If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Hidden within a question is often an issue we are unwilling to face. The question itself implies the real problem… in this case… the self-importance of human beings.
Who else would have the nerve to question a tree‘s ability to make a sound if we’re not there to have some part in the process. We completely undermine the auditory abilities of the many creatures within the vicinity of the fallen tree.
What we fail to understand is that trees are more essential to us than we are to trees. So perhaps this question is some sort of subconscious seeking of the ego, in which we try to create a situation where we are the sole proof of the tree’s existence… and most people are so unconscious that they’ll believe it, so long as you pose it to them as a rhetorical question.
Yet the trees ask a far more enlightened question:
When the last tree is cut down, will humans live long enough to regret it?