Can a tree feel cheated?

I'm currently writing a contemporary fantasy where dryads (mythical tree spirits) manage Yellowstone National Park and are deeply committed to wildlife conservation. Like any good writer, I want to ground my characters in realism. So I'm also reading books on forestry and wildlife conservation. Right now, I'm reading Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold was a naturalist who studied ecology, forestry, and wildlife management in the first half of the 20th Century. Wikipedia credits him as the founder of wildlife management science. And A Sand County Almanac is a collection of short essays about Leopold's personal relationships with the wildlife on his Wisconsin farm. So it seems like a fitting source of material for my dryad characters' attitudes.

The last collection of essays I read was Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat, which was so vitriolic that reading it felt like absorbing poison through my eyes. Leopold's essays, however, were both beautifully written and surprisingly inspiring.

In the second essay, "Good Oak," Leopold describes the sad duty of taking down an 80-year-old oak tree that had been struck by lightning. Leopold described putting the saw to the tree and pulling it through each of the tree's rings as if he were cutting through historical records. The first few rings were records of his family's life on the property. The next few rings recorded the previous landowner's abuse of the land, a bootlegger who'd burned the farmhouse and later abandoned the land during the Great Depression.

Over the next eight pages, Leopold describes the history he understood to be recorded in those rings in surprising detail. This was more than a recitation of dates and events. Leopold described how events throughout the region intertwined and affected the ecology of the area. How the oak stood indifferent to the stock market crash of 1929 and the abolition of the Wisconsin state forests in 1915. How it weathered and grew through floods, droughts, epidemics, and all the other things that affect men and trees alike.

I doubt anyone living in 1948 knew how much climate data each tree's ring recorded. Yet Leopold imagined it, and his imagination connected him through the tree to all of the land's history.

I cannot imagine imbuing the trees near my home with anywhere near the meaning that Leopold gave to his dying oak. When the developers built our subdivision, they razed the forest, killing all the plants and displacing the animals that lived here. The developers never gave a single thought to the forest community they destroyed or the history they erased. They quickly and cheaply produced rows of near-identical houses and decorated each yard with a single tree. And that's all the trees were to them, dressing to help sell the property. They never even considered the possibility that anyone would want to connect to the land the way that Leopold did.

A forest is defined as a community of plants and animals living interconnected lives. Trees depend on birds and insects to spread their seeds and pollen. This means all the lives (the birds, animals, and insects) that depend on trees are part of the trees' lives. I made this feeling of interconnectedness important to my dryad. When my werewolf character apologized to the dryad for marking her tree (as all wolves mark their territories), the dryad responded, "No apology is necessary. A wolf's markings are as welcome as the singing birds, the butterfly's cocoon, and the climbing teenager. They're all natural parts of a tree's life."

The lone tree standing in our front yard is now 35 years old, yet it is still too sparse to shelter a bird's nest from the rain and much too weak for a teenager to climb. I've walked, bicycled, or driven past that tree hundreds of times and rarely given it more than a passing thought. I gave my fictional characters more consideration, imbuing my dryads - and by extension, the trees -  with spirit, intelligence, and compassion. But now it's a symbol of all the aspects of life that are denied us living in sterile suburban neighborhoods.

No wolf has ever marked this tree. No bird or squirrel has ever nested in its branches. And I wonder: Can this tree miss the presence of all the birds and animals that enriched its predecessors' lives? Can the absence of these things cause a real tree as much pain as it would cause my fictional ones?

Can the tree feel cheated?