Finding the Mother Tree (2021)
Suzanne Simard (1960)
348 pages
The expression not being able to see the forest for the trees takes on a whole other level of meaning for readers of Suzanne Simard’s remarkable work Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest . A professor of Forest Ecology, Simard has spent the past several decades seeking to understand how forests function, and what she has learned has dramatically overturned long-standing, deeply held beliefs in the timber industry and among forest managers and scientists. Through extensive experimentation, she has discovered that while a forest may appear to be a collection of individual trees competing for precious resources, it is in reality a deeply interconnected community, in which trees share resources and communicate timely warnings to one another, even across species. In the wake of reading her book, a walk through the woods becomes a profoundly changed experience.
Over the decades that followed she doggedly pursed answers to that question. Her key, initial realization came from her examination of the root systems of trees and other plants. Noticing the prodigious variety of fungi attached to the roots, she began studying what was known about the role particular fungi play for different species of trees and plants.
Coming to understand how fungi allowed trees to access more resources, she eventually traced the fungi from the roots of individual trees and found them extending and connecting to the roots of nearby trees, apparently linking the trees together in a kind of network, one that crossed species. This observation led her to a groundbreaking insight that she would spend decades exploring, demonstrating, and expanding upon: forests are not filled with isolated trees competing with one another; instead, forests are a community of trees that sustain one another, even across species.
Her book is structured around the cycle of her subsequent discoveries. In each case, she first describes the origins of a critical insight she has while exploring the forests of British Columbia with the eyes of one deeply immersed in the natural world; next, she describes the complex experimental trials she sets up to evaluate her hypothesis; and, finally, we share with her the breathtaking moment when her research validates her idea. As she then carries that conclusion with her on subsequent outings into the forests, we follow her thinking as it leads her to yet another, further insight, starting the cycle anew.
Simard did this work for many years from her position within the British Columbia Ministry of Forests. However, despite her carefully designed and executed experimental trials demonstrating the validity of her hypotheses of how trees grow better as part of a varied community, Simard’s results represented such a significant departure from the forestry orthodoxy of the late 20th century – that trees compete with one another, and so to maximize growth of a particular species all other species in that location must be comprehensively eliminated – that she faced increasingly virulent push back from both those inside the forestry industry and those in academia supported by that industry. Eventually, continuing her work in her position in the government ministry became untenable, and so she left to take a position at the University of British Columbia, where she has been free to pursue her work with less restriction.
In must be noted that even for Simard, each new insight has represented such a radical departure from what she had learned in school that it is immediately followed by a kind of stunned wonder: “can it really be true?” This happened most strikingly as challenges in her personal life led her to seek refuge in yet another walk through a forest in British Columbia, during which she came to the concept of the presence in forests of the Mother Tree mentioned in the book’s title, ancient trees that serve as the hub of support for an entire grouping of trees in the forest. Validating the key roles played by such trees through subsequent experimentation, this discovery represents the culmination of her work so far: that an established tree will eventually become the center – the mother – of a vast network of surrounding trees; that while it helps sustain and nurture a variety of spices in it orbit, it clearly recognizes and gives preference to its own offspring, the seedlings of its own seeds; and that, at the end of its life, it unloads its remaining resources out into its network as it dies.
Though the existence of such mother trees represents the capstone of the work she describes in the book, she continues her research, and closes by hinting at the possibility that forests – through the complex networks of connections between trees and plants – exchange some level of awareness that could be considered thinking, if in a radically different way from human thought. Always careful not to get ahead of her data, she makes no concrete claims here, only raises the possibility. But her decades of surprising insights and carefully researched results – radically transforming our understanding of forest ecology and indicating more sustainable approaches for maintaining them – give her a solid ground on which to continue probing the boundaries of our current understanding.
Although the trees are the obvious stars of Simard’s book, it becomes clear that what makes the cooperation between the trees possible is the seemingly endless variety of fungi in the soil: “An intricately woven rug. … They unlocked essential nutrients. … [Through their] networks, all the plants in this forest belonged to one another.” (168-9) The central role fungi play led me to wonder if it’s not the fungi that are the masters here, effectively “farming” trees in order to access the resources they themselves need. Could it be that, through a long evolutionary process, fungi came to the beneficial solution of increasing their accessible resources by linking trees together into a cooperative community? Perhaps humans simply have a biased viewpoint – living aboveground with the trees – that leads us to see the fungi as supporting the trees and not vice versa. Of course, perhaps the deeper truth is that there are no masters, and it’s simply an integrated dance of life…
At one point in her text it almost seemed that Simard was considering such an orientation, but she doesn’t end up going there. Instead, she notes “similarities with our own human brains,” with “Mother trees [as] the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience.” The fungi in this view represent the links through which trees send “chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.” (5, italics in original)
Whether describing her view of how trees work together in a forest, or the long personal road that led to her remarkable discoveries, Simard wears her heart on her sleeve in what is effectively an autobiography of her work and life. The opposite of a staid, scientific telling, she manages to convey her shock of realization as each insight about what might be happening between the trees of the forest occurs to her, and the thrill of discovery as her carefully planned and executed experiments validate her hypotheses. As well, we experience the raw emotions of her personal challenges, including the aggressive pushback from powerful interests within the government and industry timber groups, especially as a woman in a male-dominated industry.
Interesting to note is that this pushback was not because she was trying to stop logging – she wasn’t, coming from generations of family invested in forestry. Her findings simply pointed to the need to shift to a more nuanced strategy than the clearcutting and monoculture replanting that long held sway. Her goal all along was to convince the timer industry that a more sustainable approach would not only be good for the forests, but also more profitable for the industry over the long run. But, as has seemingly forever been the case, people convinced of the righteousness of their point of view are seemingly willing to hold their ground, unwilling to consider what they feel they know with certainty. The physicist Carlo Rovelli expresses this myopia perfectly in his book on the quantum revolution in physics, Helgoland (my review linked to at right)
I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking – thinking born of curious, revolt, change. There is no cardinal or final fixed point, philosophical or methodological, with which to anchor the adventure of knowledge. (156, Helgoland)
So compelling, in fact, has been the story of Simard’s dramatic discoveries overturning decades of accepted – really, unquestioned – scientific certainty, and her gradual expulsion from the Canadian forestry service and then rebirth as a professor and researcher, that she became the basis for one of the main characters in Richard Powers’ gorgeous novel The Overstory (my review linked to at right). I had already read Powers’ novel a few months before discovering Simard’s book in a review in the New York Times Book Review, and without having heard about the link to Simard’s work; but it immediately became evident that even if there was not an explicit connection, it was at the very least a shocking coincidence.
In a sense, I must admit that having read Powers’ novel first, some of the surprise of discovery was taken away when then readying Simard’s work. Powers writes so compellingly of trees and the deeply interconnected nature of the forest and also its fundamental place in human life, and had so clearly done the research to undergird his novel, that by the time I came to Simard’s book I took the extent of the interconnections in forests for granted as true – nonsensical, in fact, to imagine otherwise.
This is not to say that Simard’s book is not worth the read in the wake of Powers’. Simard’s description of the path of her discoveries – beyond also providing insight into the physical reality that makes it possible – is a joy to read, particularly as her editors did not quash her enthusiasm, and the rawness of her telling. We discover the passion that led her to postulate and then demonstrate experimentally an ever more startling string of discoveries, knowledge that has completely altered human understanding of forests, and shown how they can be managed in a sustainable manner, one not only less damaging and destructive to the forest, but also to humankind.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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