Changing How We do Forestry

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

 

Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree, also hoped that Canadians in the forest system would change their forestry practices. Sadly, the evidence is not compelling that this has happened. In fact, the evidence points in the other direction. She had hoped that her research would change their practices.

 

In her 2014 Ted Talk Simard showed an aerial photograph of forests within 100 km. of the forest she studied and sadly it showed many large pockets of clear-cut forests. It is far from pristine. In fact, according to the 2014 report of the  World Resources Institute Canada in the past decade has had the highest forest disturbance rate of any country worldwide. This might have surprised many who might have thought that this dubious distinction might have gone to Brazil or Indonesia or Russia. In Canada the rate of forest disturbance is 3.6 percent per year. According to Simard that is 4 times the sustainable rate.

 

Added to that, massive disturbance at this scale is known to affect many other aspects of forest and neighboring ecosystems.  Such disturbances can seriously and adversely affect hydrological cycles, degrade wildlife habitat, and emit greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere. All of this in turn creates a vicious circle of forestry abuse. This leads directly to more disturbance and more tree diebacks.

 

As if that is not bad enough, according to Simard modern North American foresters, when they replant forests they do a very poor job, because often they only plant a couple of species and also weed out what they perceive to be less valuable species such as aspens and birches. According to Simard,

 

These simplified forests lack complexity, and they’re really vulnerable to infections and bugs. And as climate changes, this is creating a perfect storm for extreme events, like the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak that just swept across North America, or that megafire in the last couple months in Alberta.

 

Nature loves diversity; it abhors species poor systems, even if foresters like them.  They like them because they are easier to harvest and easier to replant. We always have to remember that nature bats last. We should be mimicking nature.  That is called biomimicry. We should not be weakening our forests. We should be working hard to strengthening them so that they can deal with future challenges such rapidly approaching climate change. Complex systems like forests have an amazing power to self-heal. But again, they are not omnipotent and never will be even with our help.

 

Simard’s experiments showed that instead of clear-cutting, patch-cutting and retention of hub trees and regeneration to a diversity of species and genes and genotypes could create strong mycorrhizal networks that would help forests recover quickly. There is hope if we learn to act smarter.

 

Simard proposed what she called four simple solutions.  First, we all need to get out in the forest and connect with them and really look at them. We cannot assume they are exactly like other forests where traditional methods might have worked. Each forest is different. We have to get actively involved in our own forests. We have to avoid the traditional one-size-fits-all approach. Good forestry stewardship absolutely requires deep knowledge of local conditions.

 

Secondly, we must save our old-growth forests. These “old growth forests are the repositories of genes and mother trees and mycorrhizal networks”. That means we can’t strip them naked. We have to cut less. Loggers won’t like this but it is absolutely essential. We can cut, but we must cut less.

 

Thirdly, when we do cut, “we need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road. We need to be conservationists.”  We have to think and act like a forest. We have to mimic nature better—much better—than we have done in the past.

 

Finally, “we must regenerate our forests with a diversity of species and genotypes and structures by planting and allowing natural regeneration. We have to give Mother Nature the tools she needs to use her intelligence to self-heal. And we need to remember that forests aren’t just a bunch of trees competing with each other, they’re super-cooperators.”

 

Simard said she hoped she had changed the way we think about forests. I know she changed my way of thinking about forests. I wish I was more important.

 

I know a lot people including a lot of scientists, perhaps even a substantial majority will be sceptical of this new science. That is as it should be. Science should always question new ideas. But they should also question old ideas! Old ideas should not get a pass. Let the evidence speak.

 

I also wonder if indigenous people would consider this such a radical idea. They often speak of trees, plants, animals, and even rocks, as their kin.

 

Below Ground Symbiosis

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants, Science

 

Before Simard and her colleagues did their work, scientists had thought that this belowground mutualistic symbiosis called a mycorrhiza was involved. Mycorrhiza literally means “fungus root.” You see their reproductive organs when you walk through the forest. They include things like mushrooms. However, the mushrooms are really just the visible result. Underground are networks of fungal threads that form a mycelium that infects and colonizes the roots of all the trees and plants in the ecosystem. Where the fungal cells interact with the root cells, there is a trade of carbon for nutrients.  The fungus gets those nutrients by growing through the soil and coating every soil particle. The web that is created is so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep in the forest.

 

 

The mycelium connects different individuals in the forest to each other. In fact, that connection is not just between members of the same species but even between species.  That is how different species such as birch and fir are connected.  The analogy Simard and others have used is the Internet—an information highway. Underneath the ground of the forest there is a vibrant thriving interconnected ecosystem connected by means of the underground Internet. It is a truly remarkable discover.

 

Like all networks, the underground mycorrhizal networks have nodes and links. Simard made a map by examining the short sequences of DNA of every tree and every fungal individual in a patch of Douglas fir forest. With that she drew a picture with circles representing Douglas Fir.  These are the nodes. The lines on the other hand represent the Douglas fir.  The lines that interlink bodies on this underground information highway show how the interlinking fungal highways work.

 

The largest and darkest nodes are the busiest nodes. Simard calls those Hub trees or more colorfully Mother Trees.  Her research demonstrated that the “Mother Trees…nurture their young, the ones growing in the understory.” Her map also showed yellow dots that represented young seedlings that have established themselves within the network of the old mother trees. In a single forest, a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees. And using isotope tracers, Simard and her colleagues found that mother trees will send their excess carbon through the mycorrhizal network to the understory seedlings.  Their research also shows that this “nurturing action by Mother Trees has increased seedling survival by four times.”  That is a substantial benefit. It is well known that some species, such as humans for example and many others favor their own offspring. Simard wanted to know if Douglas fir did the same thing?  Could they recognize and then help their own relatives? To determine that she devised an experiment where they grew mother trees with their own kin. And also stranger’s seedlings.

That experiment showed that the trees do recognize their kin. Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They also send them more carbon below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to make growing room for their offspring.

 

Their research even showed that “when mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.”

 

Simard also used isotope tracing to trace carbon moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighboring seedlings. They also discovered that besides carbon they sent out defense signals. And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those seedlings to future stresses. “So trees talk”. They not only talk to each other trees help each other. To some extent they embody Marx’s maxim, “from each according to his ability to each according to their needs.” Trees are Marxists! Trees have conversations that go back and forth. As Simard said, “Those conversations actually increase the resilience of the whole community. It probably reminds you of our own social communities, and our families, well, at least some families.” For example, trees share some characteristics of ant colonies.

 

As a result of all this data, Simard has reached the conclusion that forest are much more than collections of trees. Forests are “complex systems with hubs and networks that overlap and connect trees and allow them to communicate, and they provide avenues for feedbacks and adaptation, and this makes the forest resilient. That’s because there are many hub trees and many overlapping networks.”

 

Although all of this breeds resilience it cannot breed omnipotence.  Trees in the forest ecosystem are also “vulnerable not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles that preferentially attack big old trees but high-grade logging and clear-cut logging.

 

It is always possible to take out a couple of hub trees out of a forest. It can survive such a disturbance.  However, the more that is taken out of the complex forest system the more likely it is that eventually the system will collapse. The big question of course, is how close are our forests to collapse. Collapses can come suddenly and for many reasons.

 

When her talk was over Simard asked her audience if they were thinking about forests differently after this talk. Her audience said they were, so Simard was satisfied. She wants all of us to think differently about forests. I would say we should all have a different attitude to nature. That what I want too.

 

Talking in the Forest

Nature, New Attitude to Nature

The first day in the forest of British Columbian, when she started her research, Suzanne Simard, a mother grizzly bear and her cub chased her off the job. But she persevered and eventually completed her research. She put on her respirator, and then put plastic bags over her trees to isolate them above ground.  With her giant syringes she injected the bags with her tracer isotope carbon dioxide gases. First, she did that to the birch. She injected carbon-14, the radioactive gas, into the bag of birch. And then for fir, she injected the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. She used two isotopes, because she wanted to know if there was two-way “communication” going on between these species of trees. She wanted to identify the source of the isotopes. She waited an hour because she estimated that this would be enough time for the trees to suck up the CO2 through photosynthesis, turn it into sugars, send it down into their roots. In fact, she hypothesized that the trees would transport the carbon belowground to their neighbors.

 

When the hour was up, she moved her Geiger counter over the leaves and heard the perfect sound—Kkhh—that indicated to here that in fact the birch had taken up the radioactive gas. Then she moved to the fir tree to see what she would hear there. She heard what to her was a beautiful sound, namely,  the same Kkhh! She interpreted this as the sound of the birch tree “talking” to the fir tree.  In fact, she interpreted that to mean that the birch was in effect asking the fir tree if it could help it out and the birch “replied” that in fact it could help. Specifically, Simard theorized that the fir was asking for carbon because Simard had placed a shade cloth over it.

 

This of course is where the sceptic could ask what the justification was for making these conjectures?  Was there a better or simpler explanation for the movement of carbon?  Was her conclusion a leap of faith instead of an inevitable scientific conclusion based on the available data?  I am not so sure, though I find her conjectures deeply intriguing.

 

After that she examined the cedar and speculated it was silent. The Cedar was in fact in its own world and was not connected to the “Web interlinking birch and fir.” Was there such a web, or was this wishful thinking?

 

Simard thought the data was clear and irrefutable.  In each of her 80 plots she checked all the replicates. The C-13 and C-14 was showing that “paper birch and Douglas fir were in a lively two-way conversation.”

 

She claimed that the data showed that at that time of the summer, the birch was sending more carbon to the fir tree than the fir tree was sending back to birch and that this was particularly evident when the fir was shaded. At other times of the summer, she discovered that fir was sending more carbon to birch than birch was sending to fir. She speculated that this was as result of the fact that the fir tree was still growing while the birch was leafless. According to Simard, “The two species were interdependent, like yin and yang.”

 

That led Simard to an epiphany—a Eureka moment.  She believed she had made a major discovery that would change forever how scientists look at trees in a forest and how they interact in it. Trees are “not just competitors but…cooperators.”  If that is true, that is a revolution in science.  She believes that she found solid scientific data that proved there is “a massive belowground communications network, the other world.”

 

Simard hopes that with new understanding of forests there will come a new way for humans to interact with forest. She really hopes that instead of clear-cutting and instead of applying herbicides we will employ what she called more holistic and sustainable methods. These methods will also be more practical and less costly.

 

She explained how she viewed her science in relation to these issues.  She used science to determine how paper birch and Douglas fir were communicating? According to her research, they were conversing not only in the language of carbon but also nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and allele chemicals and hormones.  All of this she refers to as “information”.

 

Hard to believe, but…

Maybe forests are more interesting than we ever thought. In fact, maybe nature is ever more interesting than we thought it was.

How Trees in a forest Communicate with Each Other?

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Plants

 

I have been thinking a lot about forests lately. Forests are endlessly fascinating. If you are tired of forests, you are tired of life. I also says that about orchids.

 

“A forest is much more than what you see,” says forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her 30 years of research in Canadian forests have led to an astounding discovery — trees talk, often and over vast distances. I listened to a Ted Talk that she gave at Banff, Alberta in 2016.  It was extremely interesting. After listening to her I thought about forests in entirely new ways.  I had a new attitude to nature.

 

She said that forests are not just a collection of trees, as we tend to think of them. That is certainly how foresters and loggers think of them. They use the expression “stand.” According to Simard, “Yes, trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see.”

 

Forests are complex systems.  What you see above ground is just a part of that system. As Simard pointed out, “underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.” This is a shocking way to think about forests.  It goes entirely against a long history of forestry science.  It is a rebellious way to think about forests.

When Simard’s dog fell into her outhouse and she and her grandfather tried to rescue it, she began to realize that there was a lot beneath the surface and that science had not paid sufficient attention to this subterranean world.  She saw “that palette of roots and soils was really the foundation of the forest.”

 

As a result of her epiphany she studied forestry at university. That she worked with those who were literally battling the forests. They were in a war against the forests and the forests were losing. She was alarmed by the extensive clear-cutting, but also the spraying of chemicals as part of this military engagement and the hacking, as she called it, of aspens and birches to make room for more commercially valuable planted pines and firs. This disturbed her greatly. “It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless industrial machine.”

 

She went back to school and studied some more.  There she noticed that scientists in the laboratory had discovered that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root. She wondered if that could be observed in a real world forest. She believed that “ Trees in real forests might also share information below ground.” This was extremely controversial.  Many scientists did not accept that trees could “communicate.”  This was to them an entirely foreign concept. It was anthropomorphizing forests like Jane Goodall had been anthropomorphizing chimpanzees. Scientists have also said that they must resist that temptation. As a result, she had trouble getting funding for her proposed research projects.

 

Eventually she got some funding, but it meant the research would have to be done on the cheap. She wanted to do her research in the forests. She grew 80 replicates of three tree species: Paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar.

 

Simard surmised that the birch and the fir would be connected in a below ground web, but not the cedar. It was in its own other world.  She got her scientific apparatus, many supplies and tools from Canadian Tire. But she also secured some sophisticated equipment from her university, including  a Geiger counter, a scintillation counter, a mass spectrometer, microscopes. After that she actually got some really dangerous stuff: syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and some high pressure bottles of the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. She had obtained the legal right to do that for her research, but she had to be careful.

 

Her research revealed some fascinating stuff. I will talk about that next time.

 

Mothers of the Forest

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

 

When Suzanne Simard was a very young forester she learned from experience that the way foresters were reforesting forests was not working very well.

 

She noticed that after cutting most trees in a swath of trees they replanted selected trees. They did not want to plant trees that they thought might compete with the trees that were “useful.” They also did not leave many tries behind. It was basically a clear cut. When she questioned this approach, the senior forester she worked with asked, “are you an environmentalist?”

 

She had grown up with loggers but they usually did not cut everything. It did not seem right. In time she learned that it wasn’t smart either.

 

She noticed it first as a young forested and the knowledge was later reinforced when she studied the science of forests.  The underground connection between species in the forest consisting of underground mycorrhizal networks. These are networks that connect fungi under the ground to the roots of trees also under the ground. These allowed nutrients and water to be transported between species under the ground invisible except to scientists. The fungus delivers nutrients from old trees to seedlings. Cutting this link was devastating for forest renewal. The old trees could afford to do this because they had plenty to give.

 

As Simard found, “young trees got their start in in the shadow of old trees by linking into their vast mycelium [part of the fungal network under the ground] and receiving substances in return until they could build enough needles and roots to make it on their own…The seedlings in this forest were regenerating in this network of old trees.”

 

This was no accident and it explained why seedlings did best when they were not cut-off from the mature trees that were not just competing with them. They were actually helping the younger trees. As Simard said,

 

“A below ground network could explain why seedlings could survive for years, even decades in the shadows. Those old growth forests were able to self-regenerate because the parents helped the young get on their own two feet. Eventually the young ones would take over the tree line and reach out to others requiring a boost.”

 

I know to many this may sound fantastical.  If you think that you won’t be alone. I am not sure how valid her science is, but she has received a lot attention. And she has credentials.  To me what is most important about her work is that it announces a new attitude to nature, which I firmly believe is badly needed. I have even given a name to this philosophy. I call it affinity. Miriam Webster’s Dictionary defines affinity as sympathy marked by a community of interest. The dictionary uses the example of “she felt an affinity to him because of their common musical interest.”  I would say, a community of interest, like a forest. Like kinship.

 

The Forest is a Socialist Community

Affinity, Books, Environment, Nature, Plants, World of ideas

 

Professor Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia has become a bit of a celebrity as a result of the best-selling book she wrote about forest communities and in particular the Mother Tree. Her book was called Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forrest. The popular television show Ted Lasso had a character say on that show: You know we used to believe trees competed with each other for light.  Suzanne’s field work challenged that perception and we now realize that the forest is socialist community. Trees work in harmony to share the sunlight.” Believe it or not trees share! Go figure.

 

Simard says that her research into trees has shown trees are able to transmit information about potential disease and pest threats to the other trees through a network of underground fungal root systems that allow trees to share carbon, water, and other nutrients. Added to that, even more surprisingly,  they share information.

 

She has been working in Douglas fir forests near Kamloops B.C.

 

The actual descripitons of some of her scientific experiments are quite interesting. You will have to read the book to get the information. As a result of her research, she was able to produce a map showing trees are connected through underground fungal roots systems. Simard found forests are communities and mother trees are their lifeblood. As she explained,

“They’re actually like societies. They have these deep relationships with each other, the trees do, and with all the other creatures in the forest. It’s like this big interrelated community and there are all kinds of sophisticated ways that they communicate and interact with each other.”

 

The researchers found,

 

“What we found in connecting this map is that pretty much all of the trees were connected together. They had multiple linkages with each other and what emerged from map is the biggest oldest trees were the most highly connected. That’s why we started calling it the mother tree, because all of this convergence of information led us to realize that these really old trees were really essential. They’re like the nucleus of the forest in regenerating the forest.”

 

This goes to give further evidence that what all the world’s major religions have been saying for centuries is true, namely that we are all connected. All life is connected. We are all kin.

 

The Mother Tree Project

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

 

In 2015 Suzanne Simard began to apply her scientific research findings to the practice of forestry.  She wanted to know if her theories will work in practice. She wanted to reverse the current forestry practice of “free to grow” that was based on the assumption Simard believes is wrong, namely that the best way to regenerate a forest is to keep out the competitors and make the desired trees “free to grow.” She wants foresters to acknowledge that the system they used for decades is not the best. There is a better way.

 

The better way she proposes she calls the Mother Tree Project. It recognizes that trees thrives best when they are connected to the other organisms in the ecosystem, not when they are isolated.  As she said, “the guiding principle of retaining Mother Trees and remaining connections within forests to keep them regenerative, especially as the climate changes.”

 

Simard recognizes that this cooperative and communitarian approach will be needed as forest are subjected to increasing pressures and stresses such a climate change, drought, insect infestation and the like. Simard is confident “Free to Grow” will not work as well as her approach. It has the added benefit of expanding biodiversity.

 

The Project consists of 9 experimental forests located across a “climate rainbow” in British Columbia, for hot and dry forests in the southeast corner to cold and wet stands in the north central interior of the province. Her team of researchers is examining how the structures and functions of the forests and the webs of relationships that play out in them in the real environment will work with the new practices and procedures she endorses. She is confident substantial improvements in forest regeneration will be the result.

 

Then she wants to establish what she calls “an emergent philosophy: complex science.” This new science will be

 

Based on embracing collaboration in addition to competition—indeed, working with all of the multifarious interactions that the forest—complexity science can transform forest practices into what is adaptive and holistic and away from what has been overly authoritarian and simplistic.

 

We can change our ways. We can do better. Our disconnectedness has been the problem. That is where we must make the fundamental changes.  What I have been called a “new attitude to nature.” This disconnectedness is not just causing problems in the forest. It causes problems everywhere. It drives our despair. It defines our alienation. We have to understand the amazing qualities of nature. As she said, it is causing huge problems with our relationship to plants in particular. Like me she is a plant guy. Instead,

 

 “by understanding their sentient qualities, our empathy and love for trees, plants and forests, will naturally deepen and find innovative solutions. Turning to the intelligence of nature itself is the key.”

 

That is the way to discover the wisdom of the forest and that is the way to learn that wisdom.

 

Transformative Thinking

Affinity, Books, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature, World of ideas

 

 

These two  principles that Suzanne Simard explained she got from the Secwepemc and Salish people are fundamentally the same as similar principles of various North American indigenous groups.   Simard endorses them (as do I).  As Simard opined:

 

“I believe this kind of transformative thinking is what will save us. It is a philosophy of treating the world’s creatures, its gifts, as of equal  importance to us. This begins by recognizing that the trees and plants have agency. They perceive, relate, and communicate: they exercise various behaviors. They cooperate, make decisions, and remember—qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom, intelligence. By noting how trees, animals, and even fungi—any and all non-human species—have this agency, we can acknowledge that they deserve as much regard as we according ourselves.  We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm, one species, one forest one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.”

 

It is fascinating and vitally important to realize that these indigenous principles are exactly what Simard’s scientific research leads her to. Simard believes that her  scientific research proves the truth of traditional knowledge. As she said, “the rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out.”

As Simard said,

“Making this transformation requires that humans reconnect with nature—the forests, the prairie, the oceans—instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation. It means expanding our modern ways, our epistemology, and scientific methodologies, so that they complement, build on, and align with Aboriginal roots. Mowing down the forests and harvesting the waters to fulfill our wildest dreams of material wealth just because we can has caught up with us.”

 

If Simard is right, and she has significant scientific research that points in this direction, it is truly transformative. It would be part of a new attitude to nature. If adopted, it could change the world. Sometimes we need a revolution in our thinking.