"Smart" is a... Bad category. It's just a big breeding ground for reification. We do have a term for animals that do manipulate the environment: ecosystem engi

"Smart" is a... Bad category. It's just a big breeding ground for reification. We do have a term for animals that do manipulate the environment: ecosystem engineering. Which includes a variety of species, including trees. Which to that extent, it's our scale of engineering that pales in comparison. I mean, cyanobacteria is implicated in an extinction event, and the initiation of the great oxygenation event, and the rise of complicated metabolic systems using oxygen as the terminal electron acceptor. Very cleverly (intelligently, smartly?) they evolved [by chance,] a metabolic niche that was totally vacant which coincidentally could also positively amplify for some extraordinarily long period.