Category Archives: Affinity

Opinions about a new attitude to nature i.e. the idea that all of life on the planet is connected

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.

Train Dreams

Affinity, Movies, Philosophy/Ideas

 

There is another film that won my whole-hearted support this year.  It has not been in the news, but it should have been. It was not flashy, but it was truly meditative. It makes you think. I know not many people are interested in that these days, but I am.

There is a very interesting statement at the beginning of the film:

“There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”

 

There was a pair of old worn boots nailed into a tree with moss growing over them. Then you look up at an old tree, you can see it slowly falling down. That is the old world and it’s falling down.

 

Robert Grainier, the protagonist, who lived more than 80 years. He went west from Idaho to a place near the ocean, but never bothered to see the ocean. He didn’t need to see it. Why would he? He had lost his parents but he never how or why. No one ever told him. His connections were gone. One of his first memories is seeing the mass deportation of 100 or more Chinese families from town. Why was that necessary? No one has a good answer for that, just like none will have an answer for the current mass deportations either.  The narrator, who seems like the voice of God in this film, says, “Grainer was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” So am I. I know many people like it. I remember when I watched the 2020 Republican National Convention when people cheered with glee as Trump promised to bring about “mass deportation.” They loved it.

 

Graineir’s life was meaningless, until he fell in love with Gladys. Until then his life had little meaning. Suddenly it had some.  She told him, “She told him, “Right now I could just about understand everything there is.” Now that is meaning! The meaning of life. “All of a sudden, life made sense to Grainier, as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around and headed down stream.”

 

He got a job working for a railway crew and wished he’d never done that. He saw a young Chinese man inexplicably pulled from his crew and tossed off a bridge into a deep ravine to his death. No one knew what he had done to deserve that.

 

The men built a bridge across a river and were told they had done something amazing.  But 10 years later a new and better bridge was built 10 miles away that rendered their bridge obsolete.  Amazing doesn’t last long. The old bridge was abandoned. Like old things often are.

 

As soon as Robert started to know he was back at home, it was logging season and time to leave again. “His work was populated with itinerant men. Most without homes, without families. They moved from job to job, state to state, as the work dictated.” Unconnected. Not rooted to the ground like old trees. “He once worked alongside a man for 2 months without saying a single word.” Trees talk more than that.  Someone asked the man if he had ever been to California and he just asked, “Is there no place where a man can get some peace?” And then he got up and moved. Those were the only words he ever heard the man speak.  Now that man was alienated. He had no connection with other men other than the work.  Words were no connection for him. He liked being unconnected.

 

One man lived in a hole in a big tree. Another faller, Apostle Frank, worked with Robert and kept talking continuously of God. And he spoke about the Bible as if he had been there when it was written down. Nice to have such certainty. As he told Robert, “Sometimes God has to find strange ways to tell you what you need to hear. Sometimes it’s a donkey talking to you.”

 

A logger, Arn, who came to blow up trees sang a song at night: “If the Lord was a redwood would you try to cut Him down? Or climb up His loving branches and look around?”

Robert asked Arn, “do you think bad things that you do follow you through life?”  Arn replied, “I don’t know, I’ve seen bad men raised up and good men brought to their knees. If figure that I could figure it out, I’d be a lot better-looking than you.” He did not feel connected to past mistakes.

The narrator said, “Grainier worried more and more that something terrible was following him, that death would find him out here, far away from the only place he really wanted to be.” That was his family. He was still connected but remotely.

When he got home and saw his daughter every time she seemed like a different person and he felt like he was missing his whole life. Which of course was true.

Even though money was tight, when he was home he later realized it was the happiest time of his life. Robert and Gladys just wanted to spend more time together with their daughter Katie.

Arn knew the work as hard. “That’ because it’s rough work, gentlemen, not just on the body but on the soul. We just cut down trees that have been here for 500 years. It upsets a man’s soul whether you recognize it or not.”  I agree. Lots of jobs are like that. Soul-destroying work.  Another logger said he would have $200 in his pocket after the work was done and that would not bother his soul. Who was right?

 

Arn said,  echoing John Muir, “This world is intricately stitched together. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods.”

 

Another logger said there were “enough logs to cut for a thousand years. And when the last ones cut, well the first one will be growed up as big as anything around today. Arn said he thought the same thing when he was young. Arn said, “My family is everywhere there is a smiling face. Never been somewhere I didn’t have some family there. Except for Kansas.  That state is filled with savage lunatics.” Unfortunately, much of the modern world is filled with savage lunatics, not just Kansas. They are all around.

 

One day a large of a tree hit him in the head and he was not the same. Somedays he could not remember his name. Yet, Arn  looked around and said, “It’s beautiful aint it?”  “What part?” asked Robert. “All of it, “ he said. “Every bit of it.”

 

Another day he was no longer a logger.  “The last few years he expected some great revelation about his life would descend upon him. But as of yet, none had. And he was beginning to doubt that one ever would.” He met a young lady, Claire, who said others had told her he was different.  Robert asked, “Ain’t everybody different?”  “No”, he said. She said, “It’s good to be different.”  I agree, but it’s OK if you’re not. She loved the valley because it carved out all the mountains. alleys. It’s where all the lakes come from. Referring to the time when massive gushes of water from melting glaciers cut deep into mountains and prairies alike, she said, “It must have felt like the world was coming to an end.” Yup, I think. Then she asked, “That’s where did all those myths come from, you know?  All those flood stories. All those different religions all over the world. It’s just the same story. Different slants…I don’t mean to be disrespectful about anything you believe in. The world’s an old place. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.” They are all connected.

 

Robert told Claire how his wife and baby did not make it through the fire. He tells her, “Sometimes it just feels like the sadness is going to eat you alive.” She has a similar story. She lost her husband a year ago.

 

Claire tells him:

 

 “…And when it was over, it was like there was a hole in the world…I had more questions than answers…When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy…In the forest every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins, if you really look at it. The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that.”

 

Robert asks her, “What if you haven’t got anymore to give?” Claire replies, “The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”

 

One day he went to the big city and “wandered the city without much direction or purpose, as if looking for something he had misplaced a long time ago.”  Meandering. Then he went to a theatre of mysteries. They advertised that there would be “Sun Tzu, the holy man, will read your dreams.” Are those train dreams? The shill said, “pay you a dime to see a monster…Inside this theatre the mysteries of the world flit about like bats and insects. Here, all the answers to everything.” That’s a pretty big promise. The monster was only a boy in a costume. A puny monster. It made him cry. He saw his face in a mirror for the first time in a decade and could see the toll the years had taken. He felt that he was only just beginning to have some faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.

 

For $4 he got an airplane ride “to see the world as only the birds see it.’

He died in 1968.  As the narrator said,

 

“His life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents had might have been, and he left no heirs behind him. But on that spring day as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt at last connected to it all.”

He really was face to face with a mystery.

This is quiet film. Too quiet for most viewers who prefer loud action and computer generated mayhem. Too quiet to win the Academy award, but I like quiet films, that make you ponder. My kind of film.

 

Inukshuk

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Affinity, art, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

At Dixie Lake, not far past Kenora I stopped the car at a rest stop and strolled in the south side of the highway about a ¼ km along the highway shoulder. I noticed a proudly installed Inukshuk on the north side of the highway at the top of a granite wall created by blasting the top part to of the Canadian Shield.  For generations young boys and other miscreants have been painting information no one is interested in, onto the rocks beside the road. Things like their initials and the initials of their current girlfriends. They used to mar the countryside. Lately, government employees diligently try to paint over these markings as soon as possible. And they do a pretty good job.  Frankly, I consider the messages a desecration. Rarely do we see the graffiti anymore.

 

Building an Inukshut is an entirely other matter. I appreciate everyone of them I see. These I think honour the history of Canada and the places in which they are found. They are respectful. They don’t mar the countryside like painted initials.

But I like them for another reason. A more philosophical reason.

The word “inukshuk” means “in the likeness of a human.” For generations, Inuit have been creating these impressive stone markers on the immense Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes of Canada to show others where they have been and sometimes to let others know where emergency food can be found. Inukshuks really serve more than one function. They are used to guide fellow travellers sort of like a modern GPS is used. Some warn strangers of dangers. Some help assisting hunters and other to mark sacred places.

Sometimes they show how the people are part of the land and the land is part of the people. Even rocks. After all, as Carl Sagan said, “we are all stardust.”

Humans were created out of the dust of ancient stars. Whenever I think of life that way I am in awe. Imagine that each one of us is created by dust sent into the atmosphere by the big bang billions of years ago.

Inukshuts are really just piles of rocks. Nothing more. But they are places where people show reverence to nature.   They show us how we are all connected. I consider them holy messages. The opposite of desecrations. They are spiritual manifestations created by artists to suggest those connections that are the essence of religion.

Chief Seattle: An Old Attitude to nature can provide a New Attitude to Nature

Affinity, expansive religion, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature, Philosophy/Ideas, religion

 

A few years ago, in New Zealand I purchased a poster containing the complete text of the response by Chief Seattle to the President of United States to his offer to purchase land from his tribe, which I posted about yesterday.  I had only read part of it before.  It was one of the most eloquent statements I have ever heard about a genuine approach to nature that was, to some extent, the position of  many North American indigenous people.  It was radically different from the approach of the arriving Europeans.

I recognize that there is controversy over the extent to which this version or any other version accurately records what Chief Seattle said to the President, but I believe the general tenor of the letter records a profound philosophy which I am content to ascribe to Chief Seattle as I don’t know who better deserves the credit for it. I certainly think the thoughts deserve our attention.

The renowned English philosopher A. N. Whitehead once said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I think the same things can be said about Chief Seattle. At least as far as environmental philosophy goes. And to think I learned absolutely nothing of it in 4 years of university studying philosophy, proving how deficient my education was at that time, nearly 50 years ago.

Chief Seattle was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief in what we now call western North America. The city of Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington, was named after him.

As Chief Seattle said,

 

“We are part of the earth and it is part of us.

The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers.

The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man—all belong to the same family.”

 

Another way of saying is to say we are all kin. All people and all creatures of the natural world are kin. This basic premise has profound philosophical consequences. For if we recognize that we are all kin we ought to treat each other, and other creatures too, with respect.  I will get to Darwin later, for he gave the scientific basis for this view. I cherish the idea that indigenous philosophy and western science are deeply interwoven. Realizing that also has profound consequences.

To many of the First Nations of North America, they saw themselves as a part of their world.  Their philosophies vary from tribe to tribe, but a common thread, is the recognition that the Earth is our Mother and we are all together. We are all connected. We are all part of Mother Earth. Earth is not separate and apart from us. We are woven together.  This is profound fellow feeling. This philosophy recognizes that what we do to nature we do to ourselves. That is what I call affinity.

 

This idea also has profound significance in the history of religious thought.  The Indo-European word “religio” , which is the root of the word religion, means “linkage” or “connection” and is in my view the basis of all major religions. In fact, it is the core of all religions. More on this later.

I never learned any indigenous philosophy while I pursued a 4 year Honours Arts program in philosophy and English literature. I never even heard of indigenous philosophy. I did not even think such a thing was possible.

This philosophy echoes or even sums up much of what I have learned over the years, starting with German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world.  Only Chief Seattle was much more clear and easier to understand, without being any less profound than Martin Heidegger.  The natives of North America often felt a deep connection to the land.  They felt that they were a part of it.  To the Europeans on the other hand, nature was a resource ready to be exploited.  And from these two disparate attitudes springs much that is wrong with western society.

This is an old attitude to nature, which I am proposing as a new attitude to nature. It owuld be a worthy replacement for the old western attitude,.

Chief Seattle’s statement is a stunning statement about humans and nature, and all the more amazing because a “savage” (as he was wrongly called made it in 1854. Who was the savage?