Have you ever found yourself in some forest glade – maybe a patch of oaks along your evening walk, or a fleeting moment of solitude in the redwoods on a family camping trip – and there, under the dense canopy dotted with light above you, gotten the sense that the trees are speaking to one another?
Well, it turns out, they kind of are.
In her book, Finding the Mother Tree, ecologist and activist Suzanne Simard summarizes her lifelong love affair with trees. She’s especially known for her paradigm-shifting research which showed that, rather than existing primarily as individuals competing for light, they exist in complex, communicative networks. Forests do, indeed, talk.
I recently had an opportunity to hear Simard present her findings in person, and I found myself wondering, naturally, can healthy tree communities teach us anything about healthy human communities? I think they can.
Here are three ways trees exist in community, and how I think our neighborhoods could be better off by following their lead.
1) Trees have an established means of communication.
Okay, so, we’ve covered this point already… But I haven’t told you how! Did you know that more than half of the carbon (meaning, living matter) in a forest exists underground? Most of us know that trees have deep-reaching roots that only grow wider and deeper as the tree grows taller. But those roots are further interconnected by a single, fungal (yes, think mushrooms!) network called mycelia. Using the mycelia as a communication medium – we’re quite literally talking social media here – trees send biochemical signals back and forth to one another, warning of threat or requesting nutrients for growth… which gets to my second point.
2) Trees share resources according to need.
In a thriving forest, trees relate symbiotically. This means that trees both give and receive from one another, roughly in equal measure. In redwood colonies, for instance, scientists have identified albino redwoods, which never grow very tall compared to their behemoth neighbors. Because the root systems are networked, though, the big, green redwoods can send glucose (food) to the smaller, white redwoods, which lack the chlorophyll that would allow them to make their own. In turn, albino redwoods produce defensive enzymes that don’t naturally occur in the more typical redwoods, share them via mycelia, and grant the whole forest super-powered immunity from disease! And from this, we can surmise one more of Simard’s findings…
3) Trees thrive in a diverse (intergenerational) network.
Simard and her team obsess over what they call “Mother Trees,” the oldest, tallest trees in a forest that also contain the most linkages to other trees and plants in the area. Mother trees, they’ve found, act as hubs for the entire community. They send the most biochemical signals, share the most resources, and raise young saplings up to become strong, thriving trees themselves. A healthy forest depends on numerous mother trees. No mother trees, no forest.
Have I got your wheels turning yet? I hope so. The connections, no pun intended, are everywhere.
How can we translate this learning to our neighborhoods?
What if we established an open line of communication with our neighbors? Facebook and NextDoor are too big. Think of something more homegrown, grassroots. A group text might do the trick. Or a once-a-month block dinner that doubles as a chance to imagine possibilities for the neighborhood and set small goals for its betterment together.
What if our gifts, talents, and resources were less privatized? What if there was a little less shame around the things we don’t do so well? Maybe one neighbor can’t figure out for the life of them how to cook a good family meal and another has a great dinner hack. Maybe a kid needs a summer job and a busy neighbor with some extra cash needs her dog walked. Needs can feel abundant. But when we open up a little, we find resources are abundant, too.
And lastly, what if we saw our generational differences not as insurmountable obstacles to relationships, but as treasure troves of knowledge and mutual aid? We live in a time of generational distrust and separation. Societally, we push our elders to the margins in the name of progress, and our elders scratch their heads and mutter ‘kids these days’ when things go wrong. We lose sight of each other’s invaluable contributions. We (speaking as a young-ish person myself) need “mother trees” among us, wise elders who can help us navigate some of life’s overwhelming complexity. But they need us, too. (For more than just our ability to recover lost passwords, I dare say.) It’s up to us to create spaces where our unique contributions come to bear.
So, next time you get that feeling in the forest, it’s not just in your head; trees talk.
And I, for one, want to live in a neighborhood that listens to them.
Interested in other blog posts about neighboring and nature? Here are a few:
How My Dog Helped Me be a Better Neighbor
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