The Wood Wide Web: The Forest Discovery That Sparked a Backlash

0:00And now a word from our sponsor, South by Southwest London. Imagine a future where things just make sense. In the 1700s, we had canals. In the 1800s, the railways. Then telecom, fibre optic. And now? In a world that's more unsure than ever before, we need the answers. South by Southwest London presents over 900 speakers, 200 music artists, and 100 films in one location in June. To find out how they merge together and shape the future in person, visit southbysouthwestlondon.com that's sxswlondon.com Well I'm sitting under this famous oak tree in Kew Gardens in London it's the Leucam Oak it used to be over there it was moved Incredible Yeah, root and branch moved over here and I'm with forest ecologist best-selling author Suzanne Simard welcome to podcast Suzanne Thank you, thanks for having me Well I just thought it'd be really nice to do it here rather than in a studio or in an office I'm Rowan Hooper on this episode of the world the universe and us we're going to be exploring forestry ecology uh talking about your new book when the forest breathes but look you you shot to stardom with your first book um finding the mother tree so let's start with that and maybe for people who who don't know like can you tell us what the mother tree concept is yeah so i was um you know I'm an ecologist and I look at how relationships build forests.

1:23And I'm also a forest ecologist. So I apply ecology in the practice of forestry. And I was, you know, the practice of forestry today really isn't about relationships. It's about growing trees for money, the forest industry. And I felt like the way that we were looking at forests was upside down. We were looking at individual trees and how we grow big trees for the industry. And we forgot about the connections that make a forest. And so I did this research to demonstrate or to investigate, and in the process demonstrating that trees form communities, they form societies, that they are in relationship with each other.

2:12And the work I did showed that in the rainforests of British Columbia, that these trees are actually connected below ground through fungal networks and that they communicate with each other by shuttling resources. In the case of my work, I was looking at photosynthate moving back and forth between trees and that the mother tree was really the center of the forest. The mother tree is the most connected tree because of the high ability to photosynthesize, all the connection points and so they're just they're just you know have much more you know points of connection with all the other trees and they regenerate the forest they provide the seed they that seedlings tap into the networks of these old trees and that and that facilitates their regeneration so that's the mother tree it's really just the biggest oldest trees in the forest that is so highly connected and important in regeneration um perhaps we'll get onto this later but it's not just, well, it's certainly not just their offspring in the mother sense that we would think of it, that this network is connecting, is it?

3:20As you say, it's other trees in the forest, other species. Yeah, actually in that work that I did in my initial doctoral work, yeah, when I published the work in Nature, which they called the Wood Wide Web, I was looking at connections between paper birch and Douglas fir, two entirely different genuses, two obviously different species, and found that they were connected together and they shared resources back and forth, and that the direction of where those resources went depended on the photosynthetic ability of those trees, whether it was spring, summer, or fall, whether they were shaded or not shaded.

3:58So the richer tree was providing more to the tree that had more of a need for photosynthetic. synthate. And so it also showed, you know, that this facilitative effect was really fluid in the forest. It changed in synchrony with the seasons and with the condition of the trees as they changed over their lifespan. Yeah. You mentioned the Wood Wide Web. So as I recall, the News and Views article was called that and the title of the magazine. But your paper obviously didn't have that phrase in it. No. And obviously that's that is taken off and I wonder how you feel about that phrase now the wood wide web.

4:39Well at the time you know nature the editors at nature came up with that title and they asked me if I was okay with it and I thought yeah that sounds yeah it sounds amazing because at that same time that I was publishing that paper the internet was just being developed It was the internet was brought online and I think around the early 90s. I was doing this work in the early 90s. So it was kind of like there was a synchrony there. It was very clever and very timely. The wood wide web, I mean, thinking of the forest as wood is a little bit parochial, if you will. I mean, the forest is way much more than wood.

5:19But it worked because it rolls off the tongue in a really beautiful way and people remember it. Yeah. I thought it was quite clever. I did hear someone saying actually they think it's, it does the forest down to just compare it to this electronic network. The forest is so much richer and more alive. It's true. Yeah. I always thought, you know, that these fungal networks to me were just one example of the many relationships that exist in a forest. And the reason that people could really, you know, gravitate it to this new knowledge was that it showed the physical linkages and that the physical movement of resources between trees, I mean, other relationships, they're not physically connected like that.

6:04You know, like there's a relationship between, you know, the pollinators. They fly between, through the forest and between trees and the pollen itself. And then, you know, seeds also disperse through the forest and develop relationships in the place. But the physical network that we were able to demonstrate really revealed to people in a really visual way of the connections that other kinds of webs might not be so easily demonstrable. But yes, I agree that it's just one example of the many, many relationships that exist. When did the backlash start? Was it after the Mother Tree book or was it immediately after that paper?

6:46Well, I would say there are two waves of backlash. The first was a little wave. At the time, I was quite upset about it because I wasn't used to it. But that was in the late 90s. And the scientific community, in fact, it was mostly scientists from the UK that really were very critical of that work. and they said, oh, you know, there isn't enough evidence that the experiments were flawed, you know, that I'd misinterpreted. You know, they were fishing for reasons to diminish the paper. And none of them really had credence. And I did rebut those criticisms. And it kind of, it lasted for a little while and then it died down.

7:30And I actually moved a little bit away from looking at networks because of that, criticism I thought I think I'll pull back on this but then when I became a professor I started looking at it again and it was really after publishing Finding the Mother Tree that the tsunami of criticism started made the first round look like little wavelets yeah well I mean should say there's tsunami of love and and and so probably had so much sort of not fan maybe fan mail but letters of appreciation yes so much so much vast you know vastly drowning out uh the the criticisms yeah i do want to stay with the criticism a bit longer though because there was that review paper that said that look we've looked at all these studies the evidence that the network persists for a long time is not good or that it's very extensive isn't isn't good enough and that was the perhaps the harshest or the strongest or the most serious criticism wasn't it and what what happened what happened well yeah so that was the first one there were a couple more but you know all of those criticisms were looking for flaws again it was the same similar approach to the first time around looking for flaws in the experimental approach saying that yeah as you said not enough evidence that these exist and therefore we're over interpreting the importance of these networks and they criticize the scientific, like the methodologies, the treatments that we used, that I used, we used.

9:04But I re-betted them, right? I actually wrote an article and it was published in, I think, 2025, 2024. And I went through each criticism and I said, Actually, you know, you're misinterpreting what I said. Right. So they would say things like there was no evidence that carbon would move into the shoots of the receiver plants. And that was a criticism. But all of my papers show that it does. Yeah. So I don't know why they were saying that. Or they would say, oh, she said that this exists in all forests around the world. I've always made it very clear that I'm talking about the forest where I did my work.

9:43Yeah. And they'd say, oh, well, she's discounting the impact or the importance of competition in forests. But if you look at my work, I always talk about the multiplicity of interactions, including competition. And so I rebutted each point one at a time. And I think that was really important to do. There's a bit in your book that, where you had a particularly, I'm sorry to talk about this bit. No, it's okay. Your friend and colleague, Amanda, died in a terrible accident. and then your mother died, and then at the same time you were getting a lot of this pushback. That was a hard, that must have been really hard.

10:20It was a very devastating period of my life, yeah. Yeah, to have all of that happen all at once. The critics also went after Amanda's work, which I found really disappointing. You know, because, so the criticism of Amanda's work was that we hadn't definitively understood or figured out the mechanism for kin recognition. And so then they took license then to discount the entire body of work. And I found that very unfortunate and also just very hurtful because I was devastated by the loss of Amanda. You know, she was young. She was just starting her career. She wanted to take her research, which was some of the first work to ever show that trees recognize their own offspring and change their behaviors and adaptive traits in order to to make room for their offspring it was the first time that somebody had shown that in trees and she had done this yeah and that they were diminishing her work when they it should have been celebrated yeah for that that major accomplishment and then you know and then she was wasn't even able to herself come back and defend her work.

11:35And she wanted to take that work and work with it further in the rainforests of Canada. And she wasn't ever able to do that. So yeah, it was a pretty tough time. Yeah. Was that just after that you got the invite to the rainforest? And you went there? Can you tell us about that and about the indigenous tribes that you worked with? Yeah, about the Amazon recourse. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, you know, talking about those criticisms, I was really, I was really flattened by it. And I wasn't sure if I, and the passing of Amanda and my mother, and I wasn't sure if I could carry on, right. Cause I was, I was really low.

12:15And so I got this invitation to go to the Amazon and I went, you know, with the intention to, to really figure this out, what should I do? And I was fortunate that I was able to, you know, go to the rainforest and talk to Indigenous people, the Ashwar people, and really understand their dream culture and how their reverence for trees and that their connection to the spirit world through the trees, and how, you know, they would actually, you know, go to the forest to figure out what their next steps in life would be to access the ancestors through the trees. And when I was there watching this, I was just like, I felt so, I don't know, felt so at home.

12:59Because this is how I, you know, I've learned from my Indigenous colleagues back home. It's the same reverence and connection to all of the world, the whole world, the spirit world. So I felt, you know, I felt at home. I felt like I'd come home in this knowledge and really validated in a lot of ways. And they also talk about their trees as their mothers and fathers and grandfathers and grandmothers, and the whole ancestry is right there in the forest. I thought that was a really beautiful thing. And so I came away just going, yeah, I'm going to continue my work. I'm going to continue you talking about this because this speaks to us globally as people.

13:43I think what's really interesting is how science seems to be in some ways catching up with what indigenous people and traditional knowledge has known for years, for centuries, millennia. Can you talk about that a bit? Yeah, I mean I think that you know there are quite different ways of seeing the world and I think it's important to understand they each bring something different. And that, yes, bringing them together can be very powerful. So in the earth-based cultures, in the indigenous cultures, there's a deep respect for Mother Earth. And because life comes from Mother Earth, Mother Earth is life, that there's a great reciprocity in give and take, that if you provide for Mother Earth, she will provide for you.

14:30and that this is valued, right? The life is really valued. And then the way of doing the work is also different in that people living in the forest or with the earth are doing and learning from the earth. Their languages come from the earth, from the sound of the water, from the whisper in the trees. Their words come from earth itself. And so it reflects the culture and it reflects that connection. Western science is different in that it's more of a, it looks at the parts and tries to dissect them and then tries to understand what might cause a response. So it's a very cause and effect reductionist approach.

15:17So it kind of misses the bigger picture sometimes. It looks at the parts and understands those really, really well, but then doesn't really do well at looking at the context of where that relationship developed. And that has hugely influenced how we apply that knowledge, because it's been a very powerful tool. And so agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, really adopts that reductionist approach to understanding the world. And it's led to some big problems. Because if you miss the context, if you miss that, well, if I take off that forest and it affects the hydrology of the system, because you didn't understand the system, you've created a problem.

15:59And we have done a lot of that. It's also disregarded this indigenous way of seeing the world as a holistic system. So now we really need this holistic way of seeing and knowing and valuing. And so Western science, as it's recognizing this and it's catching up, And people have really, you know, it really is a much more powerful tool in our economic models, in our economies, that as it learns about this holistic way of seeing it, it's important that we translate that using Western science because people are so invested in Western science. So it's essential they work together. This episode is brought to you by Indeed.

16:47Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. So it reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer's work. And, you know, she's a scientist but also an Indigenous person and works with Indigenous groups. Yeah. I wondered if, I don't know what she would say to this, but do you think, would you say you're still a scientist?

17:33I'm very much a scientist. Yeah, I don't mean that in a bad way, but because perhaps science might not be enough for you anymore, what you want to do. Sometimes I've said I'm a recovering scientist. I think that I still use the scientific method because I recognize its power. I recognize that you can figure things out pretty quickly using the scientific method. it's also uh it's got credibility in in the world and we put you know you we can publish our work in reputable journals and then other people will say well that's got it's peer-reviewed it must be credible and so i because of its power and because of its acceptance i still use that very powerful tool yeah but at the same time i recognize its limitations and i try to use it to to help people see what is much deeper in indigenous knowledge systems.

18:32It's a much deeper understanding of us and our relationship to the world. So it feels like in your science, you can do your science in the traditional scientific way, and then you can write your books which allow you a bit more latitude to talk more about the interconnectedness in the world that you feel. And in that sense, it reminds me a bit of James Lovelock's Gaia work. You know, he would publish his chemistry in journals, and then some Gaia-ish stuff as well, but then the books really went to town, and maybe in a similar way in that your concept of the mother tree captures something that the concept of Gaia, which was William Golding's suggestion of course, not here, not Lovelock's, but in the same way that that captures something much bigger that basically then normal people say, yes, I understand that and I want it.

19:29Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, I think that people really have an innate understanding of what the work that I'm doing. People understand that, you know, that the world is a connected place. We know deep in our ancestral DNA that we are, you know, of this earth, we're connected, that our various societies and communities are built on our relationships. and I wanted to tap into people's already, into their knowledge already and say, you know what, we really need to embrace this because we'd forgotten, right? We forgot where we came from and we've, and we're, we're seeing our world kind of unraveling.

20:05And, and I really wanted to say, let's wake up to this. And, you know, in the scientific community, those messages were not getting out. The journals are great for publishing and, you know, and reviewing and validating, I guess, work. But then it just sits there. And unless you have some stroke of, you know, miraculous luck, that it will actually make its way into a policy or into some politician's mind, if it doesn't, it just remains there in the libraries. And I felt like there's a great urgency for people to really know, to say, oh, this was done with the scientific method, it must be credible.

20:47And this, I feel this, I understand this, and therefore I'm going to do something about this. And because I care so much about forests, and I care so much about where we're all going, and for the future, are in our future generations, I really wanted people to know this. And I really wanted people to say, yeah, I'm going to act on this. So that's why I wrote the book but is do you think that is part of why that you got such pushback like lovelock did with gaia i think it went to that side of things the popular but maybe going further than a bit further than the strict science says but to what people might believe but with without without perhaps gold standard science yeah all of it you know if you want to reach people you need to you need to capture their imaginations and people understand story.

21:40We all love to read stories. We learn through story. Scientific writing is not story. It's a method for delivering information in a really efficient way. A story captures people's imagination. And when it's your own personal story and how science works or how that science was done, people can become engaged in it. And then, you know, to tell the story of the science as I'm weaving my personal story with it, then they understand the scientific process. And it dispels suspicions, I think, about science. You know, and I also did, you know, you're right, I did take the science and I interpreted it in ways that I felt was important to me, that meant something to me.

22:27And some people might say that I, you know, I went beyond the realm of science. Well, I guess that was kind of the point, is to really bring the humanity into this. Why should we care about this? We need to care about this. And I needed to capture people's hearts by telling it in that storytelling way. You mentioned policy a little while ago. And I wanted to ask about how, because you work a lot with forestry people, you know, the industry. And I want to ask a bit about that. there's a bit in the book where you've given a talk to some forestry people and everyone's seems very taken with it and then some guy says we can't change what we do without more data yeah you're like you always yeah we always have what is you know how's it going with real change to that industry yeah i mean i would say that you know over the last 20 years in western canada where I'm from that forestry has become more and more extractive.

23:28There's been more and more clear cutting. We've got more and more loss of old growth forests. But things are changing on how people feel about that. People are seeing how our landscape has been changed by industrial logging, by corporate logging, and they're not happy with it. And so, you know, my books tap into that, because it's an innate anger. There's a huge loss, right? Yeah. And so the public is pushing industry to change. Yeah. And so industry is gradually changing. You know, where we did nothing but clear-cutting even last year or the year before. Now they're talking about we're going to do all selective harvesting or mostly move to selective harvesting.

24:11That's a huge change. It's not because of my books, but it's because the public are not happy with this. And the books help them validate their feelings about it. And so then when they're angry, then they push the politicians, and then the politicians will change course. So I feel there's a movement underway, and it's going to happen. We're kind of on the cresting wave. Of course, we've lost so much in the process. Yeah, I mean, I was shocked because we know in this country that the fragments of temperate rainforest that we have left are in, you know, gullies and places you can't clear cut. But I read about this contraption, the chukar or something.

24:57The ho-chukar. Yeah, that can get down steep slopes and even start to clear trees that have so far escaped it. And I was just appalled by that. You know what, it's like if there's money to be made and we give license for those companies or those corporations to make money, and we give them basically the ability to go and do that with the technology, they're going to go do it. And so it's really up to us to say no enough already. You know, it's like there's enough fossil fuels in the ground to warm the planet by many times over. Doesn't mean we should do it, right? We have the technology to do it.

25:37Well, actually, what about humanity? What about the more-than-human world? We really need to bring our morality into this and say enough is enough. And I think that's what's happening in Western Canada. Yeah. So we spoke about the Mother Tree book and the sort of philosophy of the Mother Tree, but the project, the Mother Tree project that you're doing is this huge scientific project. Can you tell us about that and how's it going? Yeah. Because it's a massive project, isn't it? It's massive. So the Mother Tree Project is, it's a thousand kilometers long. So it's about the length of Denmark. It crosses a climate gradient from hot, dry forests to cold, wet forests with the idea that, you know, this gradient of climate can represent how climate is changing itself from, you know, it's drying, becoming more arid as time goes on.

26:28And that we can use that space for time substitution to make predictions and to demonstrate how forests are going to change. And then we're trying different methods of leaving old trees, mother trees behind, while still doing some logging. So we're comparing doing, you know, basically letting a forest just grow all on its own to harvesting out from below, taking, thinning out some of the smaller trees, reducing fuel loads, making little gaps in the canopy, encouraging some small-scale regeneration, to taking out 70 % of the forest and leaving 30 % in patches so that we still have little, you know, forests that can seed into the surrounding areas.

27:10And then we've got another treatment where we've left 10 % of single trees standing and then compared that to the standard practice, which is to take everything, clear cutting. And we're finding out some amazing stuff. For one, that leaving old trees behind really matters to protecting the ecosystem. It's not rocket science, but we're finding you can protect carbon pools. You can protect biodiversity, especially species that require old forests to live in. A lot of our food and medicine plants require a canopy cover that they provide seed to regenerate the forest. The animals like forest cover.

27:49Bears, for example, they den inside old trees. If you don't have old trees, you don't have dens. so yeah we're finding out some some great stuff I think I read or that James Cameron had been influenced by your work when he wrote the treatment for the home tree in the Avatar movies yeah and was was he in touch with you subsequently for the documentary on Avatar and the next films yes he was so you know I hadn't seen Avatar but I got a phone call from from his group that said we're using you know we're looking at your work to help guide our ideas and I thought that was really cool and here's 10 million dollars no you didn't say that you need to give her some money yeah um but then I went to see the movie you know where you have the you know the 3d glasses on and I was like oh my god this is brilliant right there's the home tree and then the you know the networks and And then the people, the Navi people that were linked into the tree and that was their tree of souls.

28:53And that is just like what is, you know, when I talked about the Amazon or, you know, the cultures that I live with, that is how people see the world or see the forest and interact with the forest. So I thought it was brilliant. and then yes and then a few years back they his crew came in and didn't and started to make a documentary film about the science behind avatar um so i was interviewed i haven't seen that that documentary or if it's even going to get finished but uh but that was that was a nice validation that the work was really indeed based on well and that that gets the concept at least out obviously way beyond the science now but it does get the concept of interconnectedness and really that's what you want people to get and kids who are going to see these these films they they they will take that away yeah and and just a note about kids they get this right away right because their their world is really expansive they they haven't been winnowed down to believing a certain way of viewing the world yet there everything is is is included uh of course they're connected to the trees and they they you know I I know what when I was a kid the trees were my were my friends they were my partners right they're they're who I played with yeah um so yeah kids get this right away and I think it's the challenge to adults is to just remember what it was like when you were a kid and then come back to what is real yeah I wanted to ask you about that when because you know you grew up in a forestry family but then you said when you were a kid you were you felt innately part of nature like many kids do.

30:33But was there a point where that was banged out of you and you went into the sort of more commercial forestry kind of cold-hearted side of it and then had to relearn that connection? Yeah, that's exactly true. I always had this connection and understood the forest as that we're all together. And then when I decided to become a forester myself and I went to university and learned from the professors who were mostly from Europe. They were all from Europe, mostly men from Europe. And they told me the forest didn't work that way, the way that I understood from growing up in the forest, that trees are not in relationship, that they're individuals and that they're just out there for themselves.

31:17And we can chop them down, no problem. Yeah. And we can grow them up to be big and strong, and then we're going to cut them down and then grow them up. And I just, I struggled with that for a long time. I really tried to understand it. And for a while I was going, yeah, maybe that works. I don't know. And it doesn't, it's not how a forest works. You know, when you, when you take out part of an ecosystem, because you're trying to grow big trees, it all starts to unravel because all those niches belong, they're all packed in there together to work together. And you can't just unravel a forest forest and remake it in your own image and have it be healthy and strong.

31:54So that's when I pulled away and I said I really need to, you know, I really need to understand what I knew already and demonstrate it using the scientific methodology so that to myself but also so that we could change forestry practices. And, you know, be stereotyped here but, you know, Jane Goodall made her breakthroughs that no one else had done. Lynn Margulis did with endosymbiosis. Is there something about being a woman that helped? I think so. I think that women do see things differently. I mean, if I can compare how I thought compared to my male professors, there was a stark difference.

32:38When I worked in the forest industry alongside my male colleagues, I was different. I don't think all men are different. Not all men are like that, right? Obviously, James Lovelock, obviously, you know, many, you know, First Nations cultures, it's innately known that we're all connected, whether you're a man or a woman. And so it's just, you know, a certain, you know, certain segment of male patriarchy, I guess, that has taken this idea of competition and being dominant to the extreme. But it's not how we all think. It's not how we actually all work. And it's really, you know, it's destabilizing for us as a society.