Erazim Kohak wrote a paper about talking with trees. He wasn't considering the sort of verbal exchanges I (claim to) have with trees. Rather it was an extension, perhaps, of Goethean science. The idea is that through attending to the tree, the tree's needs are, as it were, communicated to you.
After prolonged deliberation, I've forked out for one of his books. This article tipped the balance. Here's a quote:
For Kohák, we must seek to understand “any and all reality from within” rather than “explaining it superficially from without.” That is, we must understand a living entity “in terms of its meaningful being rather than in terms of categories arbitrarily imposed upon it from without.”
Having mentioned trees, it would be remiss not to offer you this interesting question at the end of an essay on Aeon:
What might we learn and how might our behaviour change if we discarded the model of agency founded on mobility, autonomy and sovereignty, and adopted the model that trees offer us: rootedness, relationality, dialogue and responsiveness?
That is rather what I think we can also gain, well, we can gain some of it at any rate, from considering badgers. But, sticking with trees, and this is from Graham Harvey's Animism. He's talking about the anthropologist Nurit Bird-David:
Not only does [Bird-David] challenge Western approaches and understandings, she also forcefully presents indigenous alternatives: she offers ‘cutting trees into parts’ as the epitome of modernist epistemology and ‘talking with trees’ as the epitome of Nayaka animistic epistemology.
‘Talking’ is shorthand for a two-way responsive relatedness with the tree-– rather than speaking one-way to it as if it could listen and understand. ‘Talking with’ stands for attentiveness to variances and in variances in behaviour and responsive things in states of relatedness and for getting to know such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of the engagement with them.
The mutuality of paying attention to changes both in oneself and in the tree are essential, engaging the morality of responsiveness and responsibility. (Harvey 2005, 21)
I have to say that I am not really sure what this means... Maybe it's to say that you don't understand something by taking it apart, but by you doing something and seeing how the other responds... and then responding to that and seeing how the "dialogue" emerges? Yes, I think that's right. And of course the assumption is that one is dealing with a communicative other, whether they be tree, robin, squirrel, river, or cloud.
Your conclusion makes sense to me. I've read your post and just finished that good article at the link about Erazim's book. I need to read everything a second time. And am especially struck by the bit about needing to be reminded about what we already know. "Against forgetting". Thanks for your post.