~a column by Colleen O’Brien
In 2015, Canadian scholar, naturalist, writer Suzanne Simard founded the Mother Tree Project to protect and retain the Mother Trees of nine forests across British Columbia.
A Mother Tree is what Simard calls the giant trees of the center of the forest. She has worked for the Canadian Forest Service, gone to college for more and more information and degrees, researched endlessly, written peer-reviewed papers circulated around the world, lectured, spoken in public . . . about how trees are like us; or perhaps more accurately, how we are like them, since they’ve been around for 370 million years; hominids – our ancestors – only about 20 million years; and humans, maybe 400,000 years.
Simard at first guessed at – after intense studying of the forest trees, replanting its seedlings in various soils and climates, digging into the roots to figure out their complicated and efficient transportation of water and food – and came to the conclusion that Mother Trees communicate with, protect and feed their offspring. She understands scientifically that trees, especially the oldest in the forests, have the properties of responsiveness to stimulus, so they can feel pain; they can pass on wisdom to their kin, generation after generation sharing knowledge of what helps and harms, who or what is friend or foe; and how, like us, they can adapt to an ever-changing world, helping both themselves and their neighbors of other species.
Not that we’re so great at helping other species, but we do have it in us to do so.
What makes this tree book so lovely, interesting and believable is that Simard – who as a kid perhaps received her intense curiosity about trees from eating dirt from the forest floor on a regular basis – compares us to trees. To the above list of trees’ business: “It’s what all parents do,” she says.
After what she calls “a lifetime as a forest detective, my perception of the woods” is that “the scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: The forest is wired for wisdom, sentience and healing.”
Throughout the book she talks about how trees’ “grace in complexity” is like humans’ protective attitude in our nourishing behavior to our children and how we interface and connect with others in our community in passing on knowledge [think recipes, home remedies, dangers, helpfulness]. She says that ecosystems are like “human societies – “built on relationships.” We can adapt, trees adapt; we learn from experience, so do they. She uses words like resilient, complex, self-organizing, cohesion to explain to and convince others, including the Forest Service, that Mother Trees and their progeny help us learn to leave behind “old notions that trees are inert, simple, linear, predictable” or in competition; which, according to her, they definitely are not. They have nervous systems similar to ours. And our neural network works just like theirs, their root-fungus connectors.
If only we had evolved within solid communal helpfulness rather than our eternal competition with one another and ourselves. Is there time to learn it?
As I read that the Amazon Forest, the lungs of the world, is collapsing and will die even before us, Simard conveys hope by convincingly demanding that that we can no longer risk the trees’ future . . . and ours. We can no longer exploit hundreds of varieties of trees around the world. She is not against cutting down trees but is insistent that we timber them wisely (no more clear cutting, which is genocide of a species [a word usually kept for humans but by definition includes “racial killing, the act of terminating a life,” which I believe Simard would agree with, although she also did not even use the word arboricide, which is “wanton destruction of trees [1853]”).
When she speaks of the trees’ patience with supplying energy, nitrogen and water to their young and how they have the self-knowing that they have plenty stored and will find it when needed through their vast systems of connectedness with each other of many species, Simard is comparing them with our inborn and continuous nourishing and teaching of our own young, even as she cries out to us – “Vive la forét!”
Her intimations that we as societies could work for one another and our trees is both inspiring and despairing. We can but we aren’t. She studied and taught herself, and she talked to aboriginal cultures and learned: the diversity of forests matters to their health, that “the universe is connected – between the forests and prairies, the land and water, the sky and soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all creatures.”
Western philosophy says we humans are superior over all things. We should never have believed that one.
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Book: Finding the Mother Tree, 2021
Documentary film: “Mother Trees Protect the Forest,” 2014
http://mothertreeproject.org
