A Re-Ordered Summary Synthesis
by R.W. Sandford
Global Water Futures Chair, Water and Climate Security United Nations University
Institute for Water, Environment & Health
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
By Suzanne Simard
Introduction
I have been struggling since the beginning of the pandemic to find meaning in, and to give value to this transformational moment in the human journey. At last, after many months, I have got as far as an outline, at least, for a personal approach to dealing with the accelerating climate emergency that has erupted in the midst of the wave after wave of COVID crises.
I had only started Simard’s book when the time came to give a scheduled webinar on strategies for staying calm and focused on effective action in the face of a planetary climate emergency. Even though I had barely read past the introduction of Simard’s book, I was so taken by it, I made what she wrote the basis of my first strategy. Here is how I framed that discussion.
In the wake of the climate disasters in British Columbia this past year I undertook a weeks-long assessment of what I need to understand and deal with the new conditions with which we are confronted by the realization that the climate change impacts we projected to appear around mid-century have arrived 20 to 30 years earlier than intended. I have undertaken this assessment with the goal of sharing what I have come to see and understand so that others can compare my journey with theirs so that, together, we won’t have to rely on others who might dissuade us from responding meaningfully to what we are seeing unfolding right before our very eyes
and, in so doing, lose the leadership opportunity to create a safer, more just and more legitimately sustainable future in our time just when we need that leadership most.
In forcing myself to examine carefully and honestly where I stood now that it was impossible to deny we face a planetary emergency, it did not take long to realize the extent that I have over time been gradually paralyzed by growing anxiety born of helplessness that I had to fight to avoid debilitating despair.
I was surprised that getting back to the roots of my deepening anxiety demanded I go back ten years to once again face failures of courage in my life that Terry Tempest Williams challenged me through her writing to examine.
Terry Tempest Williams argues that we can save where we live ― but only if we love it and are not afraid to act on that love. Through her work she reminds me constantly that “it is a vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply” and that we may not survive our affections. Tempest Williams feels, as I do, that we are being taught to hoard our spirit so that when a landscape we care about is lost, the town we live is overwhelmed by thoughtless outsiders or eroded within by internal and external parasites that feed on qualities of community and place –when the places that define our identities are corrupted or taken from us – that our hearts are not broken because we never risked giving our love away.
Tempest Williams is right. The onslaught of public relations and aggressive self interest in our society has made us fear and suspect our deepest feelings of connection within us.
“By bottling up our cravings and our love and confining them within,” Williams writes, “we keep ourselves docile and loyal and obedient and we settle for, or accept, the inevitability of loss of what is at the root of our connection with place.” And that, to a very real extent, is what I have done.
But Terry Tempest Williams won’t accept my moral lapse and, worse than that won’t leave me alone. She believes in spiritual resistance – “the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks.” It was because I believed her, and I could no longer bottle up my love for where I lived and confine my rage within, that I wrote The Weekender Effect.
But while the book has been read around the world, my protesting the loss of place and all that place means has had no effect. Instead of sounding an alarm, the book became a chronicle of the coming to pass of all that I feared. If anything, the onslaught of greed, self-interest and moral failure on the part of our leaders, municipal, provincial and federal has grown. I lost faith in myself and confidence that the places I loved would endure, and once more began keeping everything bottled up. But once, again, Terry Tempest Williams would have none of it.
In When Women Were Birds, she called me out for my loss of moral courage when she wrote “To be numb to the world is another form of suicide.” I realize now that I have trended and continue to trend self-destructively toward that end. My fear of loss has now become so great that it literally hurts me to visit the places I so care about. What I care about at the Columbia Icefield is literally melting away right before my very eyes. I am reluctant to drive downtown in the town in which I have lived for 40 years. It hurts to be reminded of such much loss. It is as if I was suffering from a form of pre-traumatic stress disorder – if such a condition could be said to exist. It is almost as if my heart is already broken so there is no longer any point in risking giving my love away.
Even though I knew it is unproductive to live like this, I had yet to find the strength to stand fully by my principles. Because I knew that if I did, I would alienate almost everyone around me, I just pretended to go along, to live with the crassness that is undermining my community, with the destruction of place, with the trashing of our national parks, with the changing of the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the acidification on the global ocean …. the list, as we all know, of what we accept goes on and on. All I felt I could do is bear witness.
Of course, taking this tack just made my work more painful. Many in the climate community felt and still feel trapped by public and political apathy we can’t seem to penetrate. At the same time, we remain constantly assaulted by the increasingly insidious denial strategies meant to prolong the ever more uncivil undeclared war the fossil fuel sector continues to wage against climate truth.
Then something remarkable happened to break the evil spell public apathy had cast on me. Along came Greta, and with her, truth. She has done more in the last two years to raise awareness of the climate threat than the entire climate community has been able to do in the past 20 years.
And now, in this past year we are confronted by irrefutable, undeniable evidence of the climate fact.
We find ourselves, indeed, in the midst of a transformational moment during which we, more than ever, need those who know how to build the bridge between the human spirit and scientific knowledge and all other ways of knowing and caring. We need, all of us, to be the embodiment of the hope the world needs and the inspiration that leads to action that will validate hope.
To have a future, we must save the past. We, all of us, must continue at all costs to protect our sense of place, and in tandem, celebrate Sense of Place’s magic sister, Sense of Wonder, and at all costs we must not lost sight of the critical importance Sense of Place’s other enchanting sister, Sense of Humour.
We know now that the best arguments in the world won’t necessarily change a person’s mind. What might do that, however, is a good story. We must be the keepers and tellers of unforgettable stories. Our world, however, is changing. We need to create new myths and memes that we share as part of a new era of storytelling.
We need to evoke deep memories and craft them into new and positively compelling self-fulfilling predictions that inspire joy through meaningful action.
Each of us possesses our own personal way of framing and addressing these challenges. The increasing gravity of the dangerous situation we as a society have brought upon ourselves, however, has forced to me rethink my approaches to how and what I am interpreting. I have been forced to realize that some of the approaches I employed in the past may have worked to some extent then, but won’t work now.
In response, I have, over the last two months, developed a six-pronged strategy for re-engaging with the problem of Earth system overshoot that has created the climate threat. Here are the strategies as they are presently:
Strategy 1: Maintain My Grounding
I have found that it is impossible to carry on in the midst of an accelerating period of diminishment and loss without staying focused on the wonder in the world. The best tonic for the battle-weary is a regular dose of what we are fighting to protect. I realize now that dwelling in fresh surprises is what has always inspired me most. What has really kept me grounded in awe recently is new research on forests as living beings.
In Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Suzanne Simard tells us that a forest is more than a collection of trees. Through careful, persistent peer-reviewed science Simard has demonstrated that trees are, in fact, capable of perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations and that forests are a web of interdependence, linked by systems of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy, and with an intelligence that can no longer be denied. Forests are not simply inert standing wood. They are wired for wisdom, sentience and healing. Simard turns conventional wisdom on its head. It is no longer all about how we can save trees. It is about how trees can save us.
Life talks to itself and we can listen in. It is still possible to create cosmos out of chaos. But we need to hurry. We are witnessing a great bonfire of our heritage. Things are being lost that have not yet been found. We need to find them before they are gone.
Strategy 2: Keep Up with the Science
More than ever, I need to continue to diligently keep up with the science, with a critical expanded focus on changes in societal understanding and levers for action. What happened this year in British Columbia, and widely in much of the rest of the world, is a game changer. We have entered a new stage of climate emergency. In keeping up with the science, however, I have to be careful always not to let my inherent optimism protect me or deflect me from the facts.
Strategy 3: Maintain My Own Personal Relationship to the Climate Threat: Do the Hard Work of Hope
Warnings issued by the climate science community for the past 40 years have, until now, been largely ignored. As a result, what scientists once projected to happen in the future is happening now. The future we feared and wanted at all cost to avoid has arrived, in some places 30 years earlier than anticipated. Presently what we know and have projected has become like a “lantern on the stern that only shines on the waves behind us.”
It is going to get worse. I must be among the ones who don’t lose their heads while others are losing theirs. The mechanism I have used to navigate my way first through the decades of public apathy with respect to action and now to come to terms with the acceleration of the climate threat is to read, write and talk my way through it. That leads me to my next strategy.
Strategy 4: Find My Own Ways & Words to Tell The Story
I have found that it is one thing to have an understanding of the climate threat and how you will personally come to terms with it, and quite another to successfully communicate that understanding meaningfully to others. In the darkest moments, I imagine myself going along with the reasoning German health minister who glibly offered that COVID would soon resolve itself. By next spring he said, COVID would no longer be a threat because by then everyone would have been vaccinated, cured or dead. Shouldn’t we take the same approach with climate change? Shouldn’t we just let floods and tornadoes convince the congenitally contrary that not getting killed or displaced by climate disruption is actually in their interest?
Inevitably, when I let myself droop this low, Terry Tempest Williams comes back to remind me that anger is not an answer to evil. “Your duty, Bob,” I hear her saying, “is to find the strength to bear witness and tell the truth even though it is hard to bear.” I am shamed. Clearly, there is no other way forward. I have to find better ways and words to tell my story.
Then she reminds me of something that has become the foundation of my next to last strategy. “How shall we live?” she asks. “Build community,” she answers. “Because in community anything is possible.”
Strategy 5: Build and Sustain Community
As Richard Powers observes in The Overstory, his amazing novel about the sentience of forests, “life will not answer to reason. And meaning it too young a thing to have much power over it.” Beyond established universal laws, there is no knowing for an absolute fact. The path to truth is an endless one, and on that path the only dependable things are humility and looking.
We cannot do what needs to be done to face this planetary emergency alone. We need to surround ourselves with people who will help us have and share hope. We need to build and sustain community and that is what this webinar is all about. That takes me to my final strategy.
Strategy 6: Help Others Do the Same
My final strategy is to help others wherever I can to relate to and act on the climate threat in their own positive way. In the I am particularly committed to intergenerational dialogue and cooperation.
I want to help others explore and deepen their own sense of place and sense of wonder about the natural world; encourage them not to fear the science and to establish their own personal relationship to concerns about Earth system overshoot and the climate threat that has emerged from it.
I want to encourage others to find their own words and ways to express what they think and feel about the future; and to trust in and build community in the interests of at future for it is at the local level – the level at which all of us ultimately work – that we have the most power to effect change and to act most effectively in service of where and how we live and who we love, now and in the future. It is in the building of community that we must concentrate our greatest efforts.
But the presentation and all I did to prepare for it, I found, was just the beginning of a long overdue deep reassessment of the strategies I need to develop if I am going to help myself and others deal with this unexpected acceleration of the climate change threat. Fortunately, I was far from taking full advantage of what Suzanne Simard had to teach me and understanding the full measure of the gift she gave the world when she wrote Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.
As soon as I got through the webinar, I dove directly and deeply back into Finding the Mother Tree. Reading it was such a positive, refreshing and ultimately hopeful experience I wanted to extend the glow it cast over me over the entire Solstice Season. In full disclosure, I have to admit that I didn’t want it to end if only because if I finished it, I knew I would be forced back to the unpleasant reality that is the actual zeitgeist we live in as portrayed in the movie Don’t Look Up, which I also saw during the Solstice Celebration. The main reason for never wanting to finish
Finding the Mother Tree, however, was that, in it, I found passages that I wanted to roll around in my mind and my heart for the rest of my life.
I am not wrong in casting Suzanne Simard as an absolute scientific iconoclast. In my view, her ideas about cooperation as opposed to competition being the origins of not just sentience but intelligence in mature forests – and later in us – rank with Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection as a landmark breakthrough in Earth science thinking. How she arrived at this hypothesis also marks a breakthrough in how we should view the world. She proved to us by way of peer-reviewed science that a forest really is more than a collection of trees. Trees are, as she points out, capable of perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. Forests really
are a web of interdependence, linked by systems of underground channels, where trees perceive and connect and relate with one another by way of an elaborate filigree of roots and fungi and the millions of living things that inhabit the soil. Forests are most certainly not simply inert standing wood as forestry companies would have us believe. Forests possess an intelligence that can no longer be denied. They are wired for wisdom, sentience and healing. Our conventional wisdom is inadequate. Yes, we should be concerned about how we can save trees; but we should also be far more aware of how trees can save us.
But even concentrating on these recognitions is just skimming the surface of the deeper meaning of her discoveries. And because what she has discovered is of such critical importance to us now at this moment of planetary emergency, it may be very helpful to walk the forest path she took as she explains how she came to the understandings that led to her extraordinary findings. I can almost hear her voice.
“Is it possible that the trees are as perceptive of their neighbours as we are of our own thoughts and moods? Even more, are the social interactions between trees as influential on their shared reality as that of two people engaged in conversation? Can trees discern as quickly as we can? Can they continuously gauge, adjust, based on their signals and interactions, just as we do? Just as the inflection of the way Don says “Suze,” and from his brief glances, I comprehend his meaning. Maybe trees relate to one another as delicately, with such attunement. Signalling as precisely as the neurons in our brains do, to make sense of the world. …
Could information be transmitted across synapses in mycorrhizal networks, the same way it happens in our brains? …
Maybe I was on to something, both neural networks and mycorrhizal networks transmit information molecules across synapses. Molecules move not just the cross walls of adjacent plant cells and the end pores or back-to-back fungi cells, but also across the synapses of different plant roots, or different mycorrhizas. Chemicals are released into these synapses, and the information must then be transported along an electrochemical source link gradient from fungal-root tip to fungal root-tip, similar to the workings of the nervous system.
The same basic processes, it seemed to me, were occurring in the mycorrhizal fungal network as in our neural networks. Giving us that flash of brilliance when we solve a problem, or make an important decision, or align our relationships. Maybe from both networks emerge connection, communication and cohesion.
It was already accepted widely that plants use their neural-like physiology to perceive their environment. Their leaves, stems, and roots sense and comprehend their surroundings, then alter their growth, ability to forage for nutrients, photosynthetic rates, and closure rates of stomata for saving water. The fungal hyphae, too, perceive their environment and alter their architecture and physiology. …
The Latin verb intelligere means to comprehend or perceive.
“Intelligence.”
Her assessment: Forests can be represented as fluid intelligence.
In the midst of her own battle with cancer, Simard contemplated her doctor’s wisdom about “embracing the mystery of life, sensing that magical, emergent phenomena when we work together, the synergy that reductionist science so often misses, leading us to mistakenly simplify our societies and ecosystems.”
“I imagine the flow of energy from the Mother Tree as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child.”
In the midst of this conversation, Simard asks the Big Question – and in answering it herself provides the Big Takeaway: If we are equal to everything in nature, do we share the same goals in death?
“The data also showed that injury, whether by spruce budworm or the shears, induced Mother-Tree seedlings to transfer even more carbon to her kind. Facing an uncertain future, she was putting her life force straight off to her offspring, helping them prepare for changes ahead.
Dying enable the living; the aged fueled their young.”
She then goes on to blow contemporary forest management practices based on a mechanistic world view out of the water.
“The trees of the next generation with genes most adaptable to change – whose parents have been shaped by a variety of climatic conditions, those attuned to the stresses of their parent, with robust defense arsenals and shots of energy – ought to be the most successful in rebounding from whatever tumult lies ahead. The practical application – what this might mean for forest management – is that elders that survived climate changes in the past ought to be kept around because they can spread their seed into the disturbed areas and pass their genes and energy and resilience into the future. Not only a few elders, but a range of species, of many genotypes, kin and strangers, a natural mix to ensure the forest is varied and adapted.”
Of the contemporary practice of clear-cut salvage logging, she has this to say:
“My wish is that we might think twice about salvage harvesting the dying Mother Trees, might be compelled to leave a portion behind to take care of the young, not merely their own but those of their neighbours too. In the wake of diebacks from droughts, beetles, budworms, and fires, the timber industry has been cutting wide swaths of the forest, the clear-cuts coalescing over whole watersheds, entire valleys mowed down. The dead trees were considered a fire risk, but more likely a convenient commodity. Great numbers of healthy neighbours have also been captured for the mills as collateral damage. This salvage cutting has been amplifying carbon emissions, changing the seasonal hydrology in watersheds and in some cases causing streams to flood their banks. With few trees left, the sediments are flowing down rivulets and into rivers already warming with climate change, harming salmon runs even further.”
How can the truth of these claims be contested and ignored in the wake of the flooding that took place in the forested interior of British Columbia in November of 2021? We have, as a society, clearly gone a long way down the wrong path with respect to forestry practices and there may not be time walk back our terrible misjudgements.
Our Forestry Practices Are Self-Terminating
Now that we have learned to recognize it, we now know that our forests exhibit intelligence. Presently the foresters and forest companies that have taken possession of our forests are little more than forest engineers, forest miners who look at a forest and see only wood. We are knowingly wiping out other major forms of intelligence that exist on a living world we share other sentient beings.
How can British Columbia – or any other jurisdiction for that matter – justify logging practices of this kind now that the cumulative damage they causing is now so well known. How can we permit the perpetuation of these practices when, in fact their impacts are so severe over the long term that continuing to pursue them is, in fact, self-terminating for the entire forestry sector because they will put an end to the existence of forests as we have known them? When will this stop, this unravelling?
Part of the calm genius of Simard’s lifework, is the patient, careful, systematic way she builds up a body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence that clearly validates traditional Indigenous knowledge. The reader doesn’t have to go far into the book to see that Simard is leading us there. Much of the value of the book is that Simard reports the research findings objectively, and lets the reader come to his or her own conclusions about what they mean.
Simard deals in the same way with the implications of the gap that exists between current forest practices and Indigenous ways of knowing and caring for the sentient world in which we all live. She leaves the reader to work that out also. It is clear, however, that escaping from the omnicidal dangers we pose to ourselves and to the rest of the world is not going to be an easy project.
What we learn from the forests and from the conventional wisdom behind the forest practices that have evolved over the past century is that in challenging a mechanistic world view that maintains that the rest of nature is just a commodity; a resource that has no being beyond utility, we should count on relentless indifference, criticism and opposition. Not enough people yet on this planet remember, are aware of, or acknowledge the sentience of the living world and how that sentience supports and sustains ours. Not enough people are in a position to “go and find your own Mother Tree.”
That said, like more and more of us, Simard believes that we may be in a transformational moment. Simard’s years in the forestry profession have shown her that too many decision-makers still dismiss this way of viewing nature and rely only on select parts of science. The impacts of outmoded contemporary forestry practices, however, have become too devastating to ignore. “We can now 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 principle of “we are all related,” or the Salish concept of “we are all one.”
But adopting Indigenous philosophical principles relating to the care of the living world around you of the kind Simard validates take a great deal effort and demands more sacrifice than most non-Indigenous peoples appear willing or able to make. True worldviews run deep and can only be held through acting upon them in ways that fully honour them. On this matter, I turn to a new book by Amitav Ghosh entitled The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. This book explores in a complementary manner many of the same themes Simard does in Finding the Mother Tree, but in the broader context of the relationship between colonialism and prevalent world view that nature has no being beyond utility.
“Today, as we look at the floods, wildfires, and droughts that afflict some of the most intensively terraformed parts of the Earth – Florida, California, the American Midwest, southeastern Australia, and so on – it is hard not to wonder whether those landscapes have no decided to shrug off the forms imposed upon them by European settlers. …
In any event it is increasingly clear that the Earth can, and does, act, except that its actions unfold over scales of time that shrink the four-hundred-year gap between 1621 and 2021 to a mere instant, like that which separates the slipping of a boulder on a mountain slope from the landslide that follows. From that perspective the response to four centuries of terraforming, during which time the project, in its neoliberal guises, has come to be universally adopted by global elites.
These developments are making it ever more evident that many “savage” and “brutish people understood something about landscapes and the Earth that their conquerors did not. This, perhaps, is why even hard-headed, empirically minded foresters, water experts, and landscape engineers have begun to advocate policies that are based on Indigenous understandings of ecosystems. Experts even have a name, and an acronym, for this now – Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Yet the very name is suggestive of a fundamental misunderstanding: it assumes that
Indigenous understandings are useable “knowledge” rather than an awareness created and sustained by songs and stories.
You cannot relate to Gunung Api as the Bandanese did unless you know that your volcano is capable of producing meanings; you cannot relate to the Dinétah as the Diné did unless the Glittering World glitters for you too.
The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit the living Earth – Gaia.”
To survive we have to decolonize ourselves of the deeply baked-in ideology that conquest is a form of extraction.
Back to Simard. Making this necessary transformation to a sustainable future – or to any liveable future – requires that humans reconnect with nature – the forests, the prairie, the oceans – instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation. It means expanding our modern ways, our epistemology and scientific methodologies, so that they can complement, build on and align with Aboriginal roots. Mowing down the forests and harvesting the waters to fulfill our wildest dreams of material wealth just because we can has caught up to us.
So here I am at 72, near the end of my life. How do I deal with having my worldview utterly shattered even though the breakthrough confirms what I held to be true in nature all of my life? I am surrounded at last what appears to be a humanity that is finally returning to its senses. It has been said that all that has occurred has done so in what is just a blink in time in terms of the life of the Earth, but it is my blink in time. No matter how late in the day it may be for me, there is no rationalizing inaction. The question now becomes this: what should I be focussing on with my remaining life energy?
And I have it. What more of a breakthrough in world view do we need? We now know that cooperation as opposed to competition over millions of years allowed sentience and then intelligence to emerge in the forests as a means for them to protect and sustain themselves and all who lived in them and relied upon them. The same sentience and intelligence in the same way later emerged from cooperation in our species. It will be through cooperation and not competition that, if we can generate enough of it, will be what gets us through the climate crisis.
Examples of the value of cooperation are all around us. If we learned nothing from the COVID pandemic, the failure to put cooperation ahead of competition simply prolongs the pain of planetary crisis and only adds to the disruption of the lives of all. Only through cooperation, and the building of community, will we be able to set our world view back on course.
I believe that Simard’s kind of transformative thinking is what will save us. “It is a philosophy of treating the world’s creatures, its gifts, as of equal important to us. This begins by recognizing that trees and plants have agency. They perceive, relate, and communicate; they exercise various behaviours. They cooperate, make decisions, learn and remember – qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom, intelligence. By noting how trees, animals, and even fungi – any and all nonhuman species – have this agency, we can acknowledge that they deserve as much regard as we accord ourselves. We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mismanagement of one species is mistreatment of all.”
As Simard points out, “the rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out.”