Fall 2024 49 P R O F I L E Simard studied forestry as an undergraduate at UBC and worked a seasonal job with a logging company in her early 20s, when she began to grow curious about the connections between trees. She observed the detrimental impact of the clear-cutting practices that had replaced the sustainable logging her family had participated in for decades; they might yield more wood in the short term but seemed to have long-term consequences for the forest’s ability to regenerate. Many of the trees that she replanted after a clear-cut — as many as 10% — grew sick and died. She wanted to understand why. She completed a master’s degree in forestry at Oregon State, studying how alders and other shrubs then thought to be weeds competed with pine saplings, but she still wasn’t satisfied with her research. Starting from a young age, Simard had an instinct that a forest was more than a collection of individual trees. Following a stint with the Canadian Forest Service, she came to OSU to pursue a doctorate studying forests more holistically—trees as members of an interconnected community. “We emphasize domination and competition in the management of trees in forests,” she writes in Finding the Mother Tree. She wanted to ask a contradictory question: “Are forests structured mainly by competition, or is cooperation as or even more important?” She studied Douglas firs and paper birches, showing that radioactive carbon isotopes respired by one tree could be passed along to adjacent trees — and that the pathway was likely the filaments of ghostly white mycorrhizae spider-webbing just under the topsoil of the forest floor, connecting one tree to the next. These connections are significant not only to the logging industry, she asserts, but also to the understanding of how forests respond to stress, particularly in the face of climate change. Resistance to her research, which was published in Nature in 1997, came swiftly. Her work “was (and is) a direct challenge to the prevailing competition paradigm. It meant that the forest was not a collection of individuals but included the potential for a web of interconnections and interdependence,” says Dave Perry, emeritus professor of forest ecosystems and society at OSU and Simard’s doctoral supervisor. “Swimming against the tide is not easy in science; it takes courage.” Simard was not the first researcher to propose that trees exchange resources, Perry adds, but she brought the concept to the mainstream — particularly with her TED Talk and the publication of Finding the Mother Tree. With astonishing intimacy, the memoir chronicles her childhood, the death of her brother, romances, her divorce and a bout with cancer, alongside the development of her career. She draws metaphors from the landscape to help illuminate her experiences, and vice versa. “You can write journal papers, and it doesn’t really change,” Simard says of her decision to write the book. “I kept thinking, ‘It’s because people don’t read these journal papers.Theyread stories.’”Otherwriters, like Powers, had used aspects of her research and of her biography in their writing, and just as she’d felt something was missing from science’s understanding of forest ecosystems, she felt that something was missing from the way her research was being portrayed. “I wanted to tell the story myself,” she says, “and I wanted it told from a female perspective.” When she says this, she isn’t simp- ly referring to her own point of view as a woman in science. One of the central metaphors of her memoir is that of the titular “mother tree,” which is what she calls each of the towering old-growth behemoths that appear to anchor the mycorrhizal network, shuttling re- sources to younger and more vulnerable saplings. “It felt like mothering to me.With the elders tending to the young,” she writes. “Yes, that’s it. Mother Trees.” If the response to her work is any indication, Simard’s language seems to have tapped into a desire to see ourselves as part of, rather than distinct from, the landscape. Still, there are those who say that her metaphors aren’t sufficiently grounded in research. “I was trained as a scientist, and I have great pride in being a scientist,” she says. “There’s been a huge backlash against me writing in this way, and that’s been very difficult for me as a scientist.” Simard observes that some of the backlash to her research in the ’90s is rooted in a suspicion of language perceived as feminine. “SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE IS NOT EASY IN SCIENCE; IT TAKES COURAGE.” continued ۄ Released in 2021, Finding the Mother Tree became a bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Time and The Wall Street Journal.
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