Some trees are like mothers

Trees talk to each other and to us. They collaborate among themselves. They have hopes for human society. Tree people and human people resemble one another. We are kin, having branched off in different directions from a common evolutionary ancestor.

I first encountered these stirring ideas in Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory and later in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. I sought out Finding the Mother Tree because I wanted to understand how science views these spiritual truths.

Suzanne Simard is a Canadian forest ecologist, a pioneering researcher, a teacher, and a mother. She grew up in a family that made its living using traditional, sustainable methods of logging. Simard’s scientific work grew out of her distress over the impact of industrial logging. Working for a logging company in her early 20s, she began to investigate why trees planted after clear-cutting failed to thrive. Eventually she was able to prove what she suspected to be true and what indigenous cultures have always taught: that trees cooperate. While scientific thought, logging practice, and government policy all emphasize the importance of competition in the forest, the reality is that, for the good of the whole forest, trees of many species both cooperate and compete.