While we were obsessing over the self-obsessive one, people who take a much longer view of things have been debating the question of whether trees talk to one another, experience pain, have sex and send out signals of distress about the imminent collapse of this little planet of ours.

Trees are sociable, it turns out, and even somewhat selfless, nurturing their drought-stricken or wounded arboreal siblings. They share nutrients. They suffer when a big arm is lopped during the growing season, or a crown is next to an all-night light. Some trees warn other trees of danger by releasing chemical drifts.

I found these relatively new discoveries not long after a giant fir came crashing down in my front yard during a freakish windstorm, nearly crushing my family and our century-old house. We were spared by six inches. But a question remained: What was the big guy trying to say?

Perhaps it has something to do with the 129 million trees that died from climate-change-aggravated drought and beetle infestation in California, or the five million acres of formerly sylvan green wiped out in Colorado by the same plague. Or maybe it’s a president who dictated the largest single rollback of public land protection in our history, putting a national monument and its ancient flora at risk from predators with political connections.