Heather Rawling
‘Finding the Mother Tree’ reveals a fascinating world of complex and changing inter-relationships between trees and other living things (even salmon!) including the transfer of energy and chemicals.
A fascinating book. A combination of science, adventure and biography. And the book unconsciously confirms the Dialectics of Nature developed by Marx and Engels: “That in nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events” [Engels preface to second edition of Anti-Dühring].
Author Professor Suzanne Simard is the daughter of loggers. Living in the rich forests of British Columbia, Canada, she grew up with an intimate knowledge of the landscape and its occupants. She absorbed into her being the trees, plants, fungi, animals and bugs.
As a child, she became fascinated as much by what lies beneath as what lies above the forest floor.
Her interest grew into a passion as she witnessed the demise of trees grown in monoculture in the hungry pursuit of profits. Her observations led her to scientific experiments that overturned conventional methods of forestry based on the philosophy of competition. A capitalist philosophy based on the idea that if you eradicate all competition, the winner takes all. So trees not required for harvesting must be eradicated.
But Suzanne’s experiments showed that different species of trees do better when planted alongside each other. They share carbon, water and other nutrients in a complex system below ground involving a variety of fungi. Her findings were peer reviewed and published in Nature, the scientific journal. But when she presented her paper to people in the forestry industry, mostly men, she was laughed at and ridiculed. Her polite nickname was Miss Birch. In private, apparently, they changed one of the letters. Eventually her determination to uncover the secrets of the forest to save it from destruction cost her job with the Canadian Forestry Service.
Undaunted, she found other work at the University of British Columbia. A lifetime of research, asking more questions, has revealed the interdependency of species, communication networks between trees using the pathways of fungi, changing and adapting to the environment. She develops a growing appreciation of the wisdom of the indigenous nations of Canada, who learnt over thousands of years to take only what was needed from nature and give back in some other way what was taken, staying in harmony with the environment.
Capitalism disposes of the weak and dying trees. But Professor Simard’s work shows that dying trees bequeath their energy and food to help the trees around them survive, even sending warning signals of disease. As she faces her own mortality, she argues that: “Some death of trees (is inevitable) but too much upsets the balance and can cause a cascade of changes rippling through the landscape.”
Chopping down and killing trees with chemicals depletes the natural resources in an ecosystem and newly planted saplings struggle to get enough water and nutrients to survive.
Trees even recognise their own kin giving them preferential treatment in the sharing of earth’s resources.
Professor Simard is a hands-on scientist working in the field. Hard, arduous and dangerous work at times including brushes with grizzly bears and accidental radiation leaks. Her life story is fascinating too. This is also an adventure book with vivid and beautiful descriptions of the forests of British Columbia.
A very readable science book that attests to the power of nature to recover from the ravages of capitalism, even if that means evolving and adapting. But taken too far, the forests will not recover, and their vital role in storing carbon will be lost.
There is no real solution put forward in this book on how to stop the plundering of our forests. It doesn’t attempt to. That is our job as socialists to fight on an international and global level to overthrow capitalism and usher in socialism. A socialist world could democratically plan how best to use and conserve the bounty of nature for future generations.
