All summer and throughout the autumn months I have been engaged with mushrooming, a practice that has deepened my relationship with the forest as a whole. In my imagination, have been walking with Dr. Suzanne Simard, who also learned about symbiotic mycorrhizal networks by examining fungi. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of some of the millions of gold, silver, red, and orange fungal threads that lie just beneath the forest floor.

Suzanne grew up in the Canadian Northwest in old-growth forest (fir, hemlock, cedar), the daughter of a logging family that extended back generations. She loved to eat dirt as a child and says that she always felt that she was part of the great web of interconnection that is the forest. She states that the trees were in her DNA and of course, we know today that they are (each of us shares about 53 percent of our DNA with all trees)! She experienced the forest as an organism that was whole. The men in her family logged old-growth forest in BC sustainably, “never taking more than they needed” and the very dangerous work of logging was all done by hand.

Suzanne was the first woman to enter the field of Forestry as a young undergraduate in the late seventies where she discovered, to her dismay, that everything she was learning was increasingly focused on separating the parts of the forest from the whole. She believed that clear-cutting whole mountains and replanting ‘plantations’ composed of one species was detrimental to the trees, inviting insect infestation while destroying the underground mycelial networks that she intuited connected all the trees and plants of the forest in a ‘wood-wide-web’.

She sensed that entire forests were communicating not just above ground (they communicate threats of insect invasion and other information chemically by way of air), but underground through billions of miles of mycorrhizal nets composed of roots and fungus. She believed that when these root and fungal networks were destroyed during logging, new seedlings had difficulty generating. She also intuited that separating one tree species from another would have negative long-term consequences for clear-cutting and plantations alike.

Suzanne was sure that by protecting islands of old trees, their offspring and other species helped maintain wildlife biodiversity, providing networks for recovery from deforestation after logging. After years of painstaking field research, Suzanne proved that what she had sensed and intuited about the way the forest worked turned out to be true. What interests me is that Suzanne never lost touch with her feelings and senses as she developed her ideas. Instead, she set out to do research to validate her beliefs.

After Suzanne’s values collided with those of the Forest Service, she left the forest industry. When she obtained her PhD., Suzanne became a Forest scientist/ecologist. In her first field experiment, she proved that fir and birch exchanged carbon through underground mycorrhizal networks and that these two species cooperated with each other, supporting and enhancing the growth and health of both (birch also protected fir from devastating root disease).

Through extensive field research over a period of thirty-plus years, she demonstrated how trees communicated and exchanged carbon and other nutrients, nourished and favored their kin but also helped their neighbors, and when dying, offered precious carbon and other elements to the trees they left behind.

Initially, she hoped that this research would reveal that forests behaved as one interconnected whole organism, with each tree, plant, root, and fungus necessary to the other. And that this new understanding would help change existing destructive forestry practices.

Sadly, after thirty-plus years, and hundreds of field experiments by Suzanne, her graduate students, and other researchers that continue to prove her theses, not one forestry practice has changed. In Canada, 80 percent of the forests continue to be clear-cut.

In the US, where we have fewer trees, 40 percent of our forests are still strip logged. In both countries, enormous amounts of carbon are being released into the atmosphere as a result. Peter Wohlleben, a former German forester who became a tree advocate calls foresters “tree butchers” in his book and film The Hidden Life of Trees.

Suzanne understands what the word humility means. She is the first to say that she stands on the shoulders of giants that include not only the work of naturalists and scientists that came before her, but the ideas of Indigenous peoples, with whom she now collaborates. She closed an ancient circle when she discovered that her values/research mirrored those of people who have lived on this continent for millennia, people who have always understood how to live in respectful, reciprocal relationship with forests.

Most westerners believe that forests are a ‘resource’ to be used (and abused); some perceive themselves to be ‘stewards’ who believe that humans know more than nature does about how to protect forests.

A very few take a more holistic approach, believing that nature is sentient and that forests are capable of caring for themselves, or were up until human-induced climate change interrupted natural processes (Northeast Wilderness Trust is a large regional organization dedicated to working with all landowners and forestry organizations to preserve and re-wild forests, providing an alternate perspective and the reader with an excellent example).

With climate change upon us, we see that the field research of scientists like Susanne Simard, along with many others, has become critical because although forests can adapt to changes that occur over millions of years, they probably cannot survive this present crisis without assistance.

To that end, Suzanne has begun an ambitious one-hundred-year research program called “The Mother Tree Project”, which is designed around answering the question of how to best assist trees in forests and plantations during climate change.

Suzanne is presently concentrating on how underground networks could be disrupted by environmental threats during climate warming as a result of logging and pine beetle infestations that are especially prevalent in plantations (artificial forests composed of one species like pine that grow and can be harvested quickly for cash).

Suzanne (like me) takes a “both-and” approach to forests, recognizing that because we must have wood products, forest plantations are necessary, but at the same time, we must stop strip logging, which damages whole ecosystems, and cease all old-growth forest logging. Many trees throughout the country are already sick, and some are dying. As the climate continues to warm, new species will replace those that cannot adapt fast enough.

Thanks to Suzanne’s impeccable research, we have already learned, for example, that dying trees will pass on nutrients to the new species that will replace them, giving the trees the necessary carbon, etc. they need to survive if their mycorrhizal networks are not destroyed by the industrial logging machine. This program is open to existing and future graduate students, citizen scientists, and anyone who is interested in participating.

Central to the program are the values of relationship and partnership with respect to forests/nature, values we desperately need to embrace if the human species is to survive … It is too easy to forget that without forests to provide us with air to breathe and clean water to drink, humans, the youngest species on this planet, will not survive the dark times ahead.

Regardless of outcome, Suzanne has created a bridge into the future with her groundbreaking research and her astonishing memoir “Finding the Mother Tree …” a book that tells a riveting story about a young woman growing up in a logging family who becomes a forest scientist in the hopes of changing the way westerners think about trees and forests as a whole.

I can only hope her work will reach the ears of conservation-minded people soon enough to make a difference.

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