Category Archives: Environment

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.

 

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.

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.”

 

Great Art and the Miracle of Sudbury

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, autumn, Environment

 

This chronicle of our trip across the east half of the country is now drawing to a close. It was a glorious trip, because we have a glorious country. We had a wonderful stay in Ottawa with Chris’ sister, brother-in-law, and niece. With them we visited the Canadian Art Gallery a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. This time we saw mainly new art from students. I also saw and enjoyed Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire which caused such a great stir when the museum purchased it for $1.76 million in 1990. But now it is considered wrth more than 10 times as much.  A great investment. But I consider such values for art absurd. No art is really worth the prices paid for it, except it must be worth what people are willing to pay for it.

 

I just wanted to make a comment about Sudbury where we went to visit my cousin Bruno and his wife Lily. Bruno was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and died a month or two late. It was great to have one last visit with this gentleman. This is what he was—a true gentle man. Very glad to have one last visit.

 

I want to close this chronicle with some comments about Sudbury, which we had little time to see on account of that visit and our weariness and eagerness to go home.

Sudbury is a miracle story.  It proves that nature always bats last!  We must not forget that. At one time things looked bleak in Sudbury. They were desperate. Sudbury was the world’s largest atmospheric source of sulphur pollution, with vast associated biodiversity damages. The landscape around it was literally a moonscape. I remember the desolation from my first trip through Sudbury in 1967 on the way to Montreal.

 

The damage was caused by the chemicals emitted during the process of mining nickel. The damage was incredible. Some considered Sudbury completely destroyed.

 

Then after realizing the awful devastation, people came together to try to repair that damage. It seemed an insurmountable task.

 

Since the late 1890s, Sudbury was an important part of the mining industry in Canada. That industry created an environmental disaster in the area. There really is no other way to describe it. According to Climatefast,

 

“Sulfur dioxide released into the environment from the smelting of copper and nickel ores caused acid rain, and formed a black coating on rocks in the area, still visible to this day. Surrounding lakes were acidified, wreaking havoc on their ecosystems. Furthermore, copper and nickel accumulated in the soil, making it inhospitable for plants to grow.”

 

40 square miles around the city of Sudbury there was nearly no natural vegetation at all. It was hell. And environmental hell.

In 1971 and 1972, 4 years after I visited the area, NASA used the area for mimicking the surface of the moon for experiments with their prospective astronauts during the Apollo 16 and 17 operations. Sudbury had an international reputation for being a hell hole.

 

People got together and asked themselves what they could do about the disaster. Researchers told them that treating the toxic metal-contaminated soil with lime might help and enable vegetation to grow again. In 1978 volunteers and students including university students from Laurentian University started working at liming the ground and planting seeds of various plants as well as saplings. The campaign was an astonishing success. The area started to regreen.

 

Over 10 million trees were planted in the cleaned-up soil. Amazingly, the city now has some of the cleanest air in Canada! That re-greening project is ongoing. The newly grown trees and shrubs have helped to trap CO2 from the atmosphere.

 

The surrounding area is now habitat for wildlife and renovating the entire community.

 

At the United Nations Biodiversity Conference  (COP 15 ) in Montreal in December of 2022, a landmark agreement was made to guide global action on nature through to 2030. Representatives of 118 governments from around the world gathered for 2 weeks in Montreal and came up with the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) on the last day of negotiations. That framework agreement tries to address biodiversity loss, and the crucial need to restore biodiversity losses, and protect indigenous rights.

 

The plan includes concrete measures to stop and even reverse nature loss, including putting 30% of degraded ecosystems under legal protection by 2030.

 

At that conference delegates recognized that the stakes for the world could not be higher as the planet was experiencing the largest loss of life since the dinosaurs! One million plant and animal species arenow threatened with extinction, many within in decades.

 

At that conference Laurentian University showcased the important work that had been done in the Sudbury area and what could be accomplished with hard work and dedication.  This has been called “Sudbury’s Regreening Story.”

 

Since the project began the following has been achieved:

 

  • A 98% reduction in air pollution from an industry that is still thriving;
  • Nearly all air quality advisories have been eliminated;
  • 10 million planted trees and shrubs have been planted by the community;
  • 50% of the lost sport fish populations have been restored;
  • More than 3 million tons of carbon have been sequestered by those newly planted trees and shrubs;
  • 22% of the zone that was damaged has been converted into lovely parks.  I can testify to the beauty of much of the area that was once a despoiled wasteland. Unfortunately, because we had a deadline to visit my cousin I did not have time to go back to provide photographic proof. My bad. I will do better next time;
  • One species (aurora trout) has been delisted from the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada ( COSEWIC) which recommends what species should be placed on or taken off of the list of critically endangered species;
  • The area has seen the emergence of a biotech industry based on a sustainable harvest of critical metals for the e-economy.

 

The successful restoration, which is not complete but is ongoing, was made possible by an energetic public, and extensive partnerships between citizens and various governmental, scientific, and business communities. The work here was also instrumental in encouraging the establishment of a very successful international treaty to stop the generation of acid rain.

 

That really is the key—avoiding the catastrophic losses in advance.  The United States has forgotten about this, as under Trump II they are relentlessly dismantling many environmental protections in favor of giving businesses free reign to do about whatever they want. I believe that is a huge mistake. Sudbury shows that to us all. It is much easier to prevent environmental degradation than mitigating it.

 

The community has become involved in the demonstration of how damaged nature can be restored even in extremely difficult circumstances. A story about the project was included in the Jane Goodall film Reason for Hope.  I think the maple leaf symbolizes that.

There is reason for hope! Nature does bat last. But we have to be smart.

 

 

Decline of Ancient Ancestral People of the Sonoran Desert

2018 Trip to Southwest USA, 2023 Grand Finale Tour, Climate change, desert, Environment, Indigenous People before Contact, Simple Life

 

At Casa Grande Arizona, a steel and concrete canopy was built in 1932 to protect what remained of the Great House from the elements.

As I mentioned earlier  the great puzzle is why were these magnificent structures and elaborate towns abandoned in favor of smaller communities after about 1450 C.E.

Some have speculated that some catastrophe caused the people to leave. There is evidence that the area experienced significant floods between 1300 and 1450.  Those were followed by intense periods of drought. Severe climate change in other words.

Archeologists use multiple kinds of evidence to answer such questions, or at least shed some light on the questions posed. As a result, they have been studying salt discharge on the Salt and Gila rivers, as well as the increasing soil salinity, diseases, and evidence of malnutrition. It is likely that environmental conditions changed and the Ancestral people of the Sonoran Desert (formerly Hohokam people) did what all smart people do, they adapted to changed conditions. That is how people survive. That is a lesson we moderns are beginning to experience. How will we adapt is not so certain.

The evidence does show that the extreme flooding deepened the Gila River Channel making it more difficult for canals to carry water to fields where water levels were low. Part of the canal system was abandoned while other parts were extended miles upstream to maintain proper water flows. Around 1350 C.E., the time of the Great House, a combination of factors may have triggered a breakdown of Hohokam society and undermined their leadership.

It is probable that as a result of all of these factors, the survivors of the floods and droughts abandoned large sites like Casa Grande in favor of smaller settlements along the Gila River. Today’s O’odham people believe that they are the descendants of the Hohokam people. As a result, Hohokam society never disappeared it just adapted and changed to a lifestyle that was better suited to the changed conditions. This change was likely to one more similar to their ancestors. They changed to a simpler life. Perhaps that is what we will be compelled to do.

There is a lot to be said for a simpler life.

Collapse of Society

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Arizona, civilization, Environment, Indigenous People before Contact, Moral Humility

 

For reasons that are subject to debate, during the period of 1400 to 1500 A.D. large community centers were abandoned in the American southwest, as were many canals. The people did not die out, they moved instead to smaller villages in small groups. They spread throughout much of the Southwest, including northern Arizona. They adapted to some changed conditions in other words.

 

What really interests me is why this occurred. It is one of the genuine mysteries of North American archaeology. I believe it has continuing important significance for our modern societies. There are lessons for us to learn here. Will we learn them?

They may have left because of environmental collapse. For example, because the ancestral people of the Sonoran desert were so successful at farming they may have produced too many people for the land to sustain.  People around the world need to learn modesty and humility. That certainly applies to us moderns as well.

When Spanish missionaries arrived at the end of the 17th century, they found only an empty shell of the once flourishing village of Casa Grande (as the Spanish called it). Over the next two centuries, many visitors visited the site and damaged it over and over again. Some were like vandals ruining what they saw. We could see graffiti from this time on the walls.  In the late 1800s scientists pressed for its formal protection and in 1892 Casa Grande Ruins National Monument became America’s first archaeological reserve. To this day, the Great House keeps the secrets of the Ancestral People of the Sonoran Desert within its protected walls.

We all must learn that societies collapse. Everyone has done that and so will ours.

Humans are Sleep walking towards the edge of a cliff

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Anthropocene, Decline of the west, Ecocide, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse, Extinction, New Attitude to Nature

 

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that nature is the basis of all life on the planet. And everything we have constructed is built out of the building blocks of nature. Without nature we are done.

Yet there is little evidence that we understand that. Our actions indicate that we do not understand this simple fact or we just don’t care. Either way it is clear that we are dismally ignorant.

Our current attitude to nature stinks. That’s why we urgently need a new one.

In recent years the World Wildlife Fund (‘WWF’) has reported on the astonishing effect that our species has had on all other species. As reported by Damian Harrington of The Guardian, recent study by the WWF reached this uncomfortable conclusion:

“Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.”

Let that statement sink in please. In other words, since Chris and I met in 1970 humanity has wiped out more than half of all mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles.[1] That conclusion was reached in a major report produced by the WWF and 59 scientists from around the world. They also say the cause is the enormous and growing massacre of wildlife as a result of humans expanding consumption of food and resources that is destroying the web of life that nature took millions of years to produce. We are destroying “the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.” We are destroying what we most need!  As Mike Barrett the executive Director of science and conservation at WWF said,

“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff. If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done. This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is he said…This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a ‘nice to have’ – it is our life-support system.”

It is astonishing that we are  doing this. But we are.  We could do something about this, but we have chosen to ignore it. This reminds me of the people at Easter Island that kept cutting the trees on their island which they desperately needed for their survival until the trees were all gone. They actually did that. Is that what we are doing on a planetary scale? It sure looks like it. How can we deny that our society is declining? Is it surprising that I call my current tour “the Grand Finale Tour”?

 To say that we need a new attitude to nature seems hopelessly understated.

[1] I should mention that the numbers are little more subtle and not quite as grim than this suggests as Ed Yong demonstrated in a fascinating article for The Atlantic in Oct. 31, 2018