Saving the Mother Trees by Sara Wright

I am submitting this essay on March 25^th, the original Mother’s Day according to some pre – Christian mythology. It seems important to be writing about the ‘Old’ Trees of Life, today, of all days.

Sixty years ago, Suzanne Simard intuited that the trees in the forests that she and her family logged (with horses) were all connected and operated as a complex cooperative living organism. Trees, understory plants, flowers, insects, animals, fish, and fungi were all parts of one integrated whole.  

Suzanne was a trailblazer, one of the first females to graduate from the University of British Columbia as a forester. Her first job seemed daunting. It was up to Suzanne to  determine why some newly planted tree seedlings kept dying.

Twenty percent or more of the seedlings that the forestry industry plants after stripping away entire forests and compacting the soil wither away. Foresters replace bare soil with seedlings of a single species (like spruce or pine) that will provide them with the fastest economical gain. 

Foresters used (and continue to use) Round Up, a deadly herbicide, to destroy all other plant life because they believe that any plant or understory tree will compete with the seedlings to the detriment of the eventual cash crop.

Suzanne intuited that one problem lay underground. She uprooted dying/dead seedlings and peered beneath the surface of the soil. She recalled as a child digging up masses of colorful rootlets that seemed to be attached to complex underground webs in diverse forests where healthy seedlings flourished.

In newly planted strip logged sites the web of tiny underground rootlets was missing.

Suzanne went back to school to become a scientist to prove what the child once intuited, that the trees were in a dynamic relationship with one another and every other living organism that made up a forest.

A second problem that Suzanne addressed  was the fact that removing all the other plants and trees from a strip logged site invited in disease. All trees and plants work together to deal with pathogenic fungi, and she demonstrated that birches, for example, protected trees if allowed to grow along with the cash crop. Alders provided seedlings with nitrogen a vital nutrient.

In 1997 the prestigious scientific journal Nature credited Dr. Simard with the discovery of the ‘Wood Wide Web’ the existence and importance of an intricate pattern of threads called the mycelial network. This complex network connected  trees and plants and nourished all life.

The second problem that Suzanne addressed and proved was the fact that removing all the other plants and trees from a strip logged site invited in disease. All trees and plants work together to deal with pathogenic fungi, and she demonstrated that birches, for example, protected trees if allowed to grow along with the cash crop. Alders provided seedlings with nitrogen a vital nutrient.

Most important is Suzanne’s understanding that some Old Mother Trees must be left in any forest that is logged to help seed future generations. If the ‘Old’ Mother Trees are removed who will be left to pass on the wisdom of the forest?

Although Suzanne’s painstaking research continues to be replicated by other scientists after thirty – five years it is still considered ‘controversial’.

Naturally, the primarily male forest industry did/does not want to know that stripping huge tracts of land with giant machines that compact the soil and destroy the underlying networks is an issue to be taken seriously. Consequently, forestry practices remain the same.

If this isn’t a tale about how patriarchy attempts to dismiss/destroy a woman who uses not just her intellect but all her senses to change the face of “his story” I don’t know what is.

After Suzanne wrote her compelling memoir  called “Finding the Mother Tree” she went on to establish the 100 Year Mother Tree Project where she and her students, many now renowned scientists themselves, continue this painstaking research most of which is done in the field and takes years.

Thanks to Suzanne’s work we now know that Mother Trees favor their own kin, send them nutrients, and even when dying these Old Trees continue to nourish not just their kin but other tree species.

Suzanne has incorporated Indigenous scientific scholars as well as well as their stories into her ongoing research. She was as stunned as I was to learn that Indigenous peoples have known about mycelial networks for millennia. How did they learn, she asked some of her colleagues.

The plants told them.

I’ll end this essay with some practical information and a question that perhaps some will ponder.

About 90 percent of all plants have underground symbiotic mycorrhizal (root fungi) relationships with other plant beings that are beneficial. These complex webs that branch and unite and are always on the move just below the surface of the earth creating a living skin that keeps trees, plants, grasses, fungi all connected to each other. These tubular networks keep plant life healthy by providing minerals carbon water etc. to vegetation through the rootlets. What this means practically is that overall plants cooperate with each other. (About ten percent of the fungi are pathogenic and kill trees and plants but this is not the rule). If cooperation has been dominating plant relationships for 400 plus million years and continues to today, then how did we get the idea that Nature competes more than S/he cooperates?