There’s a very natural way we try to teach children to look at trees. We tell them they are alive. That they breathe. That they need care. Sometimes we go a step further: we try to help them feel trees. To imagine them as creatures that, in some way, experience something.
I do it too. With my son, for example, it goes like this: walking through the woods near our home, we often return to the same tree. We notice how it changes. We give it a name (sometimes he chooses it, sometimes I do). In a way, we make it familiar.
It stops being part of the background and becomes something with its own character—a kind of “presence” we greet every time we come back to that place. And from experience, I can say it works.
It works because it makes the forest feel like a place where you belong. In a way, it feels like visiting friends, being welcomed by them. And it works because it shifts our attention—from the tree itself to the relationship we build with it.
After all, a tree doesn’t move like an animal, doesn’t speak like we do, and for that very reason it risks becoming invisible. But if we learn—and teach—to observe it over time, in its details, in its changes, then it returns to what it is: a living being that grows, changes, reacts, communicates, breathes.
It is through these small gestures that something meaningful is built. A quiet, almost instinctive form of education.
And yet, after many years working at Treedom, I came across a well-known article published back in 2012 that made me pause—and question whether what I was doing with my son was actually right.
The author is Michael Marder, a philosopher and professor at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, as well as a researcher at the Ikerbasque Foundation in Bilbao. His work focuses on phenomenology, environmental thought, and political philosophy. The title of the article is quite explicit: The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy.
His argument, put simply, is this: empathy toward plants is an illusion. Or rather, a misunderstanding.
When we try to “feel” a tree, Marder suggests, we are not entering its world—we are bringing our own into it. Empathy works when we recognize something similar to ourselves: emotions, interiority, some form of lived experience. But plants—as far as we understand them—have none of these, at least not in terms we can relate to.
So in trying to get closer to them, we risk transforming them—reducing them to a simplified version of ourselves. It’s a thesis that sparked debate precisely because it went against a widespread tendency: to “humanize” nature in order to protect it better. To tell stories of trees that speak, communicate, help one another. To build an emotional bridge.
Marder’s article, instead, suggests something less intuitive: that respect should not arise only from empathy, but also from the ability to stand before something we do not fully understand. From recognizing difference, rather than similarity.
It’s a compelling idea—one that calls for an effort of reason beyond our instinctive tendency to identify more easily with what feels close to us. It invites us not to extend empathy where it might not belong. And when I think about it, what I do with my son sits exactly on that boundary.
On the one hand, I try to bring him closer to trees, to make them feel less distant. On the other, I know that what I’m doing is a translation—a human way of describing something that is not human. Maybe it’s a shortcut.
And yet, when I see him greeting the trees, feeling welcomed by them, it still feels meaningful.
So I don’t know: to learn how to respect trees, do we need to feel them as if they were like us… or learn to recognize that they are not?
In the end, these may just be two different paths leading to the same place—the first step of a longer journey: learning how to protect them.