Suzanne Simard understands the importance of logging in British Columbia. She comes from a long line of loggers. Her scientific knowledge has revealed to her that current practices of loggers and their forestry facilitators and their conventional approaches that ignore the importance of connections in the forests between members of the forest communities is not the best. Hopefully, Simard with her scientific knowledge of forestry and trees, together with the local indigenous people, and their traditional knowledge, that is coming closer together, can teach the British Columbian officials that there is a better way. It is an ancient way practiced by indigenous people in the area for many generations. It is based on a different attitude to nature that recognizes the importance of the connections in the rainforest between the myriad organisms that live there.
Simard’s logging ancestors understood how important logging was to the people who lived there, but they must learn to understand that trees are more than a resource to be exploited. Logging can be a renewable resource, but it requires a respectful attitude to the creatures that occupy the forest ecosystems. Simply seeing forests as a resource is not good enough.
Simard learned from an indigenous person named Subiyay who talked of
“the trees as people. Not only with a sort of intelligence—akin to us humans—or even spiritual quality perhaps not unlike ours. Not merely as equivalent to people, with the same bearings.
They are people.
The tree people.
I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from that of my own culture. It speaks of being attuned to the blooming of the bitterroot, the running of the salmon, the cycles of the moon. Of knowing that we are tied to the land—the trees and animals and soil and water—and to one another, and that we have a responsibility to care for these connections and resources, ensuring sustainability of these ecosystems for future generations and to honor those who came before. Of treading lightly, taking only what gifts we need, and giving back. Of showing humility toward and tolerance for all we are connected too in this circle of life. But what my years in the forestry profession have also shown me is that too many decision-makers dismiss this way of viewing nature and rely only on select parts of science. The impact has become too devastating to ignore. We can compare the condition of the land where it has been torn apart, each resource treated in isolation from the rest, to where it has been cared for according to the Secwepemc principal of k’wseltktnews (translated as “we are all related” or the Salish concept of neca?mat ct (“we are one”).”
It was very interesting to me that the scientific knowledge Simard had acquired and the knowledge gained by Indigenous people of the forest through living there for millennia had come to such amazingly similar conclusions—namely that we are all connected.