Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 502

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," by Suzanne Simard.

Again and again I checked the numbers, just to make sure. I sat in disbelief. Paper birch and Douglas fir were trading photosynthetic carbon back and forth through the network. Even more stunning, Douglas fir received far more carbon from paper birch than it donated in return. 

Far from birch being the “demon weed,” it was generously giving fir resources. 

The amount was staggering—it was large enough for fir to make seeds and reproduce. But what really floored me was the shading effect: the more shade that birch cast, the more carbon it donated to fir. Birch was cooperating in lockstep with fir. 

I re-analyzed the data over and over to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake. 

But there it was, telling me the same thing, no matter how I looked at it. Birch and fir were trading carbon. They were communicating. Birch was detecting and staying attuned to the needs of fir. Not only that, I’d discovered that fir gave some carbon back to birch too. As though reciprocity was part of their everyday relationship. 

The trees were connected, cooperating. 

I was so shaken I leaned against the tile walls of my office to absorb what was unfolding, because the earth seemed to be rumbling. The sharing of energy and resources meant they were working together like a system. An intelligent system, perceptive and responsive.

We can think of an ecosystem of wolves, caribou, trees, and fungi creating biodiversity just as an orchestra of woodwind, brass, percussion, and string musicians assemble into a symphony. Or our brains, composed of neurons, axons, and neurotransmitters, produce thought and compassion. Or the way brothers and sisters join to overcome a trauma like illness or death, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The cohesion of biodiversity in a forest, the musicians in an orchestra, the members of a family growing through conversation and feedback, through memories and learning from the past, even if chaotic and unpredictable, leveraging scarce resources to thrive. Through this cohesion, our systems develop into something whole and resilient. They are complex. Self-organizing. They have the hallmarks of intelligence. Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have these elements of intelligence helps us leave behind old notions that they are inert, simple, linear, and predictable. Notions that have helped fuel the justification for rapid exploitation that has risked the future existence of creatures in the forest systems.

“Well, Miss Birch,” he said, “you think you’re an expert?” 

I’d heard this name whispered behind my back. Birch was the clever substitute in public for what some of them called me in private. 

Then he became furious. “You have no idea how these forests work!”

Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans. They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care. But now we know Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring. Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhizas of their kin but to other members of the community. To help keep it whole. They appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters. Conveying their life energy, their wisdom, to carry life forward.