Entangled Material Literacy: Nonfiction Forest Writings and Forest Experience for a Relational Ecocritical Pedagogy

Abstract

Ecocriticism often employs a mimetic, text-based model that includes literary analysis of canonical nature writings complemented with wilderness excursions seeking verification of literary representations and place-based experience. I suggest that in order to better integrate ecocriticism within the Environmental Humanities’ decolonial and material turns, a pedagogy of “entangled material literacy” should be explored. This approach, grounded in biosemiotics and new materialist thought, enables a relational reading of nonfiction forest writings like Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, positioning the forest as a co-author in these works. Aligning with critical forest studies, this project examines the forest’s biosemiotic intelligence and agential multiplicities in human–nonhuman communicative meaning-making. Moreover, as reflected by the authors’ personal connections to forests, I argue that teaching entangled material literacy necessitates embodied experience, where the forest becomes a co-teacher, cultivating students’ competency for responsive engagement with a sentient more-than-human world.

Introduction: The forest as an author and teacher

In one of the videos of “Countdown,” TED’s global initiative to explore solutions to climate crisis, Indigenous activist and member of the Waorani Nation, Nemonte Nenquimo, explains how her education is closely related to the forest: “The forest is our teacher.” Nemonte’s tribal experience reveals an Indigenous onto-epistemology founded on acknowledging nonhuman personhood, which stands in contrast to conventional understanding in Western-modern education, where “forest as teacher” is also a recognisable concept but is perceived as a metaphorical expression rather than a pedagogical principle. The difference in worldviews is manifested in how ecocriticism is taught as a form of environmental education, conventionally adopting a text-based approach grounded in mimetic theory (the idea of literature as representations of nature and human experience in it) and the inclusion of canonical nature writing from the traditions of Romanticism, American classics epitomised by Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and British New Nature Writing in the curriculum. The model is typically accompanied by place-based wilderness excursions, which function as a form of experiential verification of the texts and a quest for student epiphany (Garrard, 2007, 2010). However, while the critique of anthropocentrism remains a central tenet of ecocriticism, a genuine decolonisation of human–nonhuman relationships requires a mode of reading that enables ecocriticism to participate in the broader development of environmental humanities that challenges the very definition of nonhuman identity and taking nonhuman personhood seriously. ¹

Contemporary environmental art increasingly expresses the personhood of nature by explicitly positioning it as a creative collaborator rather than a passive source of inspiration. American artist Patrick M. Lydon’s 2019 exhibition, “Forest is the Artist,” at Seoul’s placeMAK gallery was the outcome of a year-long project that exemplifies the conceptual shift. Lydon presented ten blank canvases to Gomsil Forest, allowing natural elements to inscribe their own marks. He credited the forest as the sole artist, placing himself as the “coordinator” who facilitated the process. On the project’s introductory page, Lydon (2019) writes:

Many artists have worked directly with nature – and indeed most of us agree that nature is in one way or another, the source of inspiration for all art – but in the end the human tends to claim ownership of the process, and of the end product. To me, this feels somewhat disingenuous. It’s time to give credit where it is due. (The Artist and the Coordinator section, paras. 1–3)

In a comparable endeavour, Canadian artist Zuzana Vasko’s project, “Making kin with local woods” (2021), also engages the forest as a co-author. Through a series of small drawings created during regular, seasonal walks, Vasko sought to build intimacy with a specific wooded area via embodied, “animistic sensing.” In a final act of reciprocal dialogue, each completed drawing was buried at its site of creation and retrieved on a subsequent visit, physically returning the artwork to the land that inspired it (Vasko, 2021). These artists’ projects serve as a critical inquiry into how we can engage with nature by explicitly acknowledging its creative agency and challenging the entrenched human-centric ownership of art and knowledge. Just as the forest can be recognised as a collaborating artist, is it possible to consider the forest and its nonhuman dwellers co-authors for our written texts on forests?

To account for nonhuman contribution through “co-authorship” in writing involves key shifts in our understanding of who is capable of meaning-making signification processes and of the human role from being the sole composer of a text to a participant in the communicative dynamics. First, it means viewing a text not just as human discourse, but as a material record and even enactment of an encounter – a performative narrative of the specific interactions between a writer and the lively, communicative, and coexisting forest. The text is shaped by what the forest “says” through its signal transmissions and perceptible live dramas. Second, it requires us to see human language as just one part of a much larger, older system of biological communication, where plants, fungi and animals constantly exchange chemical or behavioural signals and create meanings, while humans participate through a specialised medium of scripted text. In this view, a writer is not an isolated creator but a translator. These two perspectives, drawn from posthumanist thought that critiques human exceptionalism, and biosemiotics, the study of biological signs in nature, together provide a framework for understanding writing as a collaborative act with the nonhuman world we seek to describe.

Locating ecocriticism in critical forest studies and the significance of forest writings

Nowhere is this ontological entanglement more materially evident and critically meaningful than in the context of forests. Comprising levels of complex, agentic ecosystems and being a collective of multiple Umwelten ² of organisms, forests compel us to move beyond a purely symbolic or scientific reading; they are not merely a setting or a resource, but active participants in semiotic and material exchanges. The characteristics of forest precisely reflect ontological multiplicities of things, as it exemplifies how “each cell, organism, vegetable, and photon is irreducibly composed of what Karen Barad would call an ‘intra-active’ host of others” (Keller & Rubenstein, 2017, p.2). In other words, the becoming of a tree is inseparable from the fungi, microbes, animals and atmospheric forces it interacts with, each contributing to its growth and health conditions within the broader web of ecological relationships. This article, therefore, seeks to theorise “entangled material literacy” ³ and its significance for ecocritical education. The concept is understood as a receptive capacity and competence for reading the layered, more-than-human semiotics of nonhuman entities – in this case, the forest – and for relating to its living beings and “worlds” not only epistemologically but also ontologically. Building on the scholarship of material ecocriticism and biosemiotic intertextuality, I also explore the concept of “entangled material intertextuality,” referring to the condition of narrative entanglement that arises from intercorporeal being – an ontological coexistence that is, from its very beginning, rooted in the more-than-human lifeworlds. The notion will be elucidated by examining the “conversations” between human texts and the semiotic agency of forests that are grounded in embodied experiences.

This project connects with the aims of Critical Forest Studies by engaging with forests as sentient, interspecies learning communities or societies (Rousell & Tran, 2024). It contributes to the problematisation of forest pedagogies by proposing “entangled material literacy” as a foundational practice for learning in, with and from these symphonic, pluriversal worlds of trees and their dependent lives. While my discussion aligns with Colligs’s (2023) conceptualisation of a “sylvan and arboreal agency,” I am interested in nonfiction forest writings as a valuable addition to the existing body of primary texts, including canonical nonfiction nature writing and creative-poetic literature, to be taught in ecocriticial classes because they serve as poignant illustrations of how nonhuman semiotic agencies actively co-produce meaning. I will illustrate with two notable examples of nonfiction forest writing: Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben to demonstrate how these texts can serve as primary texts for relational and material ecocritical analysis. I classify these two works under the broad category of nonfiction forest writing, identifying it as a subgenre under nature-themed creative nonfiction, a category of nonfiction that is notoriously hard to define but has greatly grown in popularity in recent years. These works set themselves apart from Thoreauvian nature writing by offering lay readers a pathway to understanding animal and plant lives through accessible popular scientific narratives, but are at the same time not written in dry, hardcore scientific language, often blended with a high level of personal fondness and intimate experience of the author for their nonhuman subjects. The forest writings of Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben demonstrate different modes of narrative engagement, namely posthuman life-writing ⁴ and speculative scientific translation through anthropomorphism, for understanding the working of material narrativity and how nonhuman beings co-constitute the “authorship” of these books.

Entangled material literacy: Ontologising literary-scientific consilience

Recent developments of ecocriticism increasingly recognise that for the discipline to be truly interdisciplinary, it is necessary to transcend the boundaries of traditional literary approaches and engage with scientific discourses on nature in conscious and creative ways that can stimulate ethical reflections on human–nonhuman relationships (Garrard, 2004; Clark, 2019; Alaimo, 2010). Rather than treating scientific subjects as merely resources of objective knowledge, ecocriticism seeks to assimilate them into its analytical framework so as to expand our understanding of textuality by undermining the binaries of subject and object, culture and nature and the symbolic and the physical. Responding to this intellectual shift, there is also an urgency for ecocritical education to achieve consilience, as envisioned by Love (1999), to transition from the separate spheres of literary and scientific literacy to a more fluid and integrated conception and practice of ecological literacy that is suitable for humanities students. The necessity of a sort of combined literacy is the focus of Louise Wrestling’s chapter “Literature and Ecology” in Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies edited by Greg Garrard (2012). She aptly observes that historically the relation between literature and science has been a “strained” one, leading to an “alienation” between literary and scientific scholars, where “humanists often claiming unique powers for imaginative writing and speculative theory, while scientists insist that the only certain knowledge comes from objective experimentation and quantitative measurement with mathematics as the ultimate arbiter” (p. 77). However, since “ecocriticism’s very sense of itself is shaped by the life sciences,” ecocritics and educators should be equipped with scientific literacy, even though it is not necessary and not practical to become a specialist (p. 82). Wrestling (2012) suggests that literary scholars can rely on the popular science books written by scientists and historians of science as entry points into scientific research to explore how scientific knowledge can be relevant and useful for teaching a literary text (p. 82).

I would like to take Wrestling’s approach of informed complementarity of the two literacies further to suggest the possibility of addressing “entangled material literacy.” This framework posits that all communicative acts – literary and scientific – are materially embedded and co-constituted by the lively agencies of the world. It moves beyond the mere application of scientific knowledge to literary texts, or simply the simultaneous possession of literacies of two disciplines; rather, it asserts the cultivation of a critical sensibility attuned to the material-semiotic processes from which both literary and scientific discourses arise. It thus approaches written texts as milieus of ontological entanglement, where human expression emerges from and registers the agency of the more-than-human world.

Anthropocentric problems of mimetic representations of nature and place-based ecocritical education

The problem of the representation of nature, namely whether it can be accurately depicted or whether writing about nature can directly inform human–nature relationships, which is closely related to the ancient literary question of mimesis, underpinned many ecocritical debates. This challenge also complicates ecocritical education, as educators attempt to navigate the significance and pitfalls of teaching students how to read and interpret nature writings, heeding the need to avoid a naïve faith in textual representation but also not to dismiss the meaningful human–nature connections that nature writings can illuminate. Phillips (2003) and Cohen (2004) have articulated sound scepticism towards the romanticised tendency of returning to nature as wilderness and celebrating restorative, non-conflictual union in human–nature relationships in canonical nature writing’s representation of nature in early ecocriticism. While Phillips questions the assumptions of realist ecocritics that in nature writing the verbs “to be” and “to write” are reconciled, allowing language to directly reflect and access natural reality (p. 136), Cohen laments that much ecocriticism has become a “praise-song school,” prone to sermonising and uncritical celebration rather than critical analysis (p. 21). For Cohen, this immediately raises a profound problem: if academic convention treats literature as a human construction, how can we claim the “nonhuman environment” acts within it without falling into absurdity? (p. 16)

This very concern also creates a tension between literary and scientific language within ecocritical practices and pedagogical approaches. Galleymore (2020) observes that environmental writing pedagogy faces a fundamental anxiety about representation, which manifests in a “wariness towards the intrusion of personal or cultural meaning” (p. 8), privileging “factual accuracy” and “place-based education,” in particular in the inclusion of outdoor fieldwork for students to gain first-hand experience (p. 7). Galleymore warns against this preference for nonfiction and a realist aesthetic and asserts that pedagogy of environmental writing needs “a flexible, self-reflexive and imaginative approach” (p. 23). While Galleymore sees “the tension between literalness and literariness…as a tension between non-fiction and poetry” (p. 20), I would like to argue that this friction is also a symptom of a restricted understanding of language and signification, one that is confined to anthroposemiotics – sign processes created and interpreted by humans. This limitation can be attributed to the fact that the emergence of ecocriticism took place partly under a pathos of reacting against the prevalence of “theory” in late twentieth-century literary studies. Early ecocriticism defined itself in opposition to poststructuralist approaches, which were developed from Saussure’s semiotic emphasis on the arbitrariness of the sign. In contrast, ecocriticism committed to a worldview that sought direct, authentic and more “literal” access to nature through language. This stance was a deliberate reaction against the highly abstract textual theories in literary studies, asserting the existence of an actual, living nature outside the text for us to explore. However, anthropocentric textualism has become outdated since theory has evolved from the restrictive perspective of seeing texts as human and cultural constructs to rethinking the fundamental ontology and materiality of language, opening up conceptual avenues that take zoosemiotics and phytosemiotics – the sign processes of animals and plants – into consideration.

Material ecocriticism and its ontological perspective on writing

The new development of ecocritical approaches, which are identified as “the fourth wave of ecocriticism” in Colligs (2023), is represented by the theoretical framework of material ecocriticism – an innovative and interdisciplinary approach within the environmental humanities that precisely reframes the problem of the representation of nature by radically reconceptualising human and nonhuman ontology and synthesising insights from posthumanism, new materialism and biosemiotics. Iovino and Oppermann (2014) state that:

The conceptual argument of Material Ecocriticism is simple in its outlines: the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be “read” and interpreted as forming narratives, stories, Developing in bodily forms and in discursive formulations, and arising in coevolutionary landscapes of natures and signs, the stories of matter are everywhere: in the air we breathe, the food we eat, in the things and beings of this world, within and beyond the human realm. All matter, in other words, is a “storied matter.” It is a material “mesh” of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces. (pp. 1–2)

The theoretical basis of material ecocriticism encompasses major concepts from theorists in the so-called “material turn” in environmental humanities, most prominently Donna Haraway’s “material-semiotic reality,” Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” that posits that nonhumans are animated and interconnected and Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” that emphasises the mutual constitution of agencies, collectively demonstrating how material ecocriticism perceives the material world as not being passive but actively generating meaning. Adapting Barad’s phrase “to meet the universe halfway,” material ecocriticism conceives “the human agency meets the narrative agency of matter halfway, generating material-discursive phenomena in the forms of literature and other cultural creations, including literary criticism” (Iovino & Oppermann, 2014, p. 9). Moreover, the emphasis on relationality is further illustrated by insights from actor-network theory, primarily developed by Bruno Latour. The theoretical complexity is also enriched by biosemiotic understandings of life as inherently signifying – where even cells and bacteria communicate through chemical signals – suggesting that nature is always already participating in processes of semiosis.

From biosemiotics to entangled material intertextuality

Biosemiotics, as the interdisciplinary study of signs, meaning and communication in living systems, bridges the gap between biology and semiotics and asserts that life and semiosis (the process of making and interpreting signs) are co-extensive, meaning that all organisms engage in interpreting their environments to survive. Timo Maran, as a major proponent of biosemiotic literary criticism, has contributed to Material Ecocriticism and identified the common ground of material ecocriticism and biosemiotics in their shared interest in how physical matter is connected to meaning processes (2014, p. 141). Both fields undermine the classical divide between inert nature and sign-making culture by showing how material structures actively initiate and shape representations and semiotic processes (p. 142). For Maran, this convergence is most evident in the concept of the “semiotization of matter”: the process by which human and nonhuman activities imprint models and meanings onto the physical world, turning it into a legible – though often conflicted – text. The alignment of material ecocriticism and biosemiotics offers a robust non-anthropocentric framework for reading environments, where agency and meaning are distributed across human and nonhuman actants. It also introduces a critical caution: while matter can be “read,” our readings are always entangled with modelling processes, a theory developed by semioticians including Sebeok (1991) and Lotman (1967), be it cultural, biological or narrative, that may project human forms, most prominent manifested as anthropomorphism, onto nonhuman contexts (Maran, 2014, pp. 147–148). Maran (2014) thus urges a reflexive awareness of how our models, once applied, lead us to semiotise matter in ways that may exclude or harm other species, especially when the modelling functions for a narrowly utilitarian and exclusively human purpose of modifying nature. This biosemiotic perspective, when applied with an inclusive and ecological mindset, can enrich material ecocriticism by providing concrete tools – like Peirce’s typology of icons, indices and symbols or Jakob von Uexhüll’s functional cycle (Maran, 2014, p. 144, 149) – to analyse how matter becomes story and how those stories, in turn, reshape the material world.

The concepts of “hybrid agencies” and “material narrativity” expounded in material ecocriticism have radically reframed the longstanding problem of nature’s representation that is often entangled with the issue of textualism in theory, making it a significant ecocritical approach that subverts traditional binaries and is worthy of being addressed in literary education for prompting students to conceptualise literature as more than expressions of human experience and exclusively “authored” by human beings. Saussurean semiotics is identified by Nöth (1994) as one of the anthropocentric views of semiosis that have hindered semioticians from adopting an evolutionary perspective on the subject. Referencing Peirce’s assertion that the “entire universe” is “perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs,” she argues that the evolution of semiosis can only be examined within a framework that goes beyond the constraints of anthroposemiotics (p. 2). This shift necessitates a crucial distinction between two models of intertextuality: poststructuralist intertextuality, following thinkers like Barthes and Kristeva, conceives of a relatively closed, self-referential network of cultural and linguistic texts, and what James (2025) terms “biosemiotic intertextuality” is rooted in the real, causal efficacy of signs across the entire biological and physical world. As he argues,

Semiotic relations are real and bear the causal effects of the dimension of semiotic immanence in which they participate and from which they emerge. In this way biosemiotic intertextuality, obeying the logic of immanence and being structurally ordered into chains, webs, and networks, and thereby also differentiated into regions, levels, and layers, emerges as distinct from poststructuralist intertextuality. (“Chapter One: Biosemiotics and the Post-dicative”)

“Biosemiotic intertextuality,” or what I prefer to call “entangled material intertextuality,” can be exemplified and enacted by the examples of nonfiction forest writing that I will eventually focus on in this discussion. While “biosemiotic intertextuality” provides the foundation for conceiving the interconnections of signs operating in the biological world, “entangled material intertextuality” specifically describes the ontologically intra-active narrative and discursive practices through which humans engage with, read and translate embodied experiences across biosemiotic communications and entangled lifeworlds. Such intertextuality is indicative of the relational and ecological nature of being, which carries the creative and vital forces of collaborative world-making and sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016). The material aspect of forest writing is manifested in the text’s direct engagement with the physical, sensory and semiotic reality of the forest. The writer, who must navigate and interpret the nonhuman world through an entangled literacy, becomes a translator and a participant in a dialogue with an already-signifying world. The resulting written work is a hybrid, material-discursive encounter, a record of the forest’s “narrative agency” and a testament to the fact that representation is a process of co-creation between human and nonhuman actors. Seen from this perspective, the forest and its dwellers, including the trees with their climatic histories inscribed in rings, the medicinal herbs with their embodied wisdom, the mycorrhizal networks facilitating arboreal memory and communication, are not merely the subject matter but attain a certain status of co-authorship through their agential role in shaping vegetal stories. The narrative agency of plants “to write-with collaboratively,” as proposed in phytocriticism, is exercised through what Marder (2013) calls “plant-thinking,” as well as their voices as narrativised in human storytelling (Ryan, 2025, p. 31).

Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree

In the “Introduction” of Finding the Mother Tree, Simard (2022) has indicated the material-performative status of her narrative as a scientific memoir that relies on an entangled literacy, explicitly modelling how to read across the conventional boundaries that separate human from plant, mind from forest, declaring:

I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern – that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes. (p. 5)

The word “journey” suggests that the narrative process is not simply a descriptive, representational account of scientific discovery but an immersive and transformative experience of learning to see the world differently. The “shocking” similarity she posits is the catalyst for this transformation, a mind-opening realisation that tree communication can be comparable to the transmitting of signals in the human brain, and understanding such biosemiotic processes can dismantle the hierarchical dichotomy between the human as an observer and author of this “journey” narrative and the forest as the object of scientific study and narration. Simard’s narrative demands the facilitation of entangled material literacy because it operates in multiple registers at once through translating the forest’s cryptic chemical exchanges into a human narrative of kinship and recognition: the old and young are performing the semiotic communication (“perceiving, communicating and responding”) materially (“by emitting chemical signals”). This analogous comparison is a sophisticated biosemiotic translation, using the vocabulary of kinship and conscious action to make intelligible the genuine, agentic responsiveness of the forest community.

In the chapter titled “Radioactive” in Finding the Mother Tree, Simard describes the use of the isotopic tracing method in her research. From a material ecocritical perspective, this episode illustrates a methodological performance of entanglement. It does not merely describe the human action of doing the experiment; it materially enacts and makes visible the hidden material agencies and exchanges that take place between the trees:

In half the triplets, we would inject the bag over the birch with carbon dioxide tagged with the carbon-14 isotope, and we’d inject the bag over the fir with carbon-13-tagged carbon dioxide, which they’d absorb over a couple of hours through photosynthesis. This would allow us to detect carbon moving in both directions between the trees (p. 151).

The very act of injecting “tagged” carbon dioxide is a material-discursive practice that deploys the isotopes (C-14, C-13) as material signifiers engineered by human science to be traceable for tracking the photosynthetic process. Simard enrols the trees themselves as co-participants in the experiment. The trees, through their natural biological processes, become the authors of a readable text: a material narrative of resource sharing written in the language of isotopic carbon. The scientist does not stand apart from nature, but both intra-act in the revelation of mycorrhizal entanglement, a materially-grounded true arboreal story that challenges the dominant cultural narrative of nature as a competitive, individualistic struggle, reflecting the survival intelligence of trees.

In one of the most significant episodes in Finding the Mother Tree, Simard tells the moment of empirical revelation of uncovering the fungal truffles linking the roots of an old tree to its seedlings, signifying the crucial moment of the culmination of Simard’s hypothesis and the foundational evidence for her groundbreaking theory of the “Wood Wide Web,” introducing the “mother tree” concept with the narrative fusing the personal and the scientific:

I looked at my old tree, then at the little seedling in the shadows. The fungus was linking the old tree and young seedling.

[…]

I tracked another root from the elder and found another truffle, and another. I raised each to my nose and breathed in its musty, earthy smell of spores and mushroom and birth. I traced the black pulpy whiskers from each truffle to the riggings of roots of seedlings of all ages, and saplings too. With each unearthing, the framework unfolded – this old tree was connected to every one of the younger trees regenerated around it. Later another of my graduate students, Kevin, would return to this patch and sequence the DNA of almost every Rhizopogon truffle and tree – and find that most of the trees were linked together by the Rhizopogon mycelium, and that the biggest, oldest trees were connected to almost all the younger ones in their neighborhood. (p. 221)

The encounter occurs in Simard’s act of “unearthing” that yields a semiotic (meaningful) outcome. As her hands trace the roots and find each truffle, she is literally reading the forest’s text. The material framework (the root system) unfolds its meaning (the narrative of interconnection) and, in the process, collapses the boundary between the material reality of the fungus and the semiotic concept of a “network.” Simard re-tells the discovery of the mother tree and the mycorrhizal network in a human narrative form. The narrative fosters a radical ethical shift. By reading the forest in this way, Simard does not see the forest as a collection of resources to be managed. She reveals a community of kin to be respected. The “Mother Tree” is not merely a metaphor, as it represents a material-semiotic reality that infers the presence of nurturance, relationality and more-than-human personhood. Therefore, recognising the agency of the forest and attaining entangled material literacy is the essential first step towards an ethic of care and conservation rooted in the actual, communicative nature of the living world.

Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees

While Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2017) is well-received by the global pubic readers, its reception within the scientific community has been notably bifurcated, drawing criticism for its apparent departure from empirical rigour and accepted scientific conventions for construing plant lives. As noted in Kingsland’s (2018) book review, two German scientists launched an online petition against the book, the English version titled “Even in the forest, we want facts instead of fairy tales,” where they condemned the work as a “conglomeration of half-truths, biased judgements, and wishful thinking” that offers little more than “fairy tales,” arguing that such emotional writing ultimately failed both forests and environmental understanding (para. 4). However, from the perspective of material ecocriticism, this very “oversimplified and emotional” style – often dismissed as mere anthropomorphism – is precisely where the book’s most significant intervention lies. Wohlleben’s method possesses a profound material-semiotic significance: it functions as a strategic, heuristic device designed to translate the obscure, nonhuman semiosis of the forest into a narrative accessible to human perception and empathy. By describing trees as youngsters and that each tree only “raises one adult offspring” and other young seedlings only wait “at their mothers’ feet” until their demise (p. 29) or stating that “there are unwritten guidelines for tree etiquette” (p. 37), Wohlleben is not trading in facts for fairy tales; rather, he is performing a crucial act of biosemiotic translation. He constructs a bridge of affect that allows readers to understand the forest’s material agency. This analysis will therefore aim to show that The Hidden Life of Trees should be read not as a failure of scientific accuracy, but as a seminal work of material storytelling that harnesses an entangled literacy essential for fostering a truly ethical relationship with the living world.

I will illustrate my argument with the chapters “The Language of Trees,” “Love” and “Tree School,” in which we can see how Wohlleben composes his writing as a material-discursive encounter that transcends the binary opposition of nature–culture, portraying the forest as an active participant in a world of “storied matter.” His method of anthropomorphism is strategically adopted for demonstrating entangled material literacy, allowing readers to relate to the material-semiotic realities of the world of the trees. In “The Language of Trees,” Wohlleben fundamentally reorients the concept of communication from a human-centric activity to a material, chemical process intrinsic to the forest itself. He details how trees use scent as a language, describing how acacias being eaten by giraffes “pumped toxic substances into their leaves” and simultaneously “gave off a warning gas (specifically, ethylene) that signaled to neighboring trees of the same species that a crisis was at hand” (p. 7). This is not a metaphor but a documentation of material agency – the trees’ ability to act, respond and generate meaningful chemical signs that alter their environment and the behaviour of other organisms. Wohlleben extends this concept to the “wood wide web,” the fungal network that acts as a “fiber-optic Internet cable,” weaving through the soil to transmit signals and resources (p. 10). This network is the material infrastructure of forest discourse, a literal embodiment of “intra-action,” where agencies (trees, fungi, insects) emerge through their entangled relations. The chapter argues that this communicative capacity is a primary condition of the forest’s being, asserting that to ignore it is to fundamentally misread the text of the natural world. When Wohlleben writes that cultivated plants have “lost their ability to communicate above or below ground – you could say they are deaf and dumb” (p. 11), he makes a powerful material ecocritical point: industrial agriculture has not just physically altered plants but has semiotically impoverished them, stripping them of their narrative agency and their ability to participate in the biotic community.

Moving from communication to reproduction, the chapter “Love” illustrates how the forest’s material-semiotic agency is expressed through long-term, strategic planning for evolutionary fitness. Wohlleben frames the mast year phenomenon – where trees like beeches and oaks synchronise seed production – not as a mere biological mechanism but as a collective, intelligent negotiation with their ecosystem. This strategy is a form of dialogue with herbivores: “If they don’t bloom every year, then the herbivores cannot count on them” (p. 20). The material fact of superabundance or scarcity is a sign that is read and interpreted by boar, deer and insects, directly influencing their population dynamics. This reveals a biosemiotic reality where meaning is encoded in ecological patterns over time. Furthermore, Wohlleben examines the molecular semiosis of reproduction, describing how a bird cherry tree can “test the genetic makeup of the pollen and, if it matches its own, blocks the tube,” allowing only “foreign genes” to pass for reproduction (p. 23). To answer the question: “How does the bird cherry distinguish between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’?” Wohlleben vaguely but provocatively suggests “you could say, the tree can ‘feel’ them” (p. 23). This can be an interesting expression that can show material ecocritical significance: “feeling” here denotes a capacity for discernment and response that the tree performs “intuitively” with its body. It is a form of cognition that is embodied and material, not neurological. Such capacity for “feeling” illustrates how trees live with a biological intelligence that is different from that of humans, as Calvo (2023) points out: “We are so entrenched in the dogma of neuronal intelligence, brain-centric consciousness, that we find it difficult to imagine alternative kinds of internal experience” (“Preface”). The trees are not passive objects of evolutionary forces but active agents making “choices” that ensure genetic diversity and resilience.

“Tree School” explores a radical claim that knowledge and learning are material processes that need not be confined to a brain. Wohlleben presents the forest as a pedagogical space where trees learn through embodied experience and physical pain. A spruce that splits its bark during a drought learns to ration water, a lesson encoded into its very physiology: “The tree takes the lesson to heart, and from then on it will stick with this new, thrifty behavior” (p. 45). This “heart” is not entirely metaphorical – of course, a tree certainly does not have a heart, but it is the tree’s material being, its cambium and vascular system, which adapt and remember. Knowledge is stored in the thickened trunk of a tree that learned to stand alone after a neighbour fell, a process triggered by “painful micro-tears that occur when the trees bend way over in the wind” which show it “wherever it hurts, that’s where the tree must strengthen its support structure” (p. 46). This is a powerful image of embodied, material memory. Wohlleben supports this by referencing Monica Gagliano’s experiments with mimosas that learned and remembered, asking, “Where do they store what they have learned and how do they access this information? After all, they don’t have brains to function as databases and manage processes” (p. 47). The answer that can be pertinent to material ecocriticism is that they store it in their bodies. The chapter concludes with the provocative idea that thirsty trees might produce ultrasonic “screams,” vibrations that could be “cries of thirst” or a “dire warning to their colleagues” (p. 48). Whether literally true or not, this interpretation frames these vibrations as potential signs within a communicative community, further emphasising that intelligence and learning are emergent properties of material entanglement.

The Hidden Life of Trees can aptly show the necessity of entangled material literacy and recognition of trees’ material narrativity that are crucial for a material ecocriticism. Through his examination of language, love and learning, as discussed in my short analysis, Wohlleben masterfully demonstrates that the forest is a world of “storied matter,” where meaning is continually generated through the intra-actions of roots, fungi, chemicals and animals. His use of anthropomorphism is not a scientific failing but a strategic narrative tool – a biosemiotic modelling – that enables readers to grasp the otherwise unseen and abstract material-semiotic realities of the arboreal world. By translating the slow, nonhuman semiosis of the forest into a human timescale and emotional register, Wohlleben illustrates that entangled material literacy is a prerequisite for a truly ethical relationship with nonhuman beings. He reveals that the forest is not a collection of objects but a community of subjects – a “community” as respectable as, yet different from, that of human beings, whose survival depends on our ability to listen to, learn from and ultimately protect the pluralistic and intelligent narratives of these more-than-human beings that often seem perplexing to us. However vivid and animated, Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic modelling is, after all, a translation process by a human author. Like other translation activities, it is an act of creative interpretation that has limitations in rendering the logic of arboreal life into a familiar human narrative while inevitably glossing over the untranslatable aspects of tree lives or “culture” that remain to be fully understood or that exist beyond human grasp.

From place-based to wild(ing) pedagogies for teaching entangled material literacy

The fact that these forest writings are born out of deeply embodied experience of the authors’ own personal encounters with forests actually validates the core principle of wild pedagogies: that education must be a co-creative act with the more-than-human world. Wild pedagogies facilitate teaching approaches that “[enable] new relations with place” through “recognizing other-than-human agency in a similar sense to the notion of nature as co-teacher or co-researcher” (The Crex Crex Collective, 2018, p. 8). The forest writings of Simard and Wohlleben demonstrate a co-creative dialogue with nature as a sentient pedagogical partner, which necessarily emerges from their immersive and long-term embodied experience of being with the forests. Smallwood (2025) points out that traditional Outdoor Adventure Education often treats nature as a passive “backdrop or stage for learning,” a resource from which lessons are unilaterally extracted (p. 146). This finds resonance in the problem of the excursion model in ecocritical education, as it reinforces a dualistic view of nature as a separate, pristine space to be visited for personal epiphany, rather than an interconnected system within which human culture is embedded and for which we bear ongoing responsibility (Garrard, 2007). In contrast, the works of Simard and Wohlleben exemplify what happens when we approach the forest as a “co-teacher” (Smallwood, 2025, p. 146) – an educational companion with its own agency and intelligence. These authors do not simply report findings about the forest; their narratives are essentially shaped by their sustained, respectful and embodied encounters with the forest. They engage in a form of “Place-Thought,” where, as Mohawk and Anishinaabe scholar Dr Vanessa Watts (2013) describes, “land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (p. 21). While Watts (2013) positions Indigenous Place-Thought in critical contrast to Western epistemological-ontological frameworks, a resonant dialogue becomes possible with those materialist and biosemiotic approaches that challenge human exceptionalism. These Western theories, such as new materialisms and Actor-Network Theory, begin to perceive the vibrant agency of the more-than-human world and provide a conceptual direction for undermining the inherent hierarchies in Western onto-epistemological models. Although this resonance should not be mistaken for equivalence, as Place-Thought fundamentally asserts the land’s conscious, sovereign personhood, a spiritual reality that often exceeds the scope of materialist analysis, the material turn nonetheless still has the potential to match with contemporary scientific narratives that are founded and emerge from Western lines of thinking.

Conclusion

Finding the Mother Tree and The Hidden Life of Trees manifest the very ontological shift that wild pedagogies call for. They move us from a “substance-based ontology,” which views entities as primary and separate, to a “relational ontology,” which understands that “relations between entities are ontologically more fundamental than the entities themselves” (Smallwood, 2025, p. 148). Consequently, these forest writings are not merely about nature’s agency; they are the product and proof of it. They are the result of the authors entering into what Smallwood (2025) calls a “synergistic relationship” with the more-than-human world, allowing it to actively shape the learning process and the resulting knowledge (p. 152). Thus, these texts stand as powerful empirical and narrative validations that embrace the agency of the more-than-human world not as an abstract philosophical exercise but a practicable, transformative pedagogical foundation for promoting the humility and reciprocal awareness required for socio-ecological flourishing. Entangled material literacy implicates an ontological relationship between the human and the nonhuman, extending beyond mere cognitive interpretation or comprehension. Through communicative interactions with the forest, we are actually engaging with other sentient beings and are affected by their biosemiosis and agency. The actual experience of this is crucial because it can help students to shift from a theoretical understanding to an embodied relationship with the natural world. They do not just learn about the forest; they learn from it – the forest is also a teacher (in addition to an author) in the processes of ecocritical education. Getting beyond the “place-based” and excursion model that emphasises field trips to the actual locales of where literary narratives in nature writings are set, the approach of entangled material literacy focuses more on the process of situated, reciprocal experiential “reading,” as well as the transferable critical skills it cultivates. This demonstrates that it is equally useful and crucial for literary students to connect with their local forest, showing that meaningful experiential learning does not require the locale of the literary text to match the site of the physical engagement. In this way, entangled material literacy reframes the goal of ecocritical education, which is to learn embodied communicating and collaborative storytelling with the nonhuman world, practices that reestablish humanity’s deep belonging to entangled multispecies communities.