Category Archives: New Attitude to Nature

Heiltsuk people

Affinity, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Natural History, Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

 

There never was a forest that white people did not like to destroy.  Based on our history, this appears to be an obvious truth.  When European settlers arrived in North America, they went about destroying the astounding forests of North America with industrial panache. They were good at destruction.  That was their attitude to nature. Nature was something they had a moral and religious duty to destroy. They declared war on nature.

 

Many of the original inhabitants of North America had a very different attitude to nature. Most of them [though sadly not all of them] did not see nature as something that should be harvested. Primarily they saw nature as their nurturing mother—Mother Nature. And who would kill one’s own mother?

 

One interesting example of this, was the Heiltsuk people on the west coast of Canada. These people are sometimes referred to as Bella Bella, an indigenous nation of the Central coast of British Columbia centred on the island community of Bella Bella. They had thrived there for at least 8,000 years.

 

They built tidal traps along the coastline to harvest salmon passively. They kept careful track of the populations of the salmon and adjusted their harvests when necessary. They did not want to destroy the salmon population on which they depended. They kept the fish that were trapped at low tide, but released the biggest egg bearing female salmon to allow them to travel up the rivers to spawn. They smoked the salmon, or dried them or cooked them while burying the guts and left-overs in the forest floor. They returned the bones of the fish to nourish the forest ecosystem (as did the bears) This practice enhanced the salmon populations and the productivity of the forests, rivers, and estuaries. As Simard said, “The forests, rich with salmon, returned the favor by shading the rivers, shedding nutrients into the waters, and providing habitat for the bears, wolves, and eagles.” This was an example of the indigenous principle of reciprocity that was so important to them, as explained by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her wonderful book Braiding Sweetgrass. Sadly, the colonialists had a different attitude to nature. They did not worry as much about reciprocity. They were more interesting in taking.

 

When the colonialists assumed jurisdiction over these lands, including forests and waters, they were not as wise as the Indigenous people had been. The Indigenous prohibited the use of stone traps.  As a result, the inevitable happened. As Simard explained, “The salmon were overfished within the first two decades and have not yet had time to recover fully.”

 

Of course, in more recent times, thanks to the new white administration, things have got even worse. Climate change and a warming Pacific Ocean, both caused by modern industrial systems have intensified the problems. The number of fish have been reduced to the point of near exhaustion. Fewer and fewer reach the spawning grounds. As Simard, “It’s part of a general pattern of destroying interconnecting habitats.”

 

The same is happening just to the north of the Heiltsuk community. As Simard said, “to the north on Haida Gwaii, the last of the cedars, some more than a thousand years old, are being clear-cut on Graham Island, leaving the forest along the spawning rivers degraded and the Haida wondering what will happen to their way of life.” This led to Simard asking the Big Question: “When will this stop, this unravelling?”

 

Simard’s research also shows the harmful effects of clear-cutting. I have talked to a business man involved in the manufacturing of products made of wood, and he explained to me that it was important for us to remember that forests are a what he called a perpetual resource.  That assumes though that the best forestry practices are followed and clear cutting is not one of those. As Simard has shown, trees like communities and benefit greatly in many ways from the old Mother Trees that ground them.

 

A Nurturing Forest

Affinity, Books, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

 

Suzanne Simard’s scientific research shows that the traditional view of humans and plants, which assumes there is a vast chasm between them, is a gross oversimplification. They are more alike than we ever realized before. Simard explained it this way in her book Finding the Mother Tree:

 

“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 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. The yews too were in this web, in relationship with their lifelong companion, and with people like me recovering from illness or just walking through their groves.”

 

This is certainly a radically new attitude to nature. The more we learn about the world the more amazed at it we are. And the more we realize how nature is like us. We are all kin. We are all one.  Really, this all follows from the ideas of Charles Darwin, one of the greatest scientists of all time.

 

Isolation Bad; Connection Good

Affinity, Books, Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

 

Suzanne Simard’s research proved that contrary to conventional forestry protocols, Douglas fir seedlings tended to perform better if they were linked to a healthy unrelated Douglas-fir mother tree than if they were isolated. Forestry practice had assumed that surrounding trees should be removed as they would be competitors for the Douglas-fir. However, seedlings that were kin to the Douglas-fir Mother Tree did even better. This suggested strongly that Douglas-fir Mother Trees could recognize their own kin. As she said, “health depends on the ability to connect and communicate.” The worst thing that can be done for trees is to clear cut! Of course, humans are similar. Humans flourish when they are connected to others.

 

When Simard was a rookie forester, she had been mocked for resisting clear cutting, but later her research proved that clear cutting was the worst thing they could do. Trees thrived in a forest community. Again, like people, trees thrive in a community. “The forest is an integrated whole,” she said. Once more, just like people who are part of the world around them, so it was with trees.

 

Simard in fact paid particular attention to the community under the ground where there was a multitude of silky fungal threads that fanned through the soil delivering moisture, or nutrients, or even messages from older big trees to younger ones that needed help. It sounds incredible, but her science proves it. She started off with questions and ended up with answers:

 

“Were those threads, which looked like an underground spider’s web, joining trees and plants together to capture much needed moisture for the whole community? …Maybe they had nothing to do with it, since the prevailing wisdom was that trees only compete with one another to survive. That’s what forestry school had taught me, and it was why my logging company liked fast-growing trees spaced well apart in rows. But that didn’t make sense in this ecosystem where trees and plants seemed to need one another for survival. One extremely dry season, a profound dryness the trees were not adapted to cope with, and they could succumb to the blistering heat.”

 

Trees like people thrived in communities.

 

Traditional western science had always assumed that there was in huge chasm between the human world and the plant and animal worlds. Humans have intelligence, animals have instincts, and plants have neither.

Maybe plants and animals are much more alike than we thought.

More recent science, like that of Suzanne Simard is casting doubt on the traditional science and forestry. Nature is a lot different than we think. Maybe we got it all wrong. Maybe we need a new attitude to nature.

 

The Wisdom of the Forest

Affinity, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

 

At the centre of this forest ecosystem, Suzanne Simard found, mother trees. As she said,

 

“When the Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom  to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps  and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what parents do.”

 

 

Simard reached this conclusion from her scientific research:

 

After a lifetime as a forest detective, my perception of the woods has been turned upside down. With each new revelation, I am more deeply embedded in the forest. The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing. This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees can might save us.

 

Simard said she learned a lot about forestry from her grandfather. He

 

“reaped harvests while leaving the forest vibrant and regenerative, the mothers intact.  He was never wealthy, but he lived in rich peacefulness with the forest,[I love that expression], taking only what he needed, leaving gaps, so the trees could come back.  How to protect the forest while it provided us with wood to build our homes, fibers to make our paper, and medicines to cure our ailments. I wanted to be a new breed of silviculturist who honored this responsibility.”

 

This is all part of the wisdom of the forest. Not just intercommunication between trees, but intercommunication with people too. Mutualism is the wisdom of the forest. We learn to live together.  We people need the same thing—i.e. a good constitution so that even people who don’t like each other can live together in peace. Not perfect peace, but peace nonetheless.

 

The Mother Tree

Affinity, Books, Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

Suzanne Simard

Suzanne Simard came to realize that there was much more to a forest ecosystem than anyone had ever known. Or even considered. She learned this when she realized that trees were relaying messages back and forth to each other through “a cryptic underground fungal network.”

 

Through that underground fungal network there was “a clandestine path of conversations.” They conversed about dangers each tree had seen and how they might counter it. This sounds like science fiction, but it is science. She found the network was pervasive through the entire forest floor and connected all trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. She was able to discern,

 

“a crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings…that connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as lynchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes…the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of that pattern—that it has similarities with our own brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.

The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin.

The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the special nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.

The mother trees.”

 

This is a remarkable new way of looking at a forest.  And, of course, these insights are relevant to other systems as well. How much more can we learn about these other ecosystems? It is a remarkable way about thinking about the world. It ushers in an entirely new attitude to nature.

Intelligence of the Forest

Affinity, Books, Environment, Nature, New Attitude to Nature, World of ideas

Suzanne Simard  is a Canadian forestry scientist  who has become famous for her research on forest ecology which developed into work on plant communication and even intelligence. She is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of an astonishing book called Finding the Mother Tree.

 

Early on in her career as a forester, Suzanne Simard was struck by the fact that the land would mend itself when left to its own devices. She noted that her ancestors on the land in British Columbia “logged with a lighter touch.  Had they learned something modern foresters had forgotten? Did they have a better relationship to nature?

 

The key thing Simard realized in her work as a forester and later scientific studies was that trees were part of a forest system. They were part of an ecosystem. And the parts of that ecosystem were intricately interconnected. As she said, “I discovered that they are in “a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that cannot be denied.”

 

In the book she goes into fascinating detail about how she reached these startling conclusion on the basis of solid, though not uncontroversial, science. A foundational insight she gleaned from her studies was that “I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication of the relationships that create a forest society.” She admits that the science of this phenomenon was at first controversial, “but the science is now known to be rigorous, peer-reviewed, and widely published. It is no fairy tale, flight of fancy, no magical unicorn, and no fiction in a Hollywood movie.”

 

Her scientific research led her to entirely new way of looking at nature. As she said, “In this search for the truth, the trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections, and conversations. What started as a legacy, and then a place of childhood home, solace, and adventure in western Canada, has grown into a fuller understanding of the intelligence of the forest.”

 

We must declare Peace with the World

Affinity, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

 

The temperate Rainforest of British Columbia is a wonder. I had the pleasure of spending 2 months there last winter. It took me a long time to appreciate all that rain. Nearly a year in fact. My bad.

Rachel Carson was one of the finest nature writers, besides really inventing the environmental movement. In her magnificent book, Silent Spring, Carson talked about “a relentless war on life.” That’s what I would say capitalism is. It really seems anti-life.

Suzanne Simard wanted to learn how we had gone so wrong. In my view, we, as a species, started out on the wrong foot, when we took the position that we were not a part of nature. It is out there and we can do with it whatever we want. Heidegger adopted a phrase from Nietzsche to describe that: “the will to power.”

Carson then asked us to consider something very profound: “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”

Really Simard in a very different way deals with the same issues.

If we are part of nature, we will likely treat it more kindly. It’s time for a peace treaty. Not just in Iran. Everywhere. That would really be a new attitude to nature.

x

Finding the Mother Tree

Affinity, Books, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

 

 

 

 

A very radical Theory

A while ago now I read a book that I have wanted to blog about for some time. It is time for me to meander in that direction.

The book is called Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard. Simard has an amazing theory, which I think potentially has monumentally important consequences.  It really is a radical theory and it has been attracting both blame and praise. It might be the most important scientific theory since Charles Darwin. I recognize that this is an incredibly bold statement, particularly from someone who admittedly knows little about science and claims to like modesty.

Simard argues that trees show us that they live in a complex, interdependent circle of life in which forests are a system in which the organisms in it are connected to each other through underground networks. She claims that trees perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviours, recognize neighbours and kin, remember the past, and help each other out. Simard believes, based on her scientific work, that trees have agency about the future, elicit and give warnings to each other, mount defences against attackers, and both compete and cooperate with each other.

Much of what she says is relevant for other ecosystems too.

She bases her theory on work she has done in the rainforests of western North America, particularly Canada. She places importance on the fact that at the centre of these underground networks are often Mother Trees which connect and sustain those around them.

 

If you consider these theories seriously you cannot help but change your attitude to nature. These ideas will force us to change our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.

 

I believe that Simard’s theory, though hugely controversial, is as radical and important as that of Charles Darwin. In fact, I consider my immersion into this theory as part of another journey I am on, namely, my religious quest in the modern world. How can that be?  I will explain but it will take some meandering.

Simard starts her book by talking about her work as a young botanist in the forestry industry of British Columbia. She found a world that was very different than she thought it would be. As she said,

“I discovered vast landscapes cleared of trees, soils, stripped of nature’s complexity, a persistent harshness of elements, communities devoid of old trees, leaving the young one vulnerable, and an industrial order that felt hugely, terribly, misguided. The industry had declared war on those parts of the ecosystem—the leafy plants and broadleaf trees, the nibblers, and gleaners and infesters—that were seen as competitors and parasites on cash crops but that I was discovering were necessary for healing the earth. The whole forest—central to my being and sense of the universe—was suffering from disruption and because of that, all else suffered too.”

 

This theory might be the path to a new attitude to nature, something I firmly believe, is urgently needed. from my personal perspective that is the point of this book and Simard’s radical theory.

I will continue to meander through this book and the forest she talks about.