The value of gnarled trees

Now you have this big tree and you’re distressed because it’s useless. Why don’t you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? Axes will never shorten its life, nothing can ever harm it. If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain? - The Zhuangzi

In the c. 3rd century BCE Chinese philosophic text the Zhuangzi, a character named Hui Tzu voices frustration about a big, “gnarled and bumpy” tree that he owns. He tells Zhuangzi how one can’t apply a measuring line to the knotty trunk, or use a compass or square to measure its twisted branches. In other words, human beings literally cannot take the measure of this tree. Hui Tzu says, “You could stand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice." The implication is that what humans cannot measure—using their customary measuring tools—they will not value.

Zhuangzi suggests to Hui Tzu that such apparent uselessness offers a sanctuary: things without clear instrumental value to human beings will be able to live out their natural lives without coming to grief or pain at human hands.

Today, many humans understand that trees are profoundly useful or beneficial to our health and the health of the planet: that utility is a byproduct of tree-nature. We now know that any tree, however gnarled, is absorbing pollutants through the surface of its leaves. It is capturing dust, pollen, and smoke. Through photosynthesis, it is releasing oxygen. As Zhuangzi reminds Hui Tzu, a tree offers an inviting place to rest (providing shade and cool and protection from harmful UV rays). Studies have shown that greener surroundings correlate with reduced crime rates, physical and emotional stress levels and symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder. 

These benefits have become clear, as humans have applied new metrics or tools to evaluate trees’ value. We can now see that Hui Tzu’s tree was always, absolutely useful. It was Hui Tzu’s perspective on usefulness that was flawed.

In truth, the framework of utility or uselessness is itself problematic. We should, I believe, have a bias toward presuming that meaning, or value, inheres in each thing, as it is. As our evolving awareness of the benefits of trees demonstrates, an apparently useless thing may be contributing in many ways that humans have not considered or learned how to measure yet. Those contributions may benefit the other-than-human world. If we relinquish our limiting conceptions of utility and value, rather than force the world to conform to those conceptions, then we might experience the happy surprise that the world, as it is, has always been of value through, and in, its nature...without reference to us.