Suzanne Simard forever altered our understanding of forests with her research into the ways trees communicate with each other. The University of British Columbia forest ecologist was one of the first to map the so-called “wood wide web” — the vast below-ground network of mycorrhizal fungi that trees use to channel information and exchange resources.
Her work has inspired everything from the movie “Avatar” to Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, “The Overstory.”
When Simard looks at a forest, she doesn’t see individual trees competing for sunlight and water. She sees communities of interdependent species cooperating through networks anchored by the biggest and oldest among them. These “mother” trees are so essential to a forest’s health, Simard says, and preserving them should be a priority.
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Now, working with Indigenous scientists and First Nations communities in British Columbia, she’s translating her discoveries into a new model for regenerating the world’s forests before we lose them.
Simard spoke with Anne Strainchamps on “To The Best of Our Knowledge” about her Mother Tree Project.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
Anne Strainchamps: Your research runs counter to the dominant paradigm in forestry today. How so?
Suzanne Simard: The dominant paradigm in forestry now is that trees are competitive and you’ve got to manage them like tree farms and harvest them for products to feed the economy. Where I live, this has resulted in massive industrial plantations. First, they clear-cut the forest to open it up for the profits. Then they said, “These fast-growing new plantations need lots of light, so we’ve got to get rid of all these other plants.” So we got the herbicides. Next, you heard, “They’re not growing as fast as we thought,” so we got the fertilizers. And now it’s, “The trees aren’t sequestering and storing enough carbon, so let’s add more fertilizer.”
AS: What is the result of managing forests this way?
SS: This model of clearing the forest and then replanting it or changing it to our image of what we think is a productive forest comes at a huge cost of massive losses in biodiversity. And yet we don’t have to do it this way. We should be talking about working with the natural system, the regenerative aspect of the forest, which is what I study.
AS: What’s an example?
SS: So with the Mother Tree Project, we’re comparing the effects of clear-cut logging with other sylvan culture systems, to see what happens when you harvest the forest but leave some of the old ones behind. What happens to the carbon pools, to the biodiversity in the soil, to the birds and mammals and plants?
An old tree holds so much more biodiversity than a young tree. The crowns of the old trees are huge and complex, with birds and other species all over them. The young trees don’t have that biodiversity, and they don’t have the resources to hold it. In fact, there are certain kinds of mycorrhizal fungi that only grow on old trees. There’s an enormous biodiversity associated with oldness.
AS: Your great insight that a forest is not made up of individual giant sticks competing against each other but a holistic, inter-connected, regenerative network came as a revelation to a lot of people, but it seemed intuitively obvious to you. Why?
SS: Seeing the forest as a connected place was just a natural thing, because I grew up in these massive old growth forests with all these connections right in front of you. I mean, if you can’t see it, you’re not looking. Also, I came from a family of horse loggers. Actually, I looked back through my family history, all the way back to France, and we were peasant wood cutters for many generations.
And so I come from the perspective of just needing to make a living, of selective harvesting to feed the family. But of course, we were also part of the colonial system of appropriating land from the Indigenous people, which is a history that I find shameful. And I try to give back what I can for what the colonists took.
AS: You’re working with First Nations communities in British Columbia and with Indigenous scientists as part of the Mother Tree project. What have you learned about forest management from them?
SS: Working with the First Nations people means learning methods of governance and wisdom handed down through generations of knowing the land and looking after its resources, so that people are collectively working to ensure that there’s stability in the food system. So if salmon don’t come back to one stream this year, the neighbors are going to say, “Come and fish in my stream.” That reciprocity and respect for the land is an essential part of it.
But those community relationships have been so ripped apart by colonialism and the loss of access to their forests. So we need to help return that access, because their way of seeing the world is that it’s always connected. Whatever you do here will have ripple effects over there. If you cut down this forest, it’s going to fill that estuary with silt. And now that I’m older, I’m learning it and seeing it as I work with my Indigenous colleagues.
AS: You’ve talked about growing up in the old growth forest as an experience of reverence.
SS: Yeah. And that’s a spiritual thing. It’s a spiritual connection to our brothers and sisters, these trees. There’s an energy, a spirit in them. I’ve always had that spirituality, but I have not always named it.
AS: Well, you were working in science, after all.
SS: Yes, and I’ve been critiqued by reductionist scientists who say that I’m too spiritual, too mystical, dangerous to the forestry world. And I’m just like, “Man, you know, that’s the part that we’re missing.” That’s why we’re in so much trouble, because we forgot that all these beings are connected to us and connected to each other. If we treated them as though they were our brothers and sisters, we would not be in the situation we’re in right now.
AS: You said the Mother Tree Project is tracking the impact of different ways of managing forests. On how big a scale?
SS: We’ve got nine forests of Douglas fir, in an area about the size of Denmark. It follows a climate gradient along the border with the U.S. and Canada, from the 49th parallel up to about the 57th parallel. We’re applying all these different ways of harvesting and tending the forests and then following the impacts. So it’s a long, long-term project.
AS: It sounds like something that’ll outlive you.
SS: I imagine it as a 100-year project. My close colleague, Chief Rande Cook, talks about the 500-year plan. And I have lots of students and even my daughters who will be the next stewards of it, and who will train and mentor the next generation of stewards after that.
AS: You had a powerful vision in a shamanic experience recently, where you connected deeply with the life cycle of one of those “mother trees.” Was it a vision of what a return to resilient forests might look like?
SS: I went to Ecuador last year and I had the opportunity to work with a couple of shamans. And I had an experience where I flew over the forests of Ecuador — the great tropical rainforest, which is immense and magical — and then over my province of British Columbia where this devastating clear-cutting is happening.
And I had this vision of all these trees opening up again, slowly standing back up, and the people were there working with the trees to stand our ecosystems back up and heal climate change. It was an incredible vision.
AS: I’d like to believe it’s a vision of the future.
SS: I think it is and I think we’ll get there. The question is how we’ll suffer in the meantime. How much will my kids, our kids, the next generations, suffer? We have a responsibility to say, “What can I do to reduce that?” To not have it be so devastating that people are dying in hurricanes and droughts and fires, but instead are having good lives where they’re working with the land and in the forests and doing the good work of standing these forests back up again and repairing the ecosystems and creating abundance.
We can do that. It’s a choice.
