Is the earth speaking to us?

Research shows that plants emit subtle frequencies and "scream" when stressed. What else might nature be trying to say?

Thanks for reading Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly series of essays about the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions.

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Did you know that the plant you’ve forgotten to water might actually be screaming at you too silently for you to hear?

This is the conclusion of research from a 2023 study published in Cell, which found that plants sometimes change shape and color, emit aromas, and yes, make specific sounds when they are stressed.

In the study, scientists used a machine learning algorithm (AKA AI — which is also aiding scientists in their mission to talk to animals, weirdly enough) to figure out that distressed, dehydrated, or otherwise damaged tomato plants emitted popping or clicking noises at ultrasonic frequencies human ears cannot hear.

A few years ago, the same scientists found that flowers technically can hear, even though they of course don’t possess anything like the human ear canals we have on our heads. In the study, flowers that were exposed to the sound of buzzing bees started making sweeter nectar.

What secret symphonies might be at work in this field? Image via Pinterest

Meanwhile, the idea that plants can hear and respond to music has been around for decades, and while the evidence is still a bit inconclusive, it certainly seems like plants appreciate strings, classical music, and jazz — though they may not be keen on rock and roll. Either way, it’s pretty obvious that they’re listening (or rather, feeling the vibrations deep within their cell membranes).

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We live in a universe born of, and made of, sound.

There are no creatures and no entities that are not emitting some kind of buzz or hum. Everything is energy and everything is singing, according to all the laws of both science and faith that I have ever encountered.

The cosmic symphony. Image via Pinterest

But it can be difficult for us humans to hear languages or ideas that are not our own, let alone frequencies that do not reach our ears. Still, I wonder if some part of us can sense these frequencies deep within us, in the parts of our psyches that are more keyed into whatever collective force or energy binds us all together.

Perhaps some distant, remote part of our brain can pick up the shrieks of the flora dying on our windowsills. Perhaps some of us are better at sensing this than others, and perhaps that’s why some people naturally have “green thumbs.” Perhaps some of us have just forgotten how to hear, or maybe we’ve learned to tune it out thanks to our lives of constant music, stimulation, and distraction.

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If plants can make sounds, and hear sounds, by that logic, then trees, microbes, and mycelium should be able to do the same. It’s likely that animals can also hear the frequencies of these entities.

Perhaps forests are really choirs that we cannot hear — symphonies of invisible signals, webs of tongues carried on invisible vibrations.

All this raises a whole host of other questions, such as: If plants can cry when stressed, then what happens when a whole ecosystem is stressed or worse? When a drought hits key rivers? When wildfires devastate whole cities?

Perhaps we can, in some part of our brains, hear those frequencies too — those ecosystem-wide alarms. Perhaps that is the cause of some of our collective discomfort, our anxiety, our increasing inability to focus, our sense of precarity and even despair. What if some part of us can hear the earth screaming?

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Indigenous cultures have always known that the more-than-human world is speaking to us, that it is sentient, that we are in relationship with it and in dialogue with it.

Look back into the past long enough and you will see stories of deities that are nature embodied, and stones that contain inner lives, and spirits that inhabit houses and structures and rivers and shadows and must be worked with and appeased. There is something deep within us that knows this is true: The world, everything around us and everything in it, is speaking to us, is alive, is animate, is all bound up in a web of interconnected frequency.

The forest speaks. Image via Pinterest

Perhaps all this is one great hall of mirrors, a chamber of songs intertwining like tree roots just beneath the soil of the visible world. Perhaps it is all guiding us towards the understanding that everything is connected and we are all one, though most of us have forgotten.

Perhaps listening to the silence can help. Listening deeper than the sound of birdsong or wind or the hum of the refrigerator. Allowing the messages of the natural world to permeate our intuition. Hearing with something other than ears.

This, I think, must be how we join in communion with what we cannot see. This is how we begin to speak the language of the stars and soil. This is how we grow into our true nature. By looking to the more-than-human world, getting very, very quiet, and listening until we can hear it. Perhaps then we will realize it can hear us back. Maybe someday we’ll even realize we’ve been listening to ourselves all along.