We trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis. Our guests are Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, two Canadian ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid that extends beyond the forest boundaries.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode of our series about nature’s intelligence, we trek into the ancient old-growth forest where the trees reveal an ecological parable: A forest is a mightily interwoven community of diverse life that runs on symbiosis.

We meet Doctors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan, two Canadian ecologists whose work has helped reveal an elaborate tapestry of kinship, cooperation and mutual aid that extends beyond the forest boundaries.

Wander into an ancient woodland and the sheer diversity of pulsing life is breathtaking: birds flitting about high in the towering canopy – bright lichen hugging tree branches – animals scurrying about the undergrowth – moss and mushrooms underfoot – an invisible network of fungi underground.

Forests first appeared on planet earth some 390 million years ago. They’ve operated on nature’s slow time to evolve a mind-bendingly complex choreography. It’s a kind of forest kin-dom that breathes life into the world.

Western science – despite its virtues – has often not seen the forests for the trees. And extractive industries have reduced forests to board feet, devaluing the vast ecological web of relationships that make up forests, and that make them a key life-support system for planet Earth.

Today there’s a global awakening to a new paradigm of how nature operates. It’s actually a very ancient world view, long held by Indigenous and traditional land-based peoples.

Forests have long enchanted human beings as sacred places of mystery, transformation and wisdom. Cultures throughout the ages and around the world have fostered and maintained kinship with our tree relatives.

Suzanne Simard (SS): I just want to say a few names of these relatives. Grandmother tree, grandfather tree, father tree, mother tree, tree people, the tree of life, tree of knowledge, the banyan tree, the Bodhi tree, the cedar tree, the yew tree, the birch tree. Throughout our cultures, we have honored the tree, through Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Shintoism, Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Heiltsuk, Haida, Haisla, Tsimshian. The trees are always with us. We see them as symbols of life, of wisdom, fertility, continuity, growth, understanding, hospitality, generosity, peace, friendship, spirit.

Host: Suzanne Simard is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. She has revolutionized forest science through her research into the relationship between trees and their underground fungal partners. 

Born in 1960, she grew up among the old-growth forests of the Monashee Mountains. As the years went by, she became devastated by the industrial-scale destruction of the living treasures of her beloved forests.

SS: So I’ve spent my life studying these trees because this is where I come from. I come from this forest  And through my lifetime, I’ve watched what’s happened to our trees. And in fact, in British Columbia, we only have two to three percent of the tall-treed ecosystems still standing. That is wrong.

And so what I did in my grief of watching my forest disappear in front of my eyes is I became a researcher, and I started looking at the underpinnings of what made a forest, because I thought: What are we doing? We’re taking the very things that make a forest and we’re ripping it apart.

And I was building on other people’s knowledge, ancient knowledge. But I didn’t know it at the time. I was just trying to fight the corporate model of forest destruction. And so what I did is I started tracing where nutrients went through the forest floor. Where was the energy going; what happened to it when we got rid of the old trees? And in my quest to do this, I found out that, you know, that these trees are in community. Huh, no surprise. Right? The trees are in a forest in community and they’re actually communicating, like a community does.

I’ve worked with many brilliant students, and we’ve all worked on trying to understand how this forest works, how these connections work. And so what we’ve figured out is that when you’re walking through a forest, there’s this huge vibrant thing underneath called a network. And through our work, we changed how we viewed forests, from a bunch of trees that we see aboveground, to a whole network of belowground connections.

Host: This research into underground fungal networks found symbiosis at the heart of the forest’s own management. Cooperation and mutual aid between the trees and mycorrhizal fungal networks, as well as between older and younger trees. Big, elder “mother trees,” as Suzanne calls them, are especially foundational to the health of forests.

Nor does this dance of cooperation stop at the forest’s edge. Enter Teresa Ryan,  Suzanne’s colleague at the University of British Columbia where she studies these connections closely.

Teresa Ryan (TR): So my name is Sm’hayetsk. I’m Teresa Ryan. I’m from the Gitlan tribe with the Tsimshian Nation, Ganhada Clan. And my mother is Loa Ryan. As an Indigenous person, I have my science background and I also have an Indigenous knowledge base that I pull from at all times.

Host: As an Indigenous scientist, Teresa Ryan was unsurprised at the findings, such as how salmon from the ocean nourish the forest.

TR: These are beautiful systems that are interconnected. The salmon, when they come in from the ocean, they are bringing with them marine-derived nutrients, and particularly, marine-derived nitrogen, into the river system. They’re feeding many predators, the charismatic species that people see are the bears. They’ll take a salmon that they’ve caught to the riparian area alongside the river, up to their favorite spot, eating their favorite parts. And then they’ll leave the carcass there and go get another one.

And then this amazing thing happens when that carcass is decomposing into the soils, there’s other critters that are coming along and nibbling on it too. Then there’s the organisms in the soil that are also feasting on this annual abundance of food that just shows up on their doorstep.

And then there are nutrients that are carried along mycorrhizal networks in the forest. We actually had a student in our salmon forest project, demonstrated that marine-derived nitrogen is above waterfalls, where salmon can’t actually get to. So that shows us that this marine-derived nitrogen, which it’s coming from the ocean, is transmitted belowground in these vast networks of root systems belowground.

Host: It’s an awe-inspiring parable of the circle of life. Nitrogen from the ocean feeds these vast Canadian forests, courtesy of salmon, bears, microbes and the mycorrhizal fungi that nourish the trees through their roots. There’s nothing like 390 million years of R&D to get it right.

TR: Salmon are everywhere in the forest. And that’s pretty amazing when you think about the size of our trees that we have in these forests, they’re huge. Salmon play an important role in their life cycle.

It’s also beneficial for the salmon, so there’s a reciprocal relationship with the forest. The forest provides the shade, the canopy cover, to keep the streams cool. And that’s important for salmon because they need to have the cool water for the return migration and to lay their egg nests in the streams. And so it’s a feedback mechanism.

Host: Historically, Indigenous practices developed over millennia reflect an astute awareness of the intricate interdependence of forest life. Traditional salmon fishing methods have carefully avoided overfishing, for example, understanding that the rest of the forest needs the salmon too.

Traditional Indigenous teachings already recognized the underground fungal networks that Teresa and Suzanne documented through their scientific study- such as those of the Indigenous Skokomish elder, Subiyay.

TR: He was a very wise elder. And he would tell the stories about the tree people. We have stories about salmon people, and we have stories about tree people, about stone people—there’s all these different beings, and they’re equivalent; they’re people. Subiyay would tell stories about how a forest has so much to teach us, because there’s all of these connections belowground that are interwoven. And because they’re so interconnected it provides something that we can emulate in our communities. It shows us the strength of community.

Host: Community, mutual aid, kinship – these are powerful operating instructions for how to live for the long haul. Not to mention the majesty and genius of this slow-time natural magic.  

In 2021, Suzanne Simard wrote a breakthrough book called “Finding the Mother Tree” where she chronicles these remarkable forest networks. It became an influential bestseller, upending the public’s view of forests.

Suzanne discussed the book with Bioneers producer JP Harpignies.

SS: My purpose of writing that book was just really to convey what this new research is showing, and a better-informed public, to me, is a public that will protect nature better. 

And I felt like they needed to know, because what we were doing in forestry was destroying the very underpinnings of what made a forest, through forestry practices. And I think, they need to know. A plantation is not the same as an old growth forest, for example. 

JP Harpignies (JPH): Right, right.

SS: And what my research is showing is that you need all these complex relationships that are intact and protected and really nurtured to create a healthy ecosystem that provides the life support that we need, that we need and all our relations need.

Host: A forest is known as a “complex adaptive system.” It’s self-organizing. It has dynamic, regenerative relationships that adapt and evolve with changing conditions, while creating conditions conducive to life.  

Because the nature of nature is change, it produces emergent qualities fitted to the time and place. It’s far more than the sum of its parts – and the health of any one part depends on its overall health.

As complex adaptive systems, mature forests are wildly different from the mono-cultural tree plantations installed by industrial forestry. These projects are designed to reduce trees to a uniform commodity that’s easy to monetize in the global marketplace. As Suzanne Simard points out, plantations are not forests at all.

SS: My book is sort of like a different way of looking at the forest. That’s quite opposite to what mainstream forestry will tell you, which is you can replace an old forest and create a more productive forest if you use tree breeding and pesticides and fertilizers, and spacing, and thinning, and I’m coming along saying, actually, we need to work with these natural systems. 

And, you know, as people look at natural systems and they compare them to these managed systems — you see it in the journals as well—these natural systems that are naturally recovering are in better condition than the ones that we’ve applied this industrial model against. And I’m saying that’s a better way to go. It doesn’t mean don’t do anything, but it means do it differently. And so that’s a threat to many decades of research that supported that industrial model. 

JPH: It seems very much that what you’re talking about is a holistic, whole-systems approach as opposed to a reductionist efficiency model, and that that is really like almost an ideological struggle across a whole range of fields.

SS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a lot harder to manage a system as a complex adaptive system than to reduce it down to rows of trees. But the consequences of the rows of trees are much harder to deal with in the longer run than if you’ve managed this whole system. So a whole systems level approach is you’re looking at multiple scales of interaction; you’re looking at all the energy coming in and how it’s flowing through the system, how it’s flowing out of the system; you’re looking at socio-ecological principles and interactions. It’s bottom up, it’s top down at the same time. It’s all of that together, instead of saying, the industrial model is: we know best; we’re going to do it this way; we’re going to create this forest to look like this. That is really easy to do. It’s easy to clearcut and plant a forest. It doesn’t mean that the outcome is good. 

It’s a lot harder to work in these systems level complex systems where there’s many actors and many complex relationships, but that is where the solutions to climate change are. It is in honoring the complexity of those systems. It’s working with the people that know these systems so well for so long. That is the answer to filling our carbon deficits and our biodiversity deficits. It’s working very, very sensitively with cultures and ecosystems. 

Host: After the break, Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan suggest that now is the time to unite modern science and traditional ecological knowledge to bring about a genuine paradigm shift capable of restoring the Earth and enlisting human beings to become a blessing on the land.

Host: When the Europeans first came to Turtle Island, they thought they’d found a luxuriantly fertile and abundant wilderness where numerous Indians living there were simply living freely off the fat of the land. The newcomers couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was actually a vast cultivated landscape carefully tended by the Indigenous peoples living there. They understood that human beings are a keystone species on whom many others depend.

For Canadian Indigenous peoples, the colonial intruders arriving in the 17th century overran their homelands and ravaged their ancient cultural ties to the forest. It caused an epic historical discontinuity both for First Peoples and for the forests, as Teresa Ryan describes.

TR: Indigenous communities on the coast of British Columbia were surprised by colonialism when it landed on our doorstep one day. And so we’ve been tortured trying to figure out why can’t we do our stewardship practices; what happened to our management of resources?

And whatever goes on in the watersheds, such as forestry activity or agricultural activity, or mining or anything, it goes right into the streams and it affects salmon. So Indigenous people throughout the entire salmon forest region, which is in California, all the way along the coast north, all the way around Alaska into the Arctic. And the Indigenous people in these areas have observed changes over the last 150 years. And so how do we get back into expressing our traditions, compared to the way this colonial system has managed it?

Host: Early Native Americans had a widespread system of rules and regulations, and they recognized some limited land ownership because owning brought a responsibility to the land and incentivized moderation.

They also had shared lands. The fishing season was regulated up and down entire river drainages across many cultures speaking different languages. If you broke these kinds of laws, there were grave penalties—and spiritual consequences as well. With the arrival of the colonists, all that changed.

TR: When the colonial agent said you’ll be on this reserve and don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t go fishing, you’re not allowed to do that.

Our economy was obliterated, and that has had a significant impact on Indigenous people for sure, but it’s also had a significant impact on the resources that we provided these stewardship activities for for thousands of years. And now that these resources are vanishing rapidly, there’s a sudden interest in these Indigenous knowledge systems. The land was taken, the culture suppressed, being assimilated, and it’s devastating. 

And so critical imperative action is needed to restore the Indigenous stewardship to these systems, because the knowledge still exists. We still have it, and that’s something we don’t want to give up, not when we’ve lost all these other things. The knowledge is treasured. It has to be protected so that there are future generations that can take care of the resources.

Host: Indeed, there’s a global awakening today around the value of traditional Indigenous knowledge. It’s coupled with the Land Back movement and the intercultural need for First Peoples to be involved in land management decision-making.

Prioritizing the rights and engagement of Canadian First Peoples in protecting and restoring the forests is an explicit imperative for Teresa Ryan and Suzanne Simard.

So how can traditional ecological knowledge be integrated with Western scientific research? Can these two sometimes contradictory world views serve as complementary paradigms to guide humanity through this evolutionary keyhole? Suzanne Simard.

SS: I have this project called the Mother Tree Project, which I started 10 years ago, and we’re working with nations, as well as other people who are working on the land—communities, local communities, woodlots. We have this big climate gradient where we’re applying sort of these forestry practices to look for better ways than clearcutting, and then measuring the impacts on the ecological properties and processes.

The most exciting part is working with Indigenous people up and down the Pacific Coast and the interior British Columbia, finding different ways to re-engage with the forest, to get land back from colonial forestry, and then using a combination of our scientific knowledge with their objectives and goals for the land. 

Because they’re the stewards of the land for millennia, since time immemorial, culturally connected to the land. And that governance and tending and responsibility its very complex and old systems. 

It’s not just ecology and it’s not just culture. It’s the two of them together.

There’s a lot of things I don’t know. But it’s really, really rewarding. It’s the most exciting work I’ve ever done. 

Host: Respecting traditional knowledge helps inform the design of the research. It might suggest a new avenue to investigate, or in some cases, standard scientific methods may simply be inappropriate. Suzanne sees this integrated approach as enriching the research.

SS: In working with the nations, you can’t just apply an experiment across this big landscape. Each place, what we do has got to be adapted to each particular nation and what their goals for their plants, and their medicines, and their trees are. 

And so, for example, when we work with the Nlaka’pamux Nation there is no clearcutting allowed, which, of course, in an experimental setting you want to create this broad range of conditions so that you can make comparisons of the worst and the best, but we can’t really do that. We have to change it so that we’re saving these sacred trees, even though we’re trying to measure what is the protection of those trees; what does it mean for the ecosystem to measure it against; what if you don’t have them?

I’m working with the Ma’amtagila Nation, and we visited this grove of ancient sister cedars; they’re like thousands of years old, these cedar trees. They all live in this grove, and the generations of trees have come up around them, so there’s a whole multi-generational forest. 

And I was, you know, invited to talk a little bit about connection between these trees that I’ve been studying, and out of that conversation, I thought we need to understand more about the kinship. How does that kinship work among cedar trees? 

We’re doing all these experiments now to actually measure, what happens to their productivity or their biochemistry, or their reproductive ability when they’re around kin versus strangers. And it was really based on this conversation, and being in that forest, and understanding that traditional knowledge that led us to do that experiment. 

Host: Simard’s research suggests a radical shift in perspective that values the social and cultural aspects of our relationship with trees and with nature. It challenges the increasingly discredited Western scientific ideology that intelligence is restricted to human beings. It elevates cooperation over competition as the driving force of evolution.

Unsurprisingly, Simard’s work has been attacked by some scientists who accuse her of anthropomorphizing the natural world. But as she points out, such language is actually nothing new.

SS: In biology, we’ve always used that kind of language. Think about like families, plant families.

 JPH: That’s right, yeah

SS: We’ve been doing that forever. Or in forestry, we call things parent trees. I started calling these mother trees because it invokes the regenerative capacity of a forest. And there was a lot of backlash around that. But the term parent tree in genetics is used all the time, and it’s been around for a long time.

Our language is full of it. And it’s good. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It helps people understand. Automatically, you go, oh, I get that, because I can relate to that.

And regarding the intelligence of a forest, you know, again, language. Right? We have thought of intelligence as a human thing. We think of ourselves as the center of this anthropocentric center of all living beings, at least in Western culture. And that leads us to think that there can’t be intelligence in nature because it’s not us. We’ve assigned that to humans. It’s a bit of hubris, of course, around human dominance and superiority, but this intelligence of—How do we define that? Well, the ability to make decisions, that’s intelligent. To be adaptive and responsive. That’s a sign of intelligence.

In mycorrhizal networks, you know, the patterns are biological neural network patterns. And we can describe that mathematically. And decisions are made about how to propagate that network or support these trees.

And whole communities, whole ecosystems are working together, that’s an intelligent social phenomenon. So, to me, the forest has all the qualities of intelligence.

Host: Native American restoration ecologist Dennis Martinez offers this Indigenous perspective: “We don’t heal the land. We intervene no more than necessary to allow natural processes to heal the land. It’s about relationship. You have to love the natural world — the plants and the animals — and take care of them as you would your own family. It’s about our responsibility as human beings to participate every day in the re-creation of the Earth. It just goes on and on.”

Again, Teresa Ryan…

TR: Everything that is living has spirit. The way that we think we don’t want to offend those spirits. We don’t want to offend those beings. The way that we think about these beings has an impact on how we adjust our management. Because they’ll know.  They’ll know that we are not honoring their life and they may not return.

So when we think about intelligence in the forest, from a science perspective, we are seeing responses of beings in the forest, particularly through the work on the mycorrhizal networks. We can actually demonstrate that we’re seeing responses. And it’s going to be a work in progress, but it’s come such a long way in helping us to understand these relationships in science. And how there’s reactions in these beings, in their habitats and in their life cycles, and the services that they provide.

So they’re probably smarter than us

Host: Teresa Ryan and Suzanne Simard… “Seeing the Forest for the Trees”.

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