suggesting that the vines’ light-sensing abilities may amount to a rudimentary form of sight.

With time-lapse videos, we can see vines sensing and reacting. Most other plants’ behaviour is invisible. Vines aside, plants are pitiful athletes, but they are often quite gifted chemists, exhaling and secreting sophisticated compounds to entice, repel or poison their neighbours. Trees excel here. The woodsy sweetness of balsam trees, the tang of pines: these are not perfumes but chemical weapons deployed in an interspecies war. They are insecticides, and there is something softly psychotic in how much we delight in their smells.

Interestingly, trees can smell themselves, or at least detect their own airborne chemical compounds. A leaf, being eaten, can emit gases that prompt other branches – and other nearby trees – to defensively fill their own leaves with toxins. It is well known that acacias secrete sugars and proteins to recruit ants as foot soldiers in their campaign against vines and caterpillars. If trees do communicate underground, I like to think of them swearing like sailors while, rooted in place, they fend off waves of piratical attackers.

Proponents of plant sentience have a favourite plant, the boquila vine, which grows in Chilean and Argentine rainforests. In 2013, the ecologist Ernesto Gianoli realised that the boquila could convincingly imitate other plant species. It hides from its harassers, such as snails and beetles, by matching the shape, size and colour of its leaves to those of its neighbours. Gianoli notes that it can mimic plants that haven’t formed part of its evolutionary history, which would seem to indicate it somehow senses their forms in real time. The boquila is hard to grow outside its native environment, so research is slow. Still, boquila enthusiasts (including Wohlleben, in an over-oxygenated sequel to Hidden Life) have made much of a man in Utah who appears to have induced one to imitate a plastic plant on his windowsill.

For bolder botanists, such findings reopen the old question of whether plants can think. Plants lack brains – traditionally felt to be a prerequisite for intelligence – but, then again, so do computers. With chatbots showing what can be achieved by neural networks, it might be time to reconsider plants. Perhaps they also have what Stefano Mancuso calls “distributed intelligence”, with the root system acting as “a sort of collective brain”.

The ethical implications are exhausting. Taking plants’ moral standing seriously throws even veganism into disarray. “If plants also have sentience,” the philosopher Philip Goff asks, “what is there left to eat?” Still, the argument for plant consciousness is straightforward and emphatic: just look what they can do. Surely, by the time a vine is strategically transforming its body to mimic a plastic houseplant’s, it crossed the consciousness threshold long ago.

There is, however, a counterargument: the spinal cord of a rat. Sever a rat’s spinal cord from its brain (pausing to contemplate the chain of choices that brought you to this act), and you will find that the isolated spinal cord can still direct affairs with surprising competence. It can retract the legs when they receive electric shocks. It can, more impressively, learn to anticipate shocks and direct the legs to avoid them. It is capable of more sophisticated forms of learning than any plant has been shown to be. But is a rat’s spinal cord conscious?

Consciousness is frustratingly hard to define. Perhaps it inheres in many things, even parts of things. Or perhaps evolutionary forces can programme sophisticated behaviours – flexible and sensitive to environmental cues – that nonetheless operate without the special spark that signifies intelligent life. Reasonable, well-informed people disagree wildly about where to draw the line, from the panpsychists who regard atoms as conscious (in a limited way) to the conservatives who have questions about chimpanzees.

The only beings whose consciousness we agree on are humans. Beyond them, we judge candidates on whether they seem to have subjectivities like ours. In other words, the question of consciousness is fundamentally narcissistic; things merit esteem to the degree that they remind us of ourselves. This is the implicit premise of many plant and tree books, with their chorus line of mother trees, socialist fungi and cunning vines performing high kicks for human approval. But is it the best way to think about nature? As Justine Karst put it to me, “Do we not have the capacity to love and care for things that are not like us?”

Trees are, ultimately, not like us. They have torsos, limbs and crowns, and we often personify them as benevolent helpers. But stray from the forest path or let the sun go down, and their weird, sinister qualities soon emerge. It is the dark woods – “savage, rough and stern” – that lead to the underworld in Dante’s Inferno. The same dark woods, per peasant lore, teem with witches, wolves and unsupervised German children. The numerous tales about perilous forests appeal to a deep-seated sense that there is something unsettling about trees. They are a familiar sight but an alien presence.

One source of their strangeness is their size. As saplings they match our height and meet our gaze, but they continue to grow, some higher than humans can comfortably apprehend. The ecologist Meg Lowman describes the treetops as a still-unexplored “eighth continent”. The tallest trees, the redwoods of northern California, contain whole environments in their canopies. There are grasses, ferns, aquatic crustaceans and, indeed, other trees up there, unsullied by the earth, inhabiting the redwoods’ sky worlds.

The California redwoods are the tallest life forms on Earth. The biggest exceeds 115 metres: essentially the length of a large football pitch, but straight up. They are “so huge that they shut you up”, writes Anne Lamott. The redwoods famously appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. But they appear there only in part. It was virtually impossible for Hitchcock to fully capture both his actors and the trees in the same shot without making the actors appear ludicrously small, so he cropped out all but the bases of the massive trees.

The philosopher George Santayana, born in Madrid, visited those redwoods in 1911. He found northern California “intellectually emptier than the Sahara” but was awed by its “virgin and prodigious” landscape. The place was a standing chastisement to European philosophy, Santayana felt. It taught “the vanity and superficiality of all logic, the needlessness of argument”. In such an environment, he reflected, you can no longer feel that nature is yours to command: “You must feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little force among her immense forces.”

Trees attain more-than-human scales not only in metres, but in years. They are the only organisms in view that conspicuously outlive us, and some do so by multiple orders of magnitude. We usually last for decades; trees can last millennia. Such trees are not timeless but “timeful”, the historian Jared Farmer writes in his poignant book Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees. They contribute “chronodiversity” to a biological world otherwise measured in days, years and decades.

Old trees, like roots bulging through the pavement, unbalance our sense of time. In Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, surrounded by New York University’s buildings, the Hangman’s Elm protrudes as an eerie relic from the 17th century and a stern warning to the undergraduates. As long-lived trees go, that elm is not especially impressive. The UK has yews that are, literally, ancient, in that they date to antiquity and are thousands of years old. The oldest known tree, a bristlecone pine in California, is about five millennia old, meaning that it was a sapling in the bronze age. (There is a tree in Chile that might be older. And a few trees can create physically connected, genetically identical copies of themselves; these clonal trees “live,” in the sense of carrying on in replica form, even longer.) Caring for the environment, Farmer believes, will require learning to “think in the fullness of tree time”.

Tree time, however, appears to be running out. In 2005, scientists set out to examine the largest African baobabs: massively thick trees that don’t have just one stem, like most trees, but multiple, fused together. The most famous, Chapman’s Baobab in Botswana, has six stems that range from about 500 to 1,400 years old. Or, it had six stems. On 7 January 2016, the whole thing tumbled over. Two years later, the researchers announced that nine of the 13 oldest baobabs, or at least their largest or oldest stems, had collapsed since the study started.

Other long-lived trees – the cedars of Lebanon, the California redwood – are also perishing. The culprit is probably the obvious suspect: climate change. Trees equipped to survive in a place do poorly when the qualities of that place, such as temperature, water supply and length of seasons, change drastically. With time, tree species could adapt or find new habitats. The problem is just that arboreal evolution and migration are painfully slow, and global heating is painfully fast.

A tree, Farmer writes, is “a radically nonhuman thing”, and a large, old tree is especially one. If trees have conceptual value, it is not because their similarity to us elicits our sympathy, but because their difference from us enlarges our horizons. They are the most visible markers on the evolutionary road not taken. Trees stand in for all the photosynthesising, carbon-dioxide breathing, fixed-in-place species that share our world yet have fundamentally different ways of living in it.

Contemplating trees should be, above all, an exercise in humility. The mountains and woods, Santayana told his California audience, allow you to “take yourselves simply, humbly, for what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious infinity of nature”. Perhaps the presence of beings older, larger and more numerous than we are – whether or not they resemble internet users or our mothers – can be a reminder that we are not everything, and that everything is not us. “Let us therefore be frankly human,” Santayana enjoined. And let the trees be trees.

Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales will jump to a new global record in 2024 despite slowing growth in some markets, according to forecasts from the influential International Energy Agency (IEA).

The Paris-based forecaster said that 17m battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will be sold in 2024, up more than 20% compared with 2023.

The IEA also said most electric cars will cost the same as petrol equivalents by 2030 as prices drop. Tesla lowered prices over the weekend as it fights to retain its market share amid fierce competition from Chinese rivals such as BYD, its closest contender as the world’s largest producer of battery electric cars.

Carmakers have complained that growth in demand for electric cars is slowing, forcing them to offer discounts to compete. While this could damage some carmakers, lower prices are also likely to accelerate the transition, the IEA said.

Fatih Birol, the energy economist who heads the IEA, acknowledged that sales are stronger in some countries than others, but added that there was clear momentum for the transition.

“Rather than tapering off, the global EV revolution appears to be gearing up for a new phase of growth,” he said.

“The wave of investment in battery manufacturing suggests the EV supply chain is advancing to meet automakers’ ambitious plans for expansion. As a result, the share of EVs on the roads is expected to continue to climb rapidly.”

In the first quarter of 2024 there were more sales of electric and plug-in hybrids (which combine a petrol engine with a battery) than in the whole of 2020, the IEA said.

Hybrids still emit large amounts of CO₂ when in use, although some in the car industry argue that – if used correctly – they are a necessary step to lower emissions until public charging infrastructure improves.

Some countries have concentrated on encouraging electric vehicle adoption: four-fifths of all cars sold in Norway in 2023 were electric. However, policies vary widely, with China and richer European countries generally ahead of the rest of the world, including the US.

The UK was Europe’s biggest electric car market over the first three months of 2023 for the first time, according to Matthias Schmidt, an independent analyst.

The timing of the adoption of electric cars in Europe is heavily influenced by the regulations, as carmakers try to eke out profits from their petrol and diesel models while avoiding fines for failing to sell enough electric cars.

Schmidt said he expected UK electric sales in 2024 to remain equal to or slightly higher than Germany, which has a bigger population. Schmidt said German sales were suffering due to subsidy cuts, and because manufacturers are deliberately holding back sales until 2025, when tougher rules on average CO₂ emissions come in.

“That delay will give Chinese manufacturers a small window to manipulate, because from 2025 the traditional manufacturers will really begin their electric vehicle push in earnest,” Schmidt said.

In the UK the government removed subsidies from privately bought electric cars in 2022.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders on Tuesday raised concerns about the separate grants for zero-emissions lorries. The lobby group said the grants were not being used because it takes too long to certify that trucks produce zero emissions.

Mexico has been undergoing its first heatwave of the season. The heatwave started on Sunday 14 April, when Mexico City recorded a new date record with a high of 32.9C, surpassing the previous record of 32C from 1998.

Anticyclonic conditions over the region have been responsible for this heatwave by inhibiting cloud formation, allowing temperatures to rise significantly. These conditions persisted through much of last week, allowing temperatures to reach 35-45C across much of the country.

However, on Sunday night and into Monday, a cold front moved southwardsallowing temperatures to fall considerably below average at the start of this week and bringing wet and windy weather to the country.

The prefrontal trough that is expected to develop ahead of this cold front will lead to heavy rain and thunderstorms across the south-eastern parts of the country on Monday. These will include lightning, hailstorms, and possibly allow some tornadoes and whirlwinds to develop too.

Additionally, across north-eastern parts of the country, this frontal boundary will introduce some strong winds and high wave heights. As a consequence, there is a risk of seeing some localised flooding in places, as well as an increased risk of landslides.

Meanwhile, parts of southern China have been experiencing torrential rain. Convective activity over the past few days has led to a significant flooding risk across Guangdong province in southern China, with fears of seeing a one-in-50-year flood there.

Saturday had the heaviest downpours, with 12 consecutive hours of rainfall, prompting the Chinese government to issue flood warnings across the Beijiang basin. By Sunday morning, aerial footage showed many low-lying towns and buildings were already underwater, and telecommunication channels and power supplies have been damaged across the province. The fear of flooding continues this week as further heavy rain is forecast.

In Europe, temperatures are set to fall considerably below the seasonal norm this week. Parts of Germany, Italy, France as well as the Baltic states will have temperatures about 7-10C below average. However, by the end of the week and into the weekend, temperatures are expected to return to around or just above average across Europe.

The concept of “net zero” has become a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate, and may be better dropped, the outgoing head of the UK’s climate watchdog has warned.

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives were being blocked by a populist response to the net zero label, and he would be “intensely relaxed” about losing the term.

“Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it,” he said. “That wasn’t something I expected.”

Politicians on all sides are now wary of associating themselves with the term, he said, which was inhibiting progress. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, made several policy U-turns last year, including delaying the changeover to electric vehicles, while the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, watered down a promise to invest £28bn a year in a green economy.

“It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it,” said Stark. “A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

The real fight was to make the UK’s economy competitive with other countries that were investing heavily in renewable energy, electric vehicles and other green technologies that were the focus of innovation and investment around the world, he said.

“If it [net zero] is only a slogan, if it is seen as a sort of holding pen for a whole host of cultural issues, then I’m intensely relaxed about dropping it,” he said. “We keep it as a scientific target, but we don’t need to use it as a badge that we keep on every programme.”

Stark gave the example of heat pumps, which have been demonised in some quarters despite offering a low-carbon and potentially low-cost alternative to gas boilers.

“It’s very strange that some see heat pumps as an enemy of the people,” he said, in an interview with the Guardian before leaving his post this Friday. “This is a remarkably sensible technology that we’ve known about for a long time, a straightforward technology to put in your house to keep it warm, or to keep it cool in the summer. But in this country, they’ve taken on a totally different totemic role, as a technology that is being somehow forced upon the populace. I think that’s very dangerous.”

Policymakers should focus instead on what lies behind net zero – investment in the UK’s economy, in ways that would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but cut energy use, improve national security, clean up the air and protect nature and the countryside, he added.

“We are talking about cleaning up the economy and making it more productive – you can call that anything you like,” Stark said.

He has been chief executive of the CCC, the statutory body that advises government under the 2008 Climate Change Act, since 2018, under the chair John Gummer (Lord Deben), the former Conservative environment minister. Stark, who will move to the Carbon Trust, a consultancy set up by the government to help businesses cut emissions, leaves at a time when the organisation is without a permanent chair, as Deben left last year and the devolved governments have rejected the Tories’ choice as the new chair.

Tackling the climate crisis has been presented as a massive change, but Stark was at pains to point out that it would not be. “The world that we’ll have in 2050 is extremely similar to the one we have now. We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently,” he said. “The lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all.”

But it was not just those who were against climate action who were causing the problem, according to Stark. Climate activists were also alarming people, he warned, and creating “quite a serious barrier to large parts of the political spectrum to support climate action” by forceful protests, and presenting environmental policies as radical.

“It would be more helpful if they were less divisive,” he said. “I don’t think it is radical. It’s really important that we stop using words like that, as it is understandably frightening.”

Politicians could design measures so the costs were borne by those best able to shoulder them and people on lower incomes were also able to take advantage of home insulation, heat pumps and other ways of reducing energy bills. “We do need a policy package that is fair,” he said.

Stark pointed to China, the US and the EU, which are all investing heavily in low-carbon technologies that are cheaper or becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. People should not listen to trying to delay the transition, he said. “We will regret going slow in this transition, because we’ll be missing out on the economic benefits of it.”