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Finding the Mother Tree: An Interview with Suzanne Simard

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Suzanne Simard: Well, first of all, forests are life support systems, and like all major ecosystems on the earth are important. Forests cover a third of the terrestrial ecosystem, but they store 85 percent of our carbon. They're the source of 80 percent of our clean water. They produce oxygen. Most of the 80 percent of our biodiversity is in forests, terrestrial biodiversity. Without forests, we wouldn't be here. And we're seeing the consequences of that when we clear cut a forest, which is contributing about a quarter of our greenhouse gases. In British Columbia where I live, there's only three percent of the iconic old growth forests left. They've all been clear cut. And we're actually fighting; people are putting themselves on the line for that last watershed on Vancouver Island. It's just insane, honestly. Like, what are we thinking?

What is the Mother Tree? The Mother Tree is the Self.

Hawkins: You have a family background in the lumbering industry.

Simard: Yeah, my grandfather, my great grandfather, my dad, my uncles, they all were loggers, but it was selective logging. And it was in the rainforests. So they only took out the white pines and the Douglas fir trees that they needed for the family. And so it's a family business. But now what they're doing is way different than that. It's industrial, you know, multinational corporations. They don't know the forests. Their loggers sit in cabs; they don't even get out on the ground.

Hawkins: At what point did your perspective shift from logging to conservation?

Simard: I would say as an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC. We all got summer jobs each summer. And I got a job with a huge forest company; a classic cut-and-run company. I laid out roads. I laid out clear-cuts. I was planting clear-cuts. You know, I followed along behind planters. And so I saw the whole thing. And it was disturbing, to be honest. I was disturbed at that point. I was 19 or 20. Just a kid of the woods. I didn't really know. I wasn't really aware that we were doing this until I actually got there with my boots on the ground and was part of the whole scene.

Hawkins: Can you say something about mycorrhizal fungi networks.

Simard: Yeah. I was building on the work of David Reid, in the UK, who had done a little roots study in the lab. And he coated these two pine seedlings with a mycorrhizal fungus and found that they connected together, and so I was wondering, you know, could that be happening in our forests? And I was really trying to understand what the hell the logging industry was doing disconnecting the forest. To me, it was like a big disconnection. We're disconnecting the whole network below ground. And that's what I found, that these trees were trading carbon back and forth between each other. And it changed over the season, in the year. So it told me that this relationship between these trees was really sophisticated and they were attuned to each other.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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