In Finding the Mother Tree, ecologist Suzanne Simard explains her decades-long research on the relationships among trees in the forests of British Columbia. Simard shows that the long-held “competition” model of forest ecology is inaccurate, and that instead the major dynamic among plant life in forests is cooperation and interdependence. She has discovered that trees in a forest are interconnected—they communicate and share resources through a complex underground network of fungi.
Simard, who grew up in a logging family in British Columbia and earned a Ph.D. in forest sciences in 1997, is a pioneer in the research of the cooperative relationships among plant life. A professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, she has published over 200 scholarly articles. Finding the Mother Tree, published in 2021, is Simard’s memoir intertwined with her life’s work in the forests. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Time magazine named it among the best books of the year, and there are plans to produce a feature film based on the book.
In this guide, we’ll focus on Simard’s research, describing some of her experiments and how they’ve led to a shift in thinking about ecological relationships. We’ll explain how fungi work to connect the plant life in the forests, how “Mother Trees” take care of their communities and their offspring, and why the prevailing competition paradigm is shortsighted. Throughout, we’ll look at other research that supports or challenges Simard’s findings and discuss how this “new” paradigm of cooperation is not new at all—it’s been the prevailing model for understanding nature among indigenous peoples throughout history.
Simard started out working for the private logging industry, like her parents and grandparents before her, then later went to work for the Forest Service of British Columbia. The Forest Service has two goals: protecting and maintaining the health of the province’s forests, and producing timber for sale as an economic resource. At times, these goals can conflict.
The Forest Service prioritizes certain species of trees over others due to greater market demand for the wood. So they clear-cut large areas of the forest, then replant with a single, marketable species. While replanting maintains timber production, the way this is done can be unhealthy for the forests, as Simard’s research will show.
She explains that the main approach to "sustainable" forestry in recent history has been based on the notion of species competition—and eliminating that competition in order to get the best, sustained economic value.
Simard's research, however, shows that relationships between trees involve more cooperation than competition, which challenges the dominant paradigm and has major implications for future forest management. She argues that instead of ensuring the health and continuity of the forests, some current forestry practices are impeding it and must be changed.
Her key findings over decades of research include:
We’ll look at how Simard’s work has been received by the forestry and academic communities, and then we’ll turn to a discussion of the specific experiments she conducted that led her to these conclusions.
What Is Sustainable Forestry?
Although the government of British Columbia claims to be a “world leader in sustainable forestry,” many citizens of the province have challenged that claim and organized protests against the logging practices there. The conflict may be a result of differing uses of the word “sustainable.”
Devon Page, a leader in Canadian environmental law, argues that the word is being used in an attempt to “greenwash” the destructive logging practices. “Sustainable forestry” can refer simply to practices that are able to produce a consistent yield over a long period of time. So, in this way, clear-cutting large swaths of old-growth forests and then re-planting those areas with new trees can technically be called a “sustainable” practice. But Page argues that a modern definition of sustainable forestry must include much more than that. Beyond how many trees are produced, practices must consider such factors as how forests provide clean air and water, habitat for diverse animal species, and nutritional and medicinal plants.
Page argues that the government of British Columbia, by using the word “sustainable” in the former way, is able to make their practices sound more environmentally conscious than they are. He points out that as of 2009, only 10% of old-growth forest remained in BC.
Although Simard is now considered a leading expert in forest ecology, and she has received widespread acclaim for her work, she fought a long battle to get there. Her earlier research wasn’t positively received and was often outright rejected. So how did she go from being maligned and rejected to a respected world expert?
She began her work as a 20-year-old working for a logging company in 1980. She was tasked with finding out why many of the seedling trees the company had planted were not thriving. The company followed the typical industry practice of clear-cutting large areas of the forest, removing all brush, and then planting seedling trees of a single variety in rows. The prevailing theory was that removing natural “competitors” would allow the cultivated trees to grow more successfully.
After comparing the withering tree plantations with the neighboring wild areas that were thriving, Simard had a hunch that the problem was that the seedlings were planted in ways they wouldn’t naturally grow—trees in a forest don’t grow in a monoculture (a single species growing alone). This prompted Simard’s initial thought that the forests might be more cooperative than competitive.
However, when she proposed these ideas to her coworkers and supervisors, she faced stiff resistance and opposition. She continued to pursue these questions after moving on to the Forest Service and later academia, but she was routinely ignored (or ridiculed and mocked) for her ideas. Her research articles were rejected by scientific journals, and attendees walked out on her conference presentations. As Simard explains, this reaction was undoubtedly heightened by the fact that she was a young woman working in a male-dominated field. She would have to fight to be heard throughout her career, but she persisted in the face of constant opposition.
Gender and Competition
Criticism of Simard’s work mirrors other examples of women being overlooked, rejected, and ridiculed in the sciences. In fact, this specifically happened to other female scientists who have proposed cooperative rather than competitive models of biological processes—such as the biologist Lynn Margulis, who proposed that microbes form symbiotic relationships with their hosts.
This might be due to the way men and women are oriented differently to the concepts of competition and cooperation. Studies have shown that men tend to view competitiveness more favorably than women, and they are more eager to be involved in competition. It’s not clear whether this is a product of evolutionary psychology or of social conditioning, but it could contribute to why research in historically male-dominated fields tends to lean toward competitive explanations to explain dynamics in nature.
Over time, as Simard attained increasingly important research positions, and eventually a professorship at the University of British Columbia, her work became harder for the scientific community to ignore and refute. When she started training a generation of graduate students, and her continued experimentation produced consistent results, her work began receiving popular attention. Today, almost any internet search about forest ecology or trees will lead to Simard’s work.
In the following sections, we’ll describe some of the specific experiments Simard conducted in her roles in the Forest Service and in academia, and we’ll discuss the ways her results have challenged the status quo.
When Simard left the logging industry and took her first job with the Forest Service, her supervisor was supportive of her ideas and assigned her to conduct research on what was called the “free-to-grow” policy. This policy was based on the premise that clear-cutting tracts of forest was the best way to ensure that the growth of cultivated trees would be unimpeded by competitor species.
In experiments with different tree species, Simard killed “competitor” trees with glyphosate (aka Roundup), a chemical that can target some plants while leaving others unharmed. In all her experiments, she found that killing off the “competition” had no benefit for the “free-to-grow” species. And in most cases, it was detrimental. Her findings consistently suggested that tree species growing together aid one another.
In this section, we’ll briefly describe her experimental techniques and discuss the results that show cooperation among different species of trees, as well as between trees and fungi.
(Shortform note: A 2020 article indicates that glyphosate is still being used in forest management in British Columbia, and for the same reasons—to kill “competitor” plant and tree species. In addition to killing plants, glyphosate has been shown to have toxic effects on insects, earthworms, and amphibians, as well as being linked to cancer, infertility, and liver disease in humans. Since her years working with glyphosate, Simard was diagnosed with, and has recovered from, breast cancer.)
To examine the competition theory, Simard’s first experiment involved eliminating alder trees that were presumed to be in competition for water and nutrients with cultivated pine trees. Her job was to compare how pines grew in clear-cut plots versus in plots mixed with alder. While the pines in the clear-cut area did better initially, Simard found they didn't thrive alone long term, for three reasons:
Let’s look at how this cooperative dynamic works, by reviewing her experiment and results.
The Forest Service noted that in areas where alder were growing among their cultivated pine trees, they were outgrowing the young pines. Simard explains that it was assumed they were blocking the sunlight and diverting the nutrients from the pine seedlings. So, she set up controlled experiments, where different plots were treated differently, to test this competition theory.
In one plot, Simard poisoned and killed all the alder, leaving the pines 100% free to grow. In other plots she killed different percentages of alder, and in one plot she left all the alder to grow alongside the pines—the way it naturally occurred. Then, throughout the growing season, she tested how well the pines were thriving in the various plots, in terms of water, nutrients, and healthy growth.
Water: When Simard measured the water content in the alder and pine trees, initially the pines in the clear-cut plots were receiving significantly more water than those growing alongside the alder. She found this discouraging, as it appeared to support the competition theory.
However, later in the growing season, when she measured again, the pine seedlings growing with the alders had more water. Simard discovered this was due to hydraulic redistribution, a process whereby the deeper tap roots of the alder were bringing underground water up to the surface, where the shallower pine roots could access it. She realized then that this was a seasonal relationship that would have gone unrecognized had she not tested the water across the longer growing cycle.
(Shortform note: Beyond pine forests, hydraulic redistribution is a crucial process for the health of ecosystems, and it requires different species growing together. Plants with deeper roots bring water closer to the surface where shallow-rooted plants like grasses and seedlings can access it. The process helps both the shallow- and deep-rooted plants by ensuring more even water distribution and by facilitating the distribution of nutrients along with the water.)
Nutrients: In addition to water, Simard conducted analyses for nutrient content. Similar to the initial water results, her first tests indicated that the pines in the clear-cut plot were obtaining more nutrients and growing faster. This was because the cut alder had been left to decompose around the pines, and the decomposing matter provided the pines with nutrients.
However, once all that organic matter decomposed in the first year, she noted, those nutrients would be gone. So, after the first year, when the short-term nutrient supply was exhausted, the clear-cut plot lagged and the alder-companion plot started doing better. She observed that the living alder were providing a slower but steady source of nitrogen, so the soil was more nutritious in the area where alder were growing.
Alder Is an Ideal Companion
Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for trees, and alder is known to be one of only a few “nitrogen fixing” species of tree. This means it’s able to take nitrogen from the air and convert it into nitrates in the soil. It does this with help from a bacteria that grows on its roots, with which alder has a symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationship—similar to that between trees and fungi. The bacteria help convert nitrogen for the tree, and the tree provides sugar that nourishes the bacteria.
Because alder has this ability that most trees lack, it's an excellent companion since anything growing around it can benefit from the nitrogen-enriched soil. Alder has been used intentionally as a companion plant for centuries; there’s evidence that the ancient Inca used it for this purpose in their Andes mountain farmland.
Weather and pest damage: In addition to water and nutrient levels, Simard observed that in the clear-cut plot, rainwater was washing away the topsoil, because the thick root systems of the alder weren’t there to prevent it—so the pines in that plot were also slowly losing water and nutrients from the erosion.
She also found that without the protection of the leafy plants around them, the young pine trees in the cleared plot were more susceptible to sunburn, frost damage, and being eaten by foragers like voles and rabbits.
(Shortform note: Topsoil is an invaluable resource that can take much longer to regenerate than it takes to erode. Water and wind can both erode topsoil, which negatively affects the health of the plant life that depends on it. One of the best preventative measures against the erosion of topsoil is tree roots, which keep the soil in place and help regenerate it. Any clear-cut plot of land is in greater danger of topsoil erosion, which could cause the land to become barren over time.)
Many years later, upon returning to these sites, Simard observed that the cleared-plot pines had become susceptible to pine beetle infestation, and most of them were dead or dying. But she points out that it takes decades for the full results of this kind of experiment to show up. As a result, Simard concluded that the practices in place were based on assumptions made from short-term observations, because policymakers didn’t have the patience to wait for longer-term results.
The next experiment Simard conducted with the Forest Service involved a project to eliminate birch trees, which were perceived as competitors of the more valued Douglas fir trees. Again, Simard set out to show that there was likely some cooperation involved between the species. Her experiment results showed cooperation in two forms:
Let’s look at the experiment to see how Simard reached these conclusions and how exactly that dynamic works between these two tree species.
In this experiment, Simard created companion plots and clear-cut plots, in the same way she had with the alder and pine. In one plot, the birch trees were completely removed, leaving the fir trees to grow in a monoculture; in another, the two were left to grow alongside one another, as they would naturally. Again, she found that killing the “competitor” birch didn’t improve the growth of the cultivated fir trees, and in some cases it caused more of them to die—in this case, the results were a result of carbon trading.
Carbon trading: Carbon is an essential element of tree life, as trees convert it to sugars they need for energy. So Simard wanted to see if trees also share carbon with one another. During this experiment she used chemistry techniques to measure relative amounts of carbon in the birch and fir trees across the growing season. She found that carbon was moving back and forth between the trees; the birch that were viewed as competitors of the fir were actually sharing carbon with them. And in fact, her measurements showed that the birch were giving more than the fir were giving back.
Simard expected to find this carbon sharing, but an unexpected finding was that the more shade the birch trees cast on the firs, the more carbon the birch donated. So, Simard says, the birch trees actually compensate the firs for the light they’re depriving them of.
Later tests showed the fir giving more carbon to the birch during spring and fall, while the birch gave more to the fir in summer, so she says this shows the two species have a long-term, seasonal relationship, an observation that again would have been missed with a short-term experimental design.
Climate Change Affects Seasonal Cycles
Forest ecologists have noted recently that climate change is affecting cyclical seasonal patterns that are critical to plant life. Environmental conditions like light, temperature, and precipitation act as a “clock” that lets plants know when to do things like sprout new growth or drop seeds. These may also coincide with seasonal activities of pollinators and foragers. When this clock gets disrupted, it can negatively affect the symbiotic relationships between plants, animals, and insects.
As Simard noticed that birch and fir share carbon, and alder and pine share water, in seasonal cyclical patterns, these climatic shifts could affect that cycle and have a devastating effect on the forests. This is an important reason to recognize these complex interdependencies.
Fungal bacteria: Additionally, during the course of this experiment, Simard observed that when birch trees were cut down to increase the growth of fir, the fir were more likely to get fungal disease and die. She found that birch facilitate the growth of helpful bacteria that kill fungal disease, so therefore birch trees were actually producing the remedy the firs needed for their root disease.
Two decades later, Simard returned to some of these experiment sites and found that in the longer term, firs that were planted together with birch were substantially healthier, with higher levels of nutrition and less disease. And the birch that had provided nutrients to the young firs were now being helped in return by the mature firs who had outgrown them.
(Shortform note: In his 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben draws on Simard’s work to describe the complex relationships among trees in a forest, arguing that they should be viewed as a supportive community rather than as individuals. He describes how some trees can warn one another of pests, allowing the forewarned trees time to generate chemicals in their leaves that ward off the pests.)
Simard’s experiment results up to this point had made it clear that trees were sharing resources with one another, but she was left wondering exactly how it happens. Her next task was to investigate the mechanism used to move nutrients between trees, and she suspected it had something to do with the fungus that she had observed on the trees’ roots. This question would lead Simard on a decades-long quest to understand the underground fungal/root networks in forests.
This section discusses those networks' two functions, nutrient sharing and information sharing, and how Simard discovered that they work. Her key findings discussed here include:
(Shortform note: In addition to the transfer of nutrients between trees, scientists say fungi are crucial in the fight against climate change, because they absorb carbon from the trees and transfer it to the soil. This reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, decreasing the greenhouse gas effect. It’s estimated that around 5 billion tons of carbon flow through mycorrhizal fungi every year.)
Through the process of photosynthesis, trees use the energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide from the air, along with minerals and water they absorb, to create carbon and sugars they need to sustain their life. As part of this process, those sugars circulate between the tree’s foliage and its roots, similar to how our own circulatory system works.
A type of fungus called mycorrhizal fungi lives underground, so it doesn’t get sun and therefore doesn’t produce its own sugars, although it needs sugars to live. So, Simard explains that mycorrhizal fungi living in the soil in forests colonize the roots of trees (meaning they grow on and around the roots), in order to absorb sugars from them. Then, she says, the fungi send out their mycelium (“fungal threads” that are like the root structures of the fungus) through the ground, which then attach to another tree’s roots. Simard discovered that it’s through this process that trees also share nutrients with each other.
She found that in addition to absorbing some of the nutrients from the tree roots, the fungi pass them from one tree to another. So, the trees weren’t absorbing nitrogen and other minerals directly from the soil as might be expected. Instead, the fungi were collecting it from the soil and providing it to the trees through their roots, in exchange for the sugars the trees produce.
Simard found over 100 species of fungi in the forests she studied, and she explains that each has different specialized functions. Some transfer water, while some transfer phosphorus or nitrogen. Some grow deeper, while others are shallow. Some are active in spring, others in fall. Through examining these underground networks, Simard found that fungi essentially connect all the trees in the forest.
Are Fungi Intelligent?
Simard’s research focuses more on the role of the trees in this system of symbiosis, but other recent scientific research has shown that fungi exhibit signs of intelligence, and even consciousness, as well. Like trees, fungi can learn, remember, and make decisions. Scientists who have studied them say that the behavior of fungi becomes even more complex when they interact with living trees.
The symbiosis between mycorrhizal fungi and the trees they colonize requires continuous sophisticated two-way communication via chemical signals, which researchers say is akin to language. The patterns of chemical activity generated by the fungi can be understood as unique words, and some fungi have been found to have a vocabulary of about 50 “words.”
In addition to sharing nutrients through these fungal networks, trees also share information with one another. Simard discovered that trees send “warning signals” to one another in the presence of danger. In one area she studied, Douglas firs were dying from beetle infestation, but the ponderosa pines living among them survived. So, in an experiment, Simard and her colleagues planted pine and fir seedlings together, to see what dynamic might be at work. She says that when researchers “stressed” the firs by defoliating them or introducing beetles to them, the firs naturally began producing defense enzymes. And then within 24 hours, so did the pines planted near them. This only happened, she says, when the two were linked with mycorrhizal fungi on their roots. So, Simard concludes that the firs were “warning” the pines of danger.
How do Plants Speak to One Another?
This National Geographic video illustrates the way trees communicate via the fungal networks. Those networks have been mapped by Simard and her colleagues, demonstrating the high degree of interconnectedness among forest trees, as well as the importance of the old-growth trees that are more highly interconnected with all the others around them.
Ecologist Monica Gagliano’s 2018 book Thus Spoke the Plant describes her research on the way plants “talk” to one another. She has pioneered the field of plant bioacoustics, which studies the unique “voices” plants use to communicate, as well as how they interpret and respond to sounds in their environment. It’s worth noting that Gagliano has received substantial criticism for her work, similar to the early reaction to Simard’s work. One particularly harsh reviewer of her book calls her work “nonsense,” and accuses her of “suffering from drug-induced psychosis” and “going off the deep end.”
Simard’s research throughout the 1990s on these cooperative relationships in forests would ultimately take her from the Forest Service to academia, where she became a researcher and professor at the University of British Columbia in 2002. Along with her graduate students, she began a systematic study of the complex underground fungal networks to understand the dynamic at work and how much of the resource sharing might be intentional.
In this section, we’ll discuss Simard’s findings about Mother Trees, how this concept works to explain the relationships between trees, and the crucial importance of old-growth trees. Some of her key findings in this area are:
Simard came to discover that trees are intertwined via fungus in a complex resource-sharing network, with the older ones being “hubs” and the smaller ones “nodes.” She compares this to an internet satellite system, which she refers to as the “wood-wide web,” with the hub trees dubbed “Mother Trees.” Mother Trees are the oldest and largest trees in the forest and are linked to the greatest number of other trees.
Simard found that although Mother Trees send nutrients to their whole interconnected community, they recognize and favor their own offspring. In experiments where older trees were planted with seedlings that were their own offspring and others that were unrelated, she determined that the Mother Trees transferred more nutrients to their offspring. It was this realization that the trees were taking care of their “children” that inspired Simard’s coining of the phrase “Mother Trees.”
Another notable discovery Simard made is that when a Mother Tree is stressed and facing uncertainty (from disease, dehydration, or lack of nutrients) it will increase the amount of nutrients it transfers to its kin. She says that when one of these old trees is dying, it will release all of its nutrients and energy at the end of its life to the next generation, just as humans pass on their resources to their children.
All of these findings, according to Simard, provide evidence that the transfer of nutrients isn't simply a byproduct of the fungi attaching to multiple trees. The trees transfer nutrients selectively in different amounts, at different rates and different times, with more going to their kin than to strangers. So, Mother Trees favor their offspring and kin, she says, but they also take care of the whole community, because they “know” that it’s also essential to their offspring's health. A healthy community and ecosystem is the best place to ensure one’s offspring will grow up healthy.
Public Response to the Mother Tree Concept
The concept of the Mother Tree has captured mainstream media attention and the public imagination. In response to this attention, in 2015 Simard created the website The Mother Tree Project, an online hub for research, news, and media coverage on the topic, including a periodic newsletter, and links to related resources.
The concept of Mother Trees has influenced popular culture as well. In his 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory, Richard Powers used Simard’s life and her findings about Mother Trees as the basis for a plotline. Even more well-known is James Cameron’s movie Avatar, which used the Mother Tree concept as the basis for the “Hometree,” an ancient and enormous tree that sustained the life and connected the souls of the entire alien Na’vi tribe.
While Simard's ideas have caught the public imagination, they’ve been resisted by the forestry establishment, as they challenge the long-held dominant paradigm of forests as spaces of competition. Simard argues that this paradigm must change if we are to have healthy forests and sustainable practices. She says it’s crucial to recognize the cooperation and interdependence that happens in forests because the long-term health of those forests depends on those relationships.
The theory that clear-cutting destroys the natural relationships between trees has been a sticking point with people who believe the idea of trees having relationships is an idealistic “hippie” notion, as Simard says her perspective has often been characterized.
In this section, we’ll discuss some of the reasons Simard’s research might be difficult for some to accept, and her overall conclusions about the implications her research has for the future of forest management.
Materialism vs. Animism
Much of the resistance to re-thinking relationships among trees is likely due to the “materialist” worldview that characterizes the Western scientific perspective. A materialist approach sees the natural world as mechanistic and unconscious, and this is how we’ve been socialized to understand the natural world. In contrast, the “animist” perspective that tends to underlie indigenous cultural worldviews sees everything in nature as conscious and interrelated. Even though many human cultures have held animist beliefs throughout all of human history, the modern scientific establishment tends to outright reject it, often characterizing such beliefs as primitive and irrational.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, author of the best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass, and member of the Potawatomi Nation, describes an indigenous perspective on interacting with nature. She explains that the Potawatomi languages are based on a “grammar of animacy.” This means that those languages categorize everything into living and nonliving, and use word forms to indicate that. For example, one cannot speak of anything alive as “it.” Instead everything in nature is addressed the same way your family is addressed. Because, she says, they are our family. Kimmerer herself consistently uses “she” when referring to trees or the sweetgrass. She says that this animacy is built into the entire language; you would also not use the same verb to describe an airplane flying that you’d use to describe a bird flying. One is living and one is nonliving, so those would be considered different actions.
Simard suggests that one of the reasons it’s been so difficult for people to accept her findings is that they appear inconsistent with previous observations. She says this is because those observations have often been short term, and forestry research requires a longer-term commitment.
Forest experimentation takes a very long time, Simard points out, because trees grow slowly, and they live far longer than researchers. The Forest Service and the logging industry are both invested in fast-growing trees so they can replenish clear-cuts as quickly as possible. But Simard says that the emphasis on “fast” has caused them to overlook important factors that occur over the longer timeline of forest growth.
As discussed above, some of Simard’s research shows that cultivated trees in clear-cut plots fared better in their earlier stages of life. But later they declined in health, while the trees planted with companions outpaced them. In the past, policies were put into place based on those earlier observations, without awareness of the shifts that can happen later in the trees’ life cycle.
Simard explains that because forest growth is a long and slow process, researchers can use statistical models to predict future outcomes based on current data, so she had models made based on her research results. Those models show that forest growth declines with each successive clear-cut and re-planting. So one policy change she advocates for is a move toward a longer-term model for research.
(Shortform note: Many researchers in the natural sciences and anthropology are now advocating for incorporating indigenous knowledge systems into forest management practices. Indigenous peoples of the Amazon region, for example, have a deep ecological knowledge gained over centuries. A Brazilian research team is suggesting that incorporating generational knowledge into local ecosystem management practices has the potential to improve the practices and contribute to regeneration of endangered ecosystems.)
Another reason Simard’s research has been so strongly resisted over time, she says, is simply the tenacity of the long-held competition model and the way it reflects the cultural perspective it grew out of. Competition for resources has been the prevailing paradigm for understanding nature throughout the history of modern Western science. In fact, it’s the predominant model for understanding all relationships, including those in human societies and economies.
Simard’s research suggests that competition is not the defining nature of the relationship between the trees and other plant life; the major dynamic is cooperation. Next, we’ll look at how this cooperation model reflects a different view of nature, one that’s more consistent with our understanding of how our own bodies work, as well as with how some non-Western traditional societies function.
Anthropomorphizing the Trees
Some ecologists still critique Simard’s conclusions and emphasize the importance of recognizing competition in ecosystems. This seems to be a major ongoing battle of perspectives.
Simard has been accused of “anthropomorphizing” the trees, while simultaneously overemphasizing their cooperative nature. However, seeing trees as inherently competitive is more modern-human-like. Perhaps the scientists who can’t imagine trees having a symbiotic cooperative nature are more guilty of anthropomorphizing them.
In an interview, Simard says, “Our culture is not merely one of competition for scarce resources and the profits inherent in that scarcity. It is competition for competition’s sake…we compete aggressively just to do that, not for any gain.”
In terms of how its components function interdependently, Simard concludes that a forest is essentially a single organism, like the human body. The mycorrhizal network between trees, she says, is similar to the neural networks in our brains, with the mycelium being the synapses along which nutrients, like neurotransmitters, travel. And like our brains, this is also a communication network that she says is “wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing.”
Of course there is some amount of competition and dysfunction in a forest ecosystem, Simard acknowledges, just like in our bodies. We get diseases, and if we’re nutrient deficient our various organs and cells may compete for those nutrients. But if the body is healthy, the major operational mode is cooperation between the parts. Simard says a forest operates the same way.
(Shortform note: Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, says that until recently, even mentioning the possibility that plants could have intelligence would get you labeled a “whacko.” However, he says that the latest research supports the idea. The relatively new field of plant neurobiology shows that plants process sensory data in much the same way humans do. While that processing doesn’t happen via a brain, plants have their own sensory systems, and Pollan says plants have all the same senses as humans. He concludes that intelligence is an inherent feature of life.)
Of course, there are more than just trees and fungi in a forest; a forest is a complex ecosystem of diverse flora and fauna. Simard says we can think of the larger forest ecosystems as similar to human societies. They’re complex, self-organizing, and adaptive. And, importantly, she says they are intelligent.
Because ecosystems operate similar to human societies, this could explain why we find a prevailing paradigm of competition in the modern scientific worldview, and a paradigm of cooperation in the traditional indigenous worldview. Each paradigm is modeled after the society within which it develops.
Simard points out that objectifying nature, thinking of humans as separate from it (and even above it) is a modern Western construct, and reflective of a colonialist mindset. First Nations tribes of the region had a symbiotic relationship with the land and existed entirely within these forest ecological communities, rather than viewing them from the outside. She ties all of this into the pressing issue of climate change.
Climate change, she argues, is occurring in large part because of human activities, and these activities are the product of a mindset that has moved away from viewing nature as living, sentient, and sacred, toward a mindset that can’t even imagine trees as sentient beings that have relationships. This, Simard argues, needs to change. Only when we recognize the forests as alive and intelligent will we have the wisdom to recognize that we must honor them, because our lives depend on it.
Should Trees Have Rights?
The idea that humans have an inherent right to dominate nature can be connected to the Christian notion of God giving humans “dominion” over the Earth. Alternatively, some Christians consider humans “stewards” of God’s creation, however this still sets humans apart from nature, and puts us at the top of a paternalistic kind of hierarchy. This perspective is being increasingly challenged by research like Simard’s as well as by environmental movements, like the “deep ecology” movement.
While the idea that trees have intelligence is still controversial in the scientific community, it’s by no means a new idea. In The Earth People Philosophy, Lakota elder Wallace Black Elk said in 1991 to anthropologist William S. Lyons: “The trees talk. They have a language of their own. So all this green that you see, they communicate…each one of the winged-people has a song….every creature has a song. Even that spider…he walks, he rolls, he flies, and he sings a song….so I want to tell you that you have a lot to learn.”
In a 1972 book Should Trees Have Standing? environmental scholar Christopher Stone proposed the idea that trees, oceans, rivers, and other nonhuman living beings in nature should have legal personhood and all the protections that entails. Considering what we now know about plant life, perhaps it’s time to revisit that question.
One of the major conclusions from research like Simard’s is that we need to shift the way we think about nature in order to address impending climate change. The deep ecology movement embraces changing our thought patterns in order to change our relationships with the natural world.
How does Simard’s research shift the way you think about trees, fungi, and nature in general?
If forests are alive with symbiotic relationships and communication between species, do you think you have the ability to communicate with these species as well? How might you deepen your relationship with nonhuman species in nature?