article writing

1.read an article and answer the questions

2. watch the videos and answer the questions follow the instruction

Read the article “The social life of forest” and draw connections to globalization.

1. What insights did you have reading this article?

2. How is the forest system similar to the human systems?

3. What can business students learn from studying the natural systems? 

After watching the videos about the Sumerian civilizations, respond to these questions

1. Cradle of civilization, Sumer (13:46)

2. Fall of the Sumerian civilization (2:27)

1. In what ways did the Sumerians make us who we are now? 

2. What fascinated you the most about the Sumerian society?

3. What could be warning signs/lessons to us about the fall of the Sumerians?

Choose two of the three videos about the Vikings and prepare at least one question for professor Terje Leiren who will be lecturing about Trade in the Viking Age to us.

Viking Warrior Queen (55:21 min)

Vikings: Live a tour from the British Museum (1:28 min)

The Greenland Vikings – Land of the midnight sun (1:22 min)

Watch the video about the end of the Bronze Age and answer to these questions by midnight on Sunday 1/31:

1.What did you learn about the Sea Peoples?

2.Why is the shipwreck described so valuable for ourunderstanding?

3.What did you learn about Ugarit?

4.What did you learn about climate change and its impact during this period?

The Social Life of Forests
Ferris Jabr . New York Times (Online) , New York: New York Times Company. Dec 2, 2020.

ProQuest document link

FULL TEXT
As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen

branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her

grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively

harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine. They took so few trees that Simard never noticed much of a difference.

The forest seemed ageless and infinite, pillared with conifers, jeweled with raindrops and brimming with ferns and

fairy bells. She experienced it as “nature in the raw” —a mythic realm, perfect as it was. When she began attending

the University of British Columbia, she was elated to discover forestry: an entire field of science devoted to her

beloved domain. It seemed like the natural choice.

By the time she was in grad school at Oregon State University, however, Simard understood that commercial

clearcutting had largely superseded the sustainable logging practices of the past. Loggers were replacing diverse

forests with homogeneous plantations, evenly spaced in upturned soil stripped of most underbrush. Without any

competitors, the thinking went, the newly planted trees would thrive. Instead, they were frequently more vulnerable

to disease and climatic stress than trees in old-growth forests. In particular, Simard noticed that up to 10 percent

of newly planted Douglas fir were likely to get sick and die whenever nearby aspen, paper birch and cottonwood

were removed. The reasons were unclear. The planted saplings had plenty of space, and they received more light

and water than trees in old, dense forests. So why were they so frail?

Simard suspected that the answer was buried in the soil. Underground, trees and fungi form partnerships known

as mycorrhizas: Threadlike fungi envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients like

phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for some of the carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis.

Research had demonstrated that mycorrhizas also connected plants to one another and that these associations

might be ecologically important, but most scientists had studied them in greenhouses and laboratories, not in the

wild. For her doctoral thesis, Simard decided to investigate fungal links between Douglas fir and paper birch in the

forests of British Columbia. Apart from her supervisor, she didn’t receive much encouragement from her mostly

male peers. “The old foresters were like, Why don’t you just study growth and yield?” Simard told me. “I was more

interested in how these plants interact. They thought it was all very girlie.”

Now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Simard, who is 60, has studied webs of

root and fungi in the Arctic, temperate and coastal forests of North America for nearly three decades. Her initial

inklings about the importance of mycorrhizal networks were prescient, inspiring whole new lines of research that

ultimately overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems. By analyzing the DNA in root tips

and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads

link nearly every tree in a forest —even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and

hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest

and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby

trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their

networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its

carbon to its neighbors.

Although Simard’s peers were skeptical and sometimes even disparaging of her early work, they now generally

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 9

regard her as one of the most rigorous and innovative scientists studying plant communication and behavior.

David Janos, co-editor of the scientific journal Mycorrhiza, characterized her published research as “sophisticated,

imaginative, cutting-edge.” Jason Hoeksema, a University of Mississippi biology professor who has studied

mycorrhizal networks, agreed: “I think she has really pushed the field forward.” Some of Simard’s studies now

feature in textbooks and are widely taught in graduate-level classes on forestry and ecology. She was also a key

inspiration for a central character in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Overstory”: the

visionary botanist Patricia Westerford. In May, Knopf will publish Simard’s own book, “Finding the Mother Tree,” a

vivid and compelling memoir of her lifelong quest to prove that “the forest was more than just a collection of

trees.”

Since Darwin, biologists have emphasized the perspective of the individual. They have stressed the perpetual

contest among discrete species, the struggle of each organism to survive and reproduce within a given population

and, underlying it all, the single-minded ambitions of selfish genes. Now and then, however, some scientists have

advocated, sometimes controversially, for a greater focus on cooperation over self-interest and on the emergent

properties of living systems rather than their units.

Before Simard and other ecologists revealed the extent and significance of mycorrhizal networks, foresters

typically regarded trees as solitary individuals that competed for space and resources and were otherwise

indifferent to one another. Simard and her peers have demonstrated that this framework is far too simplistic. An

old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless

battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation,

reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness. The trees, understory plants, fungi and microbes in a forest are so

thoroughly connected, communicative and codependent that some scientists have described them as

superorganisms. Recent research suggests that mycorrhizal networks also perfuse prairies, grasslands, chaparral

and Arctic tundra —essentially everywhere there is life on land. Together, these symbiotic partners knit Earth’s

soils into nearly contiguous living networks of unfathomable scale and complexity.

“I was taught that you have a tree, and it’s out there to find its own way,” Simard told me. “It’s not how a forest

works, though.”

In the summer of 2019, I met Simard in Nelson, a small mountain town not far from where she grew up in southern

British Columbia. One morning we drove up a winding road to an old-growth forest and began to hike. The first

thing I noticed was the aroma. The air was piquant and subtly sweet, like orange peel and cloves. Above our heads,

great green plumes filtered the sunlight, which splashed generously onto the forest floor in some places and

merely speckled it in others. Gnarled roots laced the trail beneath our feet, diving in and out of the soil like sea

serpents. I was so preoccupied with my own experience of the forest that it did not even occur to me to consider

how the forest might be experiencing us —until Simard brought it up.

“I think these trees are very perceptive,” she said. “Very perceptive of who’s growing around them. I’m really

interested in whether they perceive us.” I asked her to clarify what she meant. Simard explained that trees sense

nearby plants and animals and alter their behavior accordingly: The gnashing mandibles of an insect might prompt

the production of chemical defenses, for example. Some studies have even suggested that plant roots grow

toward the sound of running water and that certain flowering plants sweeten their nectar when they detect a bee’s

wing beats. “Trees perceive lots of things,” Simard said. “So why not us, too?”

I considered the possibility. We’d been walking through this forest for more than an hour. Our sweat glands had

been wafting pungent chemical compounds. Our voices and footsteps were sending pressure waves through the

air and soil. Our bodies brushed against trunks and displaced branches. Suddenly it seemed entirely plausible that

the trees had noticed our presence.

A little farther along the trail, we found a sunny alcove where we stopped to rest and chat, laying our backpacks

against a log plush with moss and lichen. A multitude of tiny plants sprouted from the log’s green fleece. I asked

Simard what they were. She bent her head for a closer look, tucking her frizzy blond hair behind her ears, and called

out what she saw: queen’s cup, a kind of lily; five-leaved bramble, a type of wild raspberry; and both cedar and

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 2 of 9

hemlock seedlings. As she examined the log, part of it collapsed, revealing the decaying interior. Simard dug

deeper with her thumbs, exposing a web of rubbery, mustard-yellow filaments embedded in the wood.

“That’s a fungus!” she said. “That is Piloderma. It’s a very common mycorrhizal fungus” —one she had encountered

and studied many times before in circumstances exactly like these. “This mycorrhizal network is actually linked up

to that tree.” She gestured toward a nearby hemlock that stood at least a hundred feet tall. “That tree is feeding

these seedlings.”

In some of her earliest and most famous experiments, Simard planted mixed groups of young Douglas fir and

paper birch trees in forest plots and covered the trees with individual plastic bags. In each plot, she injected the

bags surrounding one tree species with radioactive carbon dioxide and the bags covering the other species with a

stable carbon isotope —a variant of carbon with an unusual number of neutrons. The trees absorbed the unique

forms of carbon through their leaves. Later, she pulverized the trees and analyzed their chemistry to see if any

carbon had passed from species to species underground. It had. In the summer, when the smaller Douglas fir trees

were generally shaded, carbon mostly flowed from birch to fir. In the fall, when evergreen Douglas fir was still

growing and deciduous birch was losing its leaves, the net flow reversed. As her earlier observations of failing

Douglas fir had suggested, the two species appeared to depend on each other. No one had ever traced such a

dynamic exchange of resources through mycorrhizal networks in the wild. In 1997, part of Simard’s thesis was

published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature —a rare feat for someone so green. Nature featured her

research on its cover with the title “The Wood-Wide Web,” a moniker that eventually proliferated through the pages

of published studies and popular science writing alike.

In 2002, Simard secured her current professorship at the University of British Columbia, where she continued to

study interactions among trees, understory plants and fungi. In collaboration with students and colleagues around

the world, she made a series of remarkable discoveries. Mycorrhizal networks were abundant in North America’s

forests. Most trees were generalists, forming symbioses with dozens to hundreds of fungal species. In one study

of six Douglas fir stands measuring about 10,000 square feet each, almost all the trees were connected

underground by no more than three degrees of separation; one especially large and old tree was linked to 47 other

trees and projected to be connected to at least 250 more; and seedlings that had full access to the fungal network

were 26 percent more likely to survive than those that did not.

Depending on the species involved, mycorrhizas supplied trees and other plants with up to 40 percent of the

nitrogen they received from the environment and as much as 50 percent of the water they needed to survive.

Below ground, trees traded between 10 and 40 percent of the carbon stored in their roots. When Douglas fir

seedlings were stripped of their leaves and thus likely to die, they transferred stress signals and a substantial sum

of carbon to nearby ponderosa pine, which subsequently accelerated their production of defensive enzymes.

Simard also found that denuding a harvested forest of all trees, ferns, herbs and shrubs —a common forestry

practice —did not always improve the survival and growth of newly planted trees. In some cases, it was harmful.

When Simard started publishing her provocative studies, some of her peers loudly disapproved. They questioned

her novel methodology and disputed her conclusions. Many were perplexed as to why trees of different species

would help one another at their own expense —an extraordinary level of altruism that seemed to contradict the

core tenets of Darwinian evolution. Soon, most references to her studies were immediately followed by citations of

published rebuttals. “A shadow was growing over my work,” Simard writes in her book. By searching for hints of

interdependence in the forest floor, she had inadvertently provoked one of the oldest and most intense debates in

biology: Is cooperation as central to evolution as competition?

The question of whether plants possess some form of sentience or agency has a long and fraught history.

Although plants are obviously alive, they are rooted to the earth and mute, and they rarely move on a relatable time

scale; they seem more like passive aspects of the environment than agents within it. Western culture, in particular,

often consigns plants to a liminal space between object and organism. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes

the possibility of plant intelligence and society so intriguing —and so contentious.

In a 1973 book titled “The Secret Life of Plants,” the journalists Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird claimed that

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 9

plants had souls, emotions and musical preferences, that they felt pain and psychically absorbed the thoughts of

other creatures and that they could track the movement of the planets and predict earthquakes. To make their

case, the authors indiscriminately mixed genuine scientific findings with the observations and supposed studies of

quacks and mystics. Many scientists lambasted the book as nonsense. Nevertheless, it became a New York Times

best seller and inspired cartoons in The New Yorker and Doonesbury. Ever since, botanists have been especially

wary of anyone whose claims about plant behavior and communication verge too close to the pseudoscientific.

In most of her published studies, Simard, who considered becoming a writer before she discovered forestry, is

careful to use conservative language, but when addressing the public, she embraces metaphor and reverie in a way

that makes some scientists uncomfortable. In a TED Talk Simard gave in 2016, she describes “a world of infinite

biological pathways,” species that are “interdependent like yin and yang” and veteran trees that “send messages of

wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.” She calls the oldest, largest and most interconnected trees in a

forest “mother trees” —a phrase meant to evoke their capacity to nurture those around them, even when they aren’t

literally their parents. In her book, she compares mycorrhizal networks to the human brain. And she has spoken

openly of her spiritual connection to forests.

Some of the scientists I interviewed worry that Simard’s studies do not fully substantiate her boldest claims and

that the popular writing related to her work sometimes misrepresents the true nature of plants and forests. For

example, in his international best seller, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” the forester Peter Wohlleben writes that trees

optimally divide nutrients and water among themselves, that they probably enjoy the feeling of fungi merging with

their roots and that they even possess “maternal instincts.”

“There is value in getting the public excited about all of the amazing mechanisms by which forest ecosystems

might be functioning, but sometimes the speculation goes too far,” Hoeksema said. “I think it will be really

interesting to see how much experimental evidence emerges to support some of the big ideas we have been

getting excited about.” At this point other researchers have replicated most of Simard’s major findings. It’s now

well accepted that resources travel among trees and other plants connected by mycorrhizal networks. Most

ecologists also agree that the amount of carbon exchanged among trees is sufficient to benefit seedlings, as well

as older trees that are injured, entirely shaded or severely stressed, but researchers still debate whether shuttled

carbon makes a meaningful difference to healthy adult trees. On a more fundamental level, it remains unclear

exactly why resources are exchanged among trees in the first place, especially when those trees are not closely

related.

In their autobiographies, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace each credited Thomas Malthus as a key

inspiration for their independent formulations of evolution by natural selection. Malthus’s 1798 essay on

population helped the naturalists understand that all living creatures were locked into a ceaseless contest for

limited natural resources. Darwin was also influenced by Adam Smith, who believed that societal order and

efficiency could emerge from competition among inherently selfish individuals in a free market. Similarly, the

planet’s dazzling diversity of species and their intricate relationships, Darwin would show, emerged from inevitable

processes of competition and selection, rather than divine craftsmanship. “Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural

selection is obviously 19th-century capitalism writ large,” wrote the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin.

As Darwin well knew, however, ruthless competition was not the only way that organisms interacted. Ants and

bees died to protect their colonies. Vampire bats regurgitated blood to prevent one another from starving. Vervet

monkeys and prairie dogs cried out to warn their peers of predators, even when doing so put them at risk. At one

point Darwin worried that such selflessness would be “fatal” to his theory. In subsequent centuries, as evolutionary

biology and genetics matured, scientists converged on a resolution to this paradox: Behavior that appeared to be

altruistic was often just another manifestation of selfish genes —a phenomenon known as kin selection. Members

of tight-knit social groups typically share large portions of their DNA, so when one individual sacrifices for another,

it is still indirectly spreading its own genes.

Kin selection cannot account for the apparent interspecies selflessness of trees, however —a practice that verges

on socialism. Some scientists have proposed a familiar alternative explanation: Perhaps what appears to be

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 4 of 9

generosity among trees is actually selfish manipulation by fungi. Descriptions of Simard’s work sometimes give

the impression that mycorrhizal networks are inert conduits that exist primarily for the mutual benefit of trees, but

the thousands of species of fungi that link trees are living creatures with their own drives and needs. If a plant

relinquishes carbon to fungi on its roots, why would those fungi passively transmit the carbon to another plant

rather than using it for their own purposes? Maybe they don’t. Perhaps the fungi exert some control: What looks

like one tree donating food to another may be a result of fungi redistributing accumulated resources to promote

themselves and their favorite partners.

“Where some scientists see a big cooperative collective, I see reciprocal exploitation,” said Toby Kiers, a professor

of evolutionary biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Both parties may benefit, but they also constantly

struggle to maximize their individual payoff.” Kiers is one of several scientists whose recent studies have found

that plants and symbiotic fungi reward and punish each other with what are essentially trade deals and

embargoes, and that mycorrhizal networks can increase conflict among plants. In some experiments, fungi have

withheld nutrients from stingy plants and strategically diverted phosphorous to resource-poor areas where they

can demand high fees from desperate plants.

Several of the ecologists I interviewed agreed that regardless of why and how resources and chemical signals

move among the various members of a forest’s symbiotic webs, the result is still the same: What one tree

produces can feed, inform or rejuvenate another. Such reciprocity does not necessitate universal harmony, but it

does undermine the dogma of individualism and temper the view of competition as the primary engine of

evolution.

The most radical interpretation of Simard’s findings is that a forest behaves “as though it’s a single organism,” as

she says in her TED Talk. Some researchers have proposed that cooperation within or among species can evolve if

it helps one population outcompete another —an altruistic forest community outlasting a selfish one, for example.

The theory remains unpopular with most biologists, who regard natural selection above the level of the individual

to be evolutionarily unstable and exceedingly rare. Recently, however, inspired by research on microbiomes, some

scientists have argued that the traditional concept of an individual organism needs rethinking and that

multicellular creatures and their symbiotic microbes should be regarded as cohesive units of natural selection.

Even if the same exact set of microbial associates is not passed vertically from generation to generation, the

functional relationships between an animal or plant species and its entourage of microorganisms persist —much

like the mycorrhizal networks in an old-growth forest. Humans are not the only species that inherits the

infrastructure of past communities.

The emerging understanding of trees as social creatures has urgent implications for how we manage forests.

Humans have relied on forests for food, medicine and building materials for many thousands of years. Forests

have likewise provided sustenance and shelter for countless species over the eons. But they are important for

more profound reasons too. Forests function as some of the planet’s vital organs. The colonization of land by

plants between 425 and 600 million years ago, and the eventual spread of forests, helped create a breathable

atmosphere with the high level of oxygen we continue to enjoy today. Forests suffuse the air with water vapor,

fungal spores and chemical compounds that seed clouds, cooling Earth by reflecting sunlight and providing much-

needed precipitation to inland areas that might otherwise dry out. Researchers estimate that, collectively, forests

store somewhere between 400 and 1,200 gigatons of carbon, potentially exceeding the atmospheric pool.

Crucially, a majority of this carbon resides in forest soils, anchored by networks of symbiotic roots, fungi and

microbes. Each year, the world’s forests capture more than 24 percent of global carbon emissions, but

deforestation —by destroying and removing trees that would otherwise continue storing carbon —can substantially

diminish that effect. When a mature forest is burned or clear-cut, the planet loses an invaluable ecosystem and

one of its most effective systems of climate regulation. The razing of an old-growth forest is not just the

destruction of magnificent individual trees —it’s the collapse of an ancient republic whose interspecies covenant

of reciprocation and compromise is essential for the survival of Earth as we’ve known it.

One bright morning, Simard and I climbed into her truck and drove up a forested mountain to a clearing that had

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 5 of 9

been repeatedly logged. A large tract of bare soil surrounded us, punctuated by tree stumps, saplings and mounds

of woody detritus. I asked Simard how old the trees that once stood here might have been. “We can actually figure

that out,” she said, stooping beside a cleanly cut Douglas fir stump. She began to count growth rings, explaining

how the relative thickness reflected changing environmental conditions. A few minutes later, she reached the

outermost rings: “102, 103, 104!” She added a few years to account for very early growth. This particular Douglas

fir was most likely alive in 1912, the same year that the Titanic sank, Oreos debuted and the mayor of Tokyo gave

Washington 3,020 ornamental cherry trees.

Looking at the mountains across the valley, we could see evidence of clearcutting throughout the past century.

Dirt roads snaked up and down the incline. Some parts of the slopes were thickly furred with conifers. Others were

treeless meadows, sparse shrubland or naked soil strewn with the remnants of sun-bleached trunks and branches.

Viewed as a whole, the haphazardly sheared landscape called to mind a dog with mange.

When Europeans arrived on America’s shores in the 1600s, forests covered one billion acres of the future United

States —close to half the total land area. Between 1850 and 1900, U.S. timber production surged to more than 35

billion board feet from five billion. By 1907, nearly a third of the original expanse of forest —more than 260 million

acres —was gone. Exploitative practices likewise ravaged Canada’s forests throughout the 19th century. As

growing cities drew people away from rural and agricultural areas, and lumber companies were forced to replant

regions they had logged, trees began to reclaim their former habitats. As of 2012, the United States had more than

760 million forested acres. The age, health and composition of America’s forests have changed significantly,

however. Although forests now cover 80 percent of the Northeast, for example, less than 1 percent of its old-

growth forest remains intact.

And though clearcutting is not as common as it once was, it is still practiced on about 40 percent of logged acres

in the United States and 80 percent of them in Canada. In a thriving forest, a lush understory captures huge

amounts of rainwater, and dense root networks enrich and stabilize the soil. Clearcutting removes these living

sponges and disturbs the forest floor, increasing the chances of landslides and floods, stripping the soil of

nutrients and potentially releasing stored carbon to the atmosphere. When sediment falls into nearby rivers and

streams, it can kill fish and other aquatic creatures and pollute sources of drinking water. The abrupt felling of so

many trees also harms and evicts countless species of birds, mammals, reptiles and insects.

Simard’s research suggests there is an even more fundamental reason not to deprive a logging site of every single

tree. The day after viewing the clear-cuts, we took a cable ferry across Kootenay Lake and drove into the Harrop-

Procter Community Forest: nearly 28,000 acres of mountainous terrain populated with Douglas fir, larch, cedar and

hemlock. In the early 1900s, much of the forest near the lake was burned to make way for settlements, roads and

mining operations. Today the land is managed by a local co-op that practices ecologically informed forestry.

The road up the mountain was rough, dusty and littered with obstacles. “Hold on to your nips and your nuts!”

Simard said as she maneuvered her truck out of a ditch and over a series of large branches that jostled us in our

seats. Eventually she parked beside a steep slope, climbed out of the driver’s seat and began to skitter her way

across a seemingly endless jumble of pine needles, stumps and splintered trunks. Simard was so quick and nimble

that I had trouble keeping up until we traversed the bulk of the debris and entered a clearing. Most of the ground

was barren and brown. Here and there, however, the mast of a century-old Douglas fir rose 150 feet into the air and

unfurled its green banners. A line of blue paint ringed the trunk of every tree still standing. Simard explained that at

her behest, Erik Leslie, the Harrop-Procter Forest Manager, marked the oldest, largest and healthiest trees on this

site for preservation before it was logged.

When a seed germinates in an old-growth forest, it immediately taps into an extensive underground community of

interspecies partnerships. Uniform plantations of young trees planted after a clear-cut are bereft of ancient roots

and their symbiotic fungi. The trees in these surrogate forests are much more vulnerable to disease and death

because, despite one another’s company, they have been orphaned. Simard thinks that retaining some mother

trees, which have the most robust and diverse mycorrhizal networks, will substantially improve the health and

survival of future seedlings —both those planted by foresters and those that germinate on their own.

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 6 of 9

For the last several years, Simard has been working with scientists, North American timber companies and several

of the First Nations to test this idea. She calls the ongoing experiment the Mother Tree Project. In 27 stands

spread across nine different climatic regions in British Columbia, Simard and her collaborators have been

comparing traditional clear-cuts with harvested areas that preserve varying ratios of veteran trees: 60 percent, 30

percent or as low as 10 percent —only around eight trees per acre. She directed my attention across Kootenay

Lake to the opposing mountains, where there were several more experimental plots. Although they were sparsely

vegetated, there was an order to the depilation. It looked as though a giant had meticulously plucked out particular

trees one by one.

Since at least the late 1800s, North American foresters have devised and tested dozens of alternatives to standard

clearcutting: strip cutting (removing only narrow bands of trees), shelterwood cutting (a multistage process that

allows desirable seedlings to establish before most overstory trees are harvested) and the seed-tree method

(leaving behind some adult trees to provide future seed), to name a few. These approaches are used throughout

Canada and the United States for a variety of ecological reasons, often for the sake of wildlife, but mycorrhizal

networks have rarely if ever factored into the reasoning.

Sm’hayetsk Teresa Ryan, a forest ecologist of Tsimshian heritage who completed her graduate studies with

Simard, explained that research on mycorrhizal networks, and the forestry practices that follow from it, mirror

aboriginal insights and traditions —knowledge that European settlers often dismissed or ignored. “Everything is

connected, absolutely everything,” she said. “There are many aboriginal groups that will tell you stories about how

all the species in the forests are connected, and many will talk about below-ground networks.”

Ryan told me about the 230,000-acre Menominee Forest in northeastern Wisconsin, which has been sustainably

harvested for more than 150 years. Sustainability, the Menominee believe, means “thinking in terms of whole

systems, with all their interconnections, consequences and feedback loops.” They maintain a large, old and diverse

growing stock, prioritizing the removal of low-quality and ailing trees over more vigorous ones and allowing trees

to age 200 years or more —so they become what Simard might call grandmothers. Ecology, not economics, guides

the management of the Menominee Forest, but it is still highly profitable. Since 1854, more than 2.3 billion board

feet have been harvested —nearly twice the volume of the entire forest —yet there is now more standing timber

than when logging began. “To many, our forest may seem pristine and untouched,” the Menominee wrote in one

report. “In reality, it is one of the most intensively managed tracts of forest in the Lake States.”

On a mid-June afternoon, Simard and I drove 20 minutes outside Nelson to a bowl-shaped valley beneath the

Selkirk Mountains, which houses an active ski resort in winter. We met one of her students and his friend,

assembled some supplies —shovels, water bottles, bear spray —and started hiking up the scrubby slope toward a

population of subalpine conifers. The goal was to characterize mycorrhizas on the roots of whitebark pine, an

endangered species that feeds and houses numerous creatures, including grizzly bears, Clark’s nutcracker and

Douglas squirrels.

About an hour into our hike, we found one: small and bright-leaved with an ashen trunk. Simard and her assistants

knelt by its base and began using shovels and knives to expose its roots. The work was slow, tiring and messy.

Mosquitoes and gnats relentlessly swarmed our limbs and necks. I craned over their shoulders, trying to get a

better look, but for a long time there was not much to see. As the work progressed, however, the roots became

darker, finer and more fragile. Suddenly Simard uncovered a gossamer web of tiny white threads embedded in the

soil.

“Ho!” she cried out, grinning broadly. “It’s a [expletive] gold mine! Holy [expletive]!” It was the most excited I’d seen

her the whole trip. “Sorry, I shouldn’t swear,” she added in a whisper. “Professors are not supposed to swear.”

“Is that a mycorrhiza?” I asked.

“It’s a mycorrhizal network!” she answered, laughing with delight. “So cool, heh? Here’s a mycorrhizal tip for sure.”

She handed me a thin strip of root the length of a pencil from which sprouted numerous rootlets still woolly with

dirt. The rootlets branched into even thinner filaments. As I strained to see the fine details, I realized that the very

tips of the smallest fibers looked as though they’d been capped with bits of wax. Those gummy white nodules,

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 7 of 9

Simard explained, were mycorrhizal fungi that had colonized the pine’s roots. They were the hubs from which root

and fungus cast their intertwined cables through the soil, opening channels for trade and communication, linking

individual trees into federations. This was the very fabric of the forest —the foundation of some of the most

populous and complex societies on Earth.

Trees have always been symbols of connection. In Mesoamerican mythology, an immense tree grows at the center

of the universe, stretching its roots into the underworld and cradling earth and heaven in its trunk and branches.

Norse cosmology features a similar tree called Yggdrasil. A popular Japanese Noh drama tells of wedded pines

that are eternally bonded despite being separated by a great distance. Even before Darwin, naturalists used treelike

diagrams to represent the lineages of different species. Yet for most of recorded history, living trees kept an

astonishing secret: Their celebrated connectivity was more than metaphor —it had a material reality. As I knelt

beneath that whitebark pine, staring at its root tips, it occurred to me that my whole life I had never really

understood what a tree was. At best I’d been aware of just one half of a creature that appeared to be self-contained

but was in fact legion —a chimera of bewildering proportions.

We, too, are composite creatures. Diverse microbial communities inhabit our bodies, modulating our immune

systems and helping us digest certain foods. The energy-producing organelles in our cells known as mitochondria

were once free-swimming bacteria that were subsumed early in the evolution of multicellular life. Through a

process called horizontal gene transfer, fungi, plants and animals —including humans —have continuously

exchanged DNA with bacteria and viruses. From its skin, fur or bark right down to its genome, any multicellular

creature is an amalgam of other life-forms. Wherever living things emerge, they find one another, mingle and meld.

Five hundred million years ago, as both plants and fungi continued oozing out of the sea and onto land, they

encountered wide expanses of barren rock and impoverished soil. Plants could spin sunlight into sugar for energy,

but they had trouble extracting mineral nutrients from the earth. Fungi were in the opposite predicament. Had they

remained separate, their early attempts at colonization might have faltered or failed. Instead, these two castaways

—members of entirely different kingdoms of life —formed an intimate partnership. Together they spread across the

continents, transformed rock into rich soil and filled the atmosphere with oxygen.

Eventually, different types of plants and fungi evolved more specialized symbioses. Forests expanded and

diversified, both above- and below ground. What one tree produced was no longer confined to itself and its

symbiotic partners. Shuttled through buried networks of root and fungus, the water, food and information in a

forest began traveling greater distances and in more complex patterns than ever before. Over the eons, through the

compounded effects of symbiosis and coevolution, forests developed a kind of circulatory system. Trees and fungi

were once small, unacquainted ocean expats, still slick with seawater, searching for new opportunities. Together,

they became a collective life form of unprecedented might and magnanimity.

After a few hours of digging up roots and collecting samples, we began to hike back down the valley. In the

distance, the granite peaks of the Selkirks bristled with clusters of conifers. A breeze flung the scent of pine

toward us. To our right, a furtive squirrel buried something in the dirt and dashed off. Like a seed waiting for the

right conditions, a passage from “The Overstory” suddenly sprouted in my consciousness: “There are no

individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.”

DETAILS

Subject: Trees; Fungi; Forests; Carbon

Location: Arctic region British Columbia Canada

Company / organization: Name: University of British Columbia; NAICS: 611310

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 8 of 9

LINKS

Database copyright © 2020 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest

Identifier / keyword: Trees and Shrubs Carbon Capture and Sequestration Forests and Forestry

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Fungi Evolution (Biology) Microbiology Genetics and

Heredity Soil Flowers and Plants Logging Industry Mushrooms Nelson (British

Columbia) The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate –

Discoveries From a Secret World (Book) The Overstory (Book) Simard, Suzanne

Publication title: New York Times (Online); New York

Publication year: 2020

Publication date: Dec 2, 2020

Section: magazine.

Publisher: New York Times Company

Place of publication: New York

Country of publication: United States, New York

Publication subject: General Intere st Periodicals–United States

Source type: Blogs, Podcasts, &Websites

Language of publication: English

Document type: News

ProQuest document ID: 2467146423

Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/blogs,-podcasts,-websites/social-life-

forests/docview/2467146423/se-2?accountid=14784

Copyright: Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

Last updated: 2020-12-07

Database: U.S. Newsstream

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 9 of 9