Category Archives: New Attitude to Nature

Connecting Ocean to Continent

Books, Environment, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

 

The key to the scientific research of Suzanne Simard relates to mycorrhizal fungi which are are beneficial soil fungi that form a symbiotic relationship with over 90% of plant species. That means both get something from the other.  It is a beneficial relationship for both. The fungi ins the soil act as an extension of the root system to improve the forest plant’s nutrient and water uptake. These fungi, or mycorrhizae (“fungus-root”), create underground networks that supply plants with phosphorus and water, while receiving in return carbohydrates (sugars) in return that they are unable to create well. This network is her prime research subject.

 

 

Suzanne Simard’s research is far from over. She continues to try to figure out how forest communities operate. So far, her team’s research has shown that the mycorrhizal fungal communities which they detected underneath the ground in the temperate rainforests of British Columbia differ depending on the number of salmon that were returning to their natal streams. They still don’t know exactly how far into the forest those networks transport salmon that returned to those natal streams, but they do know those networks transport nitrogen from the carcasses of salmon that did return to their natal stream to the surrounding land around those streams.

 

As a result, the team searched for the bones of salmon that had been carried into the forest by bears, wolves, and eagles. The bones were all that were left of those carcasses once these creatures were finished dining on salmon. As Simard, said, in her book Fidning the Motehr Tree, “The bones were all that were left once the flesh was eaten and the residual tissue decayed, nutrients seeping into the forest floor.”

 

They are trying to determine how the restoration of stone traps which the indigenous people were forced to abandon by successive Canadian governments affects the transportation of nitrogen from the ocean to inland. For example they would like to know the extent to which the spawning salmon feed the cedars, birches, and spruces for thousands of miles inland along the shores of those rivers. As a result of research already completed, they know that “Salmon in this way [are] connecting the ocean with the continent

 

Simard acknowledges that indigenous people of the area, including the Secwepemc “knew how vital salmon was to the interior forests, and to their livelihoods and they’d cared for the populations according to far-reaching principles of interconnectedness.” In other words, the indigenous understood as the European colonialists did not, that interconnection was crucial to the health of everything that lived in those coastal temperate rainforests.

 

It was a pity that those colonial powers failed to appreciate that the indigenous people had learned a lot about the land they occupied during their thousands of years of occupation.  Had the colonial powers recognized that and not assumed that the Europeans had superior knowledge, those communities would not have been devastated as they were. This was just one more example of how presumed European superiority was a deadly unfortunate illness that affected everything in the forest. It could have been so much better.

 

This was a fundamental error that has been perpetuated ever since. Hopefully scientists like Suzanne Simard and her fellow researchers will be able to teach the current Canadian forestry authorities that the indigenous people know a thing or two about their forests and they would do well to listen to the wisdom of the people who live there and will not always assume that they know better. The Canadian authorities need a new attitude to nature and that attitude can be obtained from their indigenous partners in the temperate rainforest.

Forest Detectives

Affinity, Books, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

 

Suzanne Simard worked with students and a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Teresa “Sm’hayetsk” Ryan of the Tsimshian nation in the Bella Bella region of British Columbia. Teresa was both a traditional basket weaver and fisheries scientist. As an aboriginal person she was keenly interested in whether or not the restoration of fishing practices using stone traps that had been banned in the area by early colonial powers could reinvigorate the salmon fishery that had been devastated after colonial powers assumed jurisdiction over those fisheries more than a century ago. At the same time, she wanted to know if a return to traditional methods of fishing might also reinvigorate the cedars of the regions by augmenting their food supply with carcasses of salmon. This could be beneficial to the forests communities as well as the people that were also part of those communities.

 

In that same inlet scientists from the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University had discovered nitrogen rings of cedar and Sitka spruce  and in plants , insects, and soils. They had learned that the nitrogen came from the carcasses of salmon from the ocean carried by bears carried to the forest where they ate part of the salmon but not all. Salmon is an incredibly rich food source as bears, eagles, and humans had learned.

 

Each bear, they learned, preying on spawning salmon, transported on average 150 salmon per day into the forest! As a result, “the roots of the trees foraged for the decaying protein and nutrients, the salmon flesh providing more than three-quarters of the tree’s nitrogen needs.” The scientists could analyze the trees and determine from where their nitrogen came. That was one of the reasons Simard said she was a “forest detective.” Simard said, “Scientists could use the year-by-year variation in tree-ring nitrogen to find correlations between salmon populations, and changing climate, deforestation, and shifting fisheries practices. An old cedar tree could hold a thousand-year-record of salmon runs.”

 

In the process of doing this work much to her amazement, Suzanne Simard had to overcome the skepticism of her scientific peers and her own personal shyness and in doing so she became an international scientific star, providing a Ted talk, podcasts, National Geographic film, and reached thousands of people around the world. I first heard her on CBC radio and then read her famous book that became a best-seller. A best-seller about trees can you imagine that. Yet, that was not all, her concept of the Mother Tree made it into the film Avatar where millions of people heard of it.

 

It was amazing what the forest detectives could learn. It would make Crime Scene Investigators look modest. The main thing they learned was that everything in the forests was connected. Nothing was isolated. Connection was everything.

 

The forest detectives provided scientific proof for what indigenous people had known for millennia!

 

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.”