How Suzanne Simard changed our relationship to trees
In ‘Finding the Mother Tree,’ a maverick forest ecologist relates her scientific journey — one that follows in the footsteps of traditional Indigenous knowledge.
A healthy forest hums with aboveground stimuli: deer shuffling through dead leaves, breezes ruffling conifer needles, squirrels dropping seeds. The trees, while they appear to stand still, play an important role in this synergy, which can feel almost sentient. Below the surface, fungi connect with tree roots and with each other, facilitating a flow of communication and allowing the trees to share energy, nutrients and intelligence.
“We have always known that plants and animals have their own councils, and a common language,” Robin Wall Kimmerer, a renowned biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, wrote in her seminal text Braiding Sweetgrass, in 2013. “In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other.”
It took centuries, but Western science has finally begun to recognize this traditional knowledge, thanks in large part to the work of Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist and professor at the University of British Columbia. In her new memoir, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Simard details her quest to prove that trees share resources like carbon, nitrogen and water via underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi, a give-and-take that boosts the health of the whole forest. In emphasizing the importance of biodiversity and interdependence in forest ecosystems, Simard’s findings threatened common logging-industry techniques like aggressive brush removal and clear-cutting — what she and a colleague called the “fast-food approach to forestry.”
The idea that trees, instead of simply competing for light, might actually communicate and even cooperate was easy to dismiss as junk science, especially coming from a young female researcher. Other foresters tried to intimidate her and suppress her work. Simard’s candid and relatable account shows how difficult it is for an outsider to push the boundaries and retain credibility in an insular and unforgiving field. Her studies have attracted criticism, and her story, in more ways than one, suggests that science and industry have a long way to go when it comes to recognizing other forms of knowledge.
Read more: https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.6/ideas-books-how-suzanne-simard-changed-our-relationship-to-trees
