We went on our first little trip to Maine this week. What a delight! I enjoyed some great hiking, but I do want to warn all of you to prepare for tick exposure. It’s apparently a banner year in North America for these critters, and I suggest that you take serious precautions.
On our way home we stopped off to see friends at their farm, and there we were treated to a really cool experience. They have loaned one of their fields to a group of scientists who are working to develop a blight-resistant version of the American chestnut. As many as four billion of these magnificent trees have been wiped out by fungal disease over the past century, and the goal is to bring the species back. Along with forestry colleagues from SUNY ESF, Professor Tom Klak of the University of New England has inserted a single wheat gene responsible for fungal resistance into the pollen of surviving wild chestnuts. He and his team are now planting out an array of chestnut seedlings representing regional varieties, including some that have taken up the potentially protective gene. If the scientists receive the regulatory go-ahead, they will introduce the harmful fungus to their test plot, and see how the various trees fare.
I shared with Professor Klak that I would be writing about Suzanne Simard’s new book this week, and he responded, “She’s a real heroine of mine. Her work has caused a dramatic shift in the way we think about forests.” It was inspiring to see his orderly test plot looking so much like the ones I had just read about in Finding the Mother Tree—although this plot lies in rural New England rather than in the vast arboreal wilderness of British Columbia. Let’s get to the woods.
Review
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Suzanne Simard
Knopf, 2021
348 pages
$28.95
Take what you need, give what you don’t. The Little Free Libraries that have lately sprouted up in my neck of the woods represent a twenty-first century expression of this ancient practice. One of them has been placed in our park downtown. I drive by another one several times a week on a country lane nearby. In a little over a decade, more than 100,000 of these wee book transit depots have been built and registered with the Wisconsin non-profit that started the movement. No one is keeping track of the books, or of just who takes them. It’s not charity. It’s mutual aid.
In vulnerable communities, mutual aid has been a way of life for centuries. During the pandemic, the diversity and power of the mutual aid movement in the U.S. has been staggering. Buy nothing groups. Cash bail funds. GoFundMe. Creative Commons. Overtipping. Community fridges. The 304 Army in Detroit provides grief support groups and holds bikini car wash fundraisers. In response to decades of chronic precarity and the acute trauma of the pandemic, we are witnessing an epic flowering of generosity. To cite one more example, diabetics are using social media to band together, seek donations, trade insulin and supplies, and promote each other’s survival.
I couldn’t help thinking about mutual aid this week as I read Suzanne Simard’s new memoir Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Simard is a Canadian forest ecologist and a professor at the University of British Columbia. Her decades of research into the way trees communicate and cooperate via underground fungal networks has profoundly altered our fundamental understandings of how forests work. In 1997, her breakthrough paper on the topic was published in the journal Nature, setting forth a paradigm that garnered the nickname “the wood-wide web.” This name has stuck and rightly so, for decades of subsequent studies have elaborated on the workings of these fascinating systems of connection and exchange. Simard’s work has inspired many artists, and she became the basis for a major character in Richard Powers’ The Overstory.
Suzanne Simard is descended from white settlers, who made their living logging the forests of Canada with teams of horses. She was raised in the Kootenay inland rainforest of British Columbia, and she loved those woods with her whole heart. The early part of the book is filled with family lore and includes fascinating vintage photos.
. . . I learned the secrets of my ancestors, fathers and sons who spent their lives felling timbers, a history knitted into our bones . . . What mattered was that loggers once stopped and carefully gauged and evaluated the character of individual trees to be cut.
Simard describes how she channeled her childhood wonder and personal griefs into her pioneering work as a female scientist in the male-dominated Canadian Forest Service.
Working at the crossroads of the timber industry, forest ecology, and public policy has never been an easy task—especially for women—and Simard is at her best in elucidating these difficult dynamics. She describes just how her key research questions first came to her, and explains how she designed her experiments and analyzed her results. I am certain that many young scientists will read this book for guidance about their career paths and inspiration from Simard’s triumphs.
Dave and I both knew these results meant birch and fir had the potential to form a robust, complex, interlinking network. But more importantly as I suspected from analyzing the isotope data from my field experiment, we knew we were on the cusp of discovery [sic] whether the trees communicated through the network. Dave pulled a bottle of Scotch whisky from his desk and poured an ounce into each of two beakers. He loved seeing his students make their first eye-popping discovery. I imagined birch and fir weaving a network as brilliant as a Persian rug.
Simard’s research clearly demonstrated that the key policy governing logging and reforestation on Canadian public lands was misguided and damaging. This so-called “free to grow” policy framework sanctioned large-scale clearcuts, which were to be replanted with single-species plantations of the highest value conifers. Competing broadleaf species were to be “brushed,” the industry euphemism for killed with herbicidal spray. Her experiments proved that these practices denied to young seedlings the highly beneficial resource exchanges between conifer and broadleaf saplings, transfers that are facilitated by the intricate mycorrhizal networks in the soil.
A more recent phase of her work has established the value and generosity of older trees (whom she calls Mother Trees) to the younger trees around them, and their capacity to prioritize their nearby kin. The power of these elder trees (a forester I know of Indigenous descent calls them ‘nurse trees’) is another element in the case against clearcutting. Simard details the stubborn resistance to her conclusions, settles a few scores, and describes how her growing role as a public intellectual intertwined with her personal journey as a mother. Tragically, most of Simard’s key insights have yet to be implemented at scale by either Canadian or American industrial foresters. She has secured funding for The Mother Tree Project, which will investigate sustainable forestry over decades. This initiative could eventually catalyze the transformative practices that her research should long since have inspired.
At times, and given her stature, I found myself wishing that this book had laid out a broader vision of evolution and ecology. While Simard does make certain references to Indigenous ways of understanding forest ecology, she does not offer any extended consideration of just how her findings relate to those frameworks and practices. Simard also alludes to the place of her work in the broader debate about the relative roles of cooperation and competition in evolutionary biology, yet she does not go into detail. Additional context for her important body of work would have been most helpful. The book would have also benefitted from endnotes and a unified bibliography.
There is a long lineage of scientists and thinkers who have analyzed cooperation within and between species. William Morton Wheeler and E. O. Wilson detailed the extraordinary eusocial behaviors and communication techniques of ants and other insects. William Donald Hamilton established a genetic basis for altruism. Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiosis has also been crucial. None of these scientific forebears are discussed in Simard’s book—although in a recent interview with Emergence, she does credit Margulis, and also speaks to her engagement with Indigenous cultures. Perhaps we can hope for another book from Simard that works toward a higher-level synthesis.
The question of how to find the right balance of competition versus cooperation is an urgent one, both at the human level and also at planetary scale. During the pandemic, profit-driven competition did in fact spur the creation of things of value: from the frivolous (takeout margaritas), to the useful (Zoom) to the momentous (safe and effective vaccines). Despite inadequate policy support, free markets have fostered renewable energy platforms, new battery and fuel cell technologies, and numerous other advances that we will require in order to decarbonize. We will need all the lessons we can glean from more sophisticated understandings of non-human systems in order to reform our own.
There is a rich human history of engaging with other species and ecosystems for betterment. The term mutual aid was in fact popularized by the Russian naturalist and political thinker Peter Kropotkin, in his 1902 essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin spent five years in Siberia during the 1860s, as a provincial official and clandestine social reformer. There he closely observed the ways in which birds, fish, horses, and insects cooperated to meet the challenges of a harsh environment. Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid in English, in part to counter the highly competitive “gladiatorial” interpretations of natural selection made by Darwin’s protégé Thomas Huxley. Kropotkin’s conclusion: “In all the scenes of animal lives which passed before my eyes, I saw mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species and its further evolution.” Suzanne Simard’s book, and Kropotkin’s also, would be worthy additions to any library. Especially the little free ones.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Emily Carr (1871-1945) painted the British Columbian landscape over many decades. Early in her life she developed a respect and love for Indigenous art, and she painted extensively in a post-Impressionist style she developed after a visit to France. In her later years she became troubled by industrial logging practices, as depicted in this work, grimly titled “Odds and Ends” (1939).
There’s a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call “the screamers”. These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree’s heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and the dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with their saws and axes resting and watching. It’s a horrible sight to see a tree felled, even now, though the stumps are grey and rotting, As you pass among them you see their screamers sticking up out of their own tombstones, as it were. They are their own tombstones and their own mourners.
Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1966).
Poem of the Week
Marilyn Dumont is a Canadian poet of Cree and Metís ancestry. Here is her poem “Let The Ponies Out.”
For Your Reading Radar
I’m quite interested in Aminatta Forna’s new essay collection The Window Seat. These pieces range over the entire globe (Sierra Leone, Iran, Scotland), and also through Forna’s personal history. Orion recently published an essay from this book on the author’s roots in the Shetland Isles. Carolyn Kellogg, writing for the LA Times, calls her writing “intelligent, curious, and broad.”
For Your Calendar
🚨 IN PERSON EVENT KLAXON! 🚨
For the first time, I am going to share an actual event you can actually go to in your actual chariot—if you feel it is safe for you to do so.
For my Boston-area peeps, the annual Boston LitCrawl will take place in Central Square, Cambridge on the evening of June 10th, from 6 to 9 PM Eastern (Rain date: June 16th). Main stage events will be streamed and recorded, including your Bloomsday warm-up event, with the Here Comes Everybody Players. The inimitable host of Here and Now, WBUR’s Robin Young will emcee.
Bookstore of the Week
I have a minor obsession with otters, so it is a happy task to feature Otter Books in Nelson, British Columbia—the town in the Kootenay region where Suzanne Simard’s family has long resided.
Please also enjoy this video of sea otters off Vancouver Island.
Have a great week, and tuck your pants into your socks—to make sure those ticks stay in the woods where they belong. xoxo Nicie
Inspirational writing packed with many thought provoking concepts and scientific information. I am driven to learn more because of the threads of information which are like a bread trail. Thanks for fascinating information on a long weekend when there is time to go down the paths....