Image: Sunphol Sorakul / Getty Images This story was originally published by  Grist . Sign up for Grist’s  weekly newsletter here . Picture yourself in a wind-swept forest. Leaves are rustling and trunks are creaking as trees sway to and fro. This oscillation might seem precarious, but it’s actually an ancient adaptation: If pines and firs and all the others were perfectly stiff, a gust would snap them. So instead, they flex.  Now teleport yourself to the top floor of a skyscraper during the same windstorm, ever so slightly bending in the same way. A tree’s clever evolutionary trick, you see, has made the modern metropolis possible: As towers reached higher and higher in the early 20th century, architects used not wood but steel to create giants that would similarly flex in hurricane-force winds and as earthquakes rattled their foundations. But as the world gets hotter and wildfires more intense, architects are turning back to trees for more than inspiration.…