Finding the Mother Tree Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It's Dr. Suzanne Simard and the book is Finding the Mother Tree.

Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what's happening underground at the root level in a forest.

It's the book by Dr. Suzanne Simard... the work of a scientist who showed that forests are wired up in very complex and identifiable ways, with trees sharing sugars, hydrocarbons, and secondary metabolites through fungal networks.

In forests, the same thing like the below ground world is like a perfect example of that. You know, these bacteria, the fungi, the archaea, they're the ones that are cycling the carbon, decomposing things, cycling nitrogen, you know, filtering water, building soil, soil structure.

And the caregivers of the forest. They are. They're the fundamental foundation of the forest. They're the legacy of the forest that helps move it forward.

And so I felt like we've got to move this field forward or it's going to die. It's going to get mired in having to prove the same things over and over again.

So every tree is linked to every other tree, all the little trees, the seedlings, the saplings are all linked into the networks that these old trees had established through their lifetime.

And that these, the biggest oldest trees were the hubs of the network. They were the nuclei. They were what everything else was linked into and they were linked to each other, these other smaller nodes as well.

In 1997, you published this NITRA article, which I, well, first of all, it was, it was rejected. And, and you went back and re-read it, rewrote it. And I get the feeling that you did not expect that they would put it on the cover. They put it on the cover, correct? Or they...

That was nature. Yeah, they put that on the front cover. Yeah. With a picture of these diverse forests with, you know, all these different tree species.

And so I labeled paper birch with radioactive carbon dioxide. That means I put a plastic bag over the shoot and I left that and I injected radioactive CO2 and I let the birch photosynthesize for a couple of hours, taking up that radioactive CO2.

And then I went over to the Douglas fir and I held the Geiger counter up to it. And there was a faint crackle. And that's when I knew, I knew that they were sharing carbon, which was mind blowing, right?

But man is part of nature. And his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.