How would we regard the world around us if we looked at it from the point of view of another species?

One of the characters in Elif Shafak’s novel, The Island of Missing Trees, is a self-confident, outspoken fig tree, who, in the beginning of the novel, sets the record straight about her place in history.

“Throughout history I have seduced into my canopy droves of birds, bats, bees, butterflies, ants, mice, monkeys, dinosaurs… and also a certain confused couple, wandering around aimlessly in the Garden of Eden, a glazed look in their eyes. Make no mistake: that was no apple. It is high time someone corrected this gross misunderstanding. Adam and Eve yielded to the allure of a fig, the fruit of temptation, desire, and passion, not some crunchy apple. I don’t mean to belittle a fellow plant, but what chance does a bland apple have next to a luscious fig that still today, even aeons after the original sin, still tastes like paradise?”

Shafak, who is Turkish, sets her story on Cyprus in 1974, when Turkey invaded the mostly-Greek island and war ensued, after which thousands of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots were displaced.

 “I wanted an observer that lives longer than human beings,” Shafak told NPR’s Steve Innskeep. “Trees …. were here before us, and they will most probably be here long after we humans have disappeared—but also [I wanted] to think more closely about issues like, what does it mean to be rooted, uprooted and rerooted?”

That summer of the war was also one of unusually high temperatures, which caused many bats to drop dead. The fig tree recalls:

“We fig trees hold bats in high regard. We know how essential they are for the entire ecosystem, and we appreciate them, with their large eyes the colour of burnt cinnamon. They help us pollinate, faithfully carrying our seeds far and wide. I consider them my friends. It broke me seeing them dropping to their deaths like fallen leaves.”

How might the world around us look  and even communicate to us differently if we imagined it expressing itself in relation to all the other beings that it interacts with? How does the squirrel regard the woodland it scampers through? What is springtime pond water to a frog? How do all those saguaro in the desert open their quirky branches to birds and insects? And how, when you come to it, would squirrel and frog, pond and cactus, regard us humans?