Biologist here. I promise I’m not laughing at you.

While I’d be a bit cautious about throwing around a word like “consciousness” without defining it, you’re absolutely right. Trees, and pretty much every living thing, are aware of their environment. They’re capable of communication and coordinated responses to threats. They have complex and intricate lifecycles and many levels of interactions with other plants and animals. One of the more profound passages I read (from Jurassic Park, whose author I otherwise detest) had the paleobotanist comment something along the lines that everyone sees plants as a background against which animals act, but they’re their own ecosystem, just as much red in tooth and claw (or cooperative, if you prefer) as any group of dinosaurs.

Being one of those weird theoretical biologists, I’d even let you get away with using a word like “intent” as long as we mean “a learned and stereotyped response to an environmental condition.” Oaks aren’t debating the meaning of life, and they’re not deciding in a sense more meaningful than an “if then else” kind of clause. I mean, I don’t think humans have free will either, so I’m not just ragging on trees here - but that’s a different conversation. They make decisions like “if it’s been warming up for a while and getting sunny, start making leaves again.” It’s generic/evolutionary learning rather than neural, but it’s still learning. It’s just much slower.

It’s also not racist for oaks to feed other oaks any more than it’s racist for humans to eat corn. Or corn dogs.

I’m not going to get into the differences between group selection versus kin selection dynamics because that would break my New Year’s resolution.