Suzanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree
Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, pioneering researcher into plant communication and intelligence, and best selling author of, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Born and raised in logging country, Suzanne and her holistic views of forest ecosystems were not welcomed into the male-dominated forestry industry. Pushed into academia, she has dedicated her career to investigating the complex relationships between trees. She is best known for her work on the communal lives of trees, exploring the ways in which trees use below-ground fungal networks to communicate, compete, and cooperate—exhibiting sophisticated social traits characteristic of a civil society not too different from our own. At the center of it all, she tells us, are the Mother Trees—immense, highly connected beings that play a vital role in intertwining and sustaining those around them.
Our conversation dives into these enthralling, mysterious relationships, and the practical application of Professor Simard’s work on forest resiliency and adaptability, including how to manage and heal forests from human impact. We must value our ecosystems for more than what we exploit them for, she tells us, and by restoring biodiversity and respecting nature’s brilliance, we can reconnect to the intelligence of the natural world, and hopefully uncover a better way forward in the process.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Communities seeking balance…
The development of a forest…
Exploring the right relationship with nature…
MORE FROM SUZANNE SIMARD:
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I loved your book. It was so beautiful. I'm from Montana and so we're neighbors!
SUZANNE SIMARD:
And that's why you've got the check shirt on.
ELISE:
Yes, yes. I wanted you to feel extra at home. And a fiddle leaf fig, right? Like that's the house plant de jour. I have a lot of those in my house. I’m trying to you feel comfortable. I loved reading. Obviously we'll get into mother trees, but it felt like such a love letter to your brother, Kelly and I loved reading about him and thank you his rodeo days.
SUZANNE:
Yeah, you know, the ranching and cattle and horse part of my family is such a huge thing, but it's sort of like once Kelly passed away, I feel like I've kind of lost my connection to that. And although my uncle Wayne is still very much, he raises cattle and he's a real character still. It's a part of life that most people don't see that segment of our culture that is so is almost like a historical thing. That culture and it's cool. It's really neat. I love it because a lot of it it's about survival. Surviving on the land and being with the land in such a unique and careful way.
ELISE:
We're going to talk about trees, I promise. But when I first started going to this ranch that I go to in the summer, I grew up with horses, in the woods and spent my childhood, you know, with my brother, my dad in the woods, in the forest, finding morels or huckleberries. I think you were a little bit more remote than we were, but when I went back to this ranch and started riding again, and I actually grew up riding English, but this ranch is Western. And my husband, he was like, this is strange to me. Like, I don't know what's happening. And the owner of the ranch was like, well, this is your culture. And I’d never really thought about it like that, but it felt very much I'm sure for you too, like coming home, but I understand horse people and I understand rodeo culture and barrel racing queens. That was my fantasy, my childhood fantasy.
SUZANNE:
It's neat that you're, that you're, you're comfortable on a horse.
ELISE:
And in that culture, there is so much respect and reverence for the land, although it's interesting, you know, you obviously grew up in a logging family, like really in it and reading the first third of your book, which is really about this strange, I don't even know how you would define it, but like the Venn diagram between people who, you know, know better, or have some must have some intuitive understanding of the forest and some reverence. But their unwillingness to accept the reality of the practices like that had to have been such a in cognitive dissonance.
SUZANNE:
Well, and still today, you know, it's the same cognitive dissonance over all kinds of things that we have going on. It's like, how could you not see this? You know, that caring for the land is your livelihood. Our lives depend on it. And yet, you know, our economic system is about exploiting, and pushing these ecosystems to collapse, and yet, as individual people, we careabout the land and the plants and the water and the animals. But then we're driven by this economic thing that doesn't care about it. It is a cognitive dissonance, but how do, we've gotta bring that Venn diagram so that it's full, right? Because until we do yet, we're gonna still continue that we'll, we'll still continue to have these collapsing systems around us.
ELISE:
I thought at the end, I mean, you write about that first, you know, when you were working, writing prescriptions for that logging company and you first encounter those yellowing saplings and you're like what's happening . Or seedlings. And then you write, “I've been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forests objectively. This dissection, this control and categorization was supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings.” And then that's how you were able to publish your, your point. And then, but when you get into the complexity, it's like, well, there's no control in this study! Like what you're observing is irrelevant. But it is that the fact that we've been taught to specialize the body dissociate, you know, it's all the same.
SUZANNE:
The same, it's the same thing. Yeah. In medicine or forestry or fisheries or, yeah, it's, it's this reductionism that Western science is based on. This reductionism. And you know, it's only in the last couple of decades that has emerged this more holistic science called complexity science, which is whole ecosystem, whole body, whole biosphere kind of way of seeing the world. But it takes a whole different tool set to do that. And we also have to, you know, retrain our minds to not look at the whole thing instead. And I think the other difficult part is that emerging from this reduction in science is how we also treat our ecosystems or treat our bodies. Right. Like you go in and I go, oh, I've got a pain in my stomach.
Oh, I'm gonna give you like Antacid. But that pain could be because your whole food system is out of whack. You're eating foods that you're allergic to, but we sort of reduce it down to that one organ. And it's the same in forest. We reduce it down to those little trees. That's all we care about are those little trees, because we're gonna grow them back to become big trees that we're gonna log again. That's like the whole objective. And it's like, man, we've missed the point that this little seedling is dependent, interdependent with its whole ecosystem or in our sense that little, you know, your gallbladder is interdependent with your entire body. So we've kind of really, you know, dug ourselves into this. And now we're seeing it expressed in our losses. Our losses of climate stability and all that goes along with that.
ELISE:
You were one of the very early people. I mean, this is the irony, right. That essentially indigenous peoples and cultures all along have been like, have understood this deeply and profoundly and been expressing it. And yet, as a Western scientist, you were an early, a very early, too early, right? To the point that you, you fled into the forest service into academia. Maybe you, maybe that, I mean, I'd like to be a professor.
SUZANNE:
I would say I was pushed out into it. You know, I always saw myself as a person that would work with the land, work on the land. I really wanted to just, you know, work in the forest, be a Forester. But forestry would not accept me at that point. I was a young girl. It was the late or the late seventies, early eighties. And the industry was, it was completely male-dominated. And the, so was the science around it. And, and it was not ready for girls to come in and make waves or, or even just to do a job. And so I couldn't make my way in. And so then, you know, and then when I went to the forest service, so I went, I, I kind of got pushed out of forest industry into the government, you know, forest government governance.
And I was able to do research, but even then they were not ready to move from this reductionism to a more holistic way of seeing forests. And so I got pushed out of there. And then I was lucky to land into an academic job, which I'd never envisioned myself doing, because I am a practitioner, right. I'm an applied, live on the land, work with the land, kind of person. And here I spent a large part of my career doing research, which I loved. But it wasn't my calling. It was something that I got to because the other places wouldn't keep me.
ELISE:
But ultimately, probably to the benefit of the forest, but it's interesting. I mean, clearly there's like, there was a huge gender component to this and this boys club that you were part of. How much, you know, it was so staggering sort of after your, after that massive breakthrough in Nature, which is sort of like the ultimate, right. I mean, there is no more prestigious place for this type of research. But after that first early study and then your rejection, right? Like the disavowal of your work, how much do you think was, gender versus politics and money? Because clearly, like it's wild to me that despite what you were showing, and you've only been proven out more and more in these intervening decades, that there was so much resistance. How much would you put on guilt, versus gender, versus just how hard it is for people to acknowledge that they've been wrong?
SUZANNE:
Yeah. I think it's all mixed in there together. You know, I try to look back and dissect it. I mean, certainly, there were gender issues about anything that women were doing in forestry then, and what we were trying to do was just fit in so we could get these jobs. And then, you know, and then you start, you know, because we're thinking, feeling and understanding human beings. Of course, we're gonna start looking at, well, how are you doing this? Why are you taking these old, old forests and reducing them to rows of pine trees? You know, of course, you know, any thinking person would say, what are we doing here? And so there was, and women tend to look, you know, we ended up in research because we weren't welcomed into the practical side, which was more about the engineering and road building and laying out blocks to cut timber down.
It was very much a machismo kind of world. So we ended up in these little places like research and civil culture where we were more accepted. And of course that's where, you know, you challenge the status quo because when you do research, you go, oh, you know, as soon as you start looking at that system, anybody will see that there's things wrong with it. And, and so, you know, we ended up, you know, just because that's the way things worked out looking and critiquing the system and of course from our own female perspective. So I'm counting myself in this small group of female scientists, forest scientists who started doing this research and critiquing. And of course when you, as a scientist, you find these places that can be improved and when you start vocalizing it in that male world, it's easy for, you know, a group of males who are, have their cultural support behind them to say, oh no, we can't accept this.
And so of course there was gender issues just as I described there. And then of course there was also the individual egos at play as well. So for example, you know, there's certain people, males that had risen up through forest policy and practice in government who created policies that, that reinforced this sort of mechanical way of industrial forestry, and they become wedded to their policies. It becomes their thing. And so I hit that as well as like, we're not gonna change this for you. So there was that individual ego involved, but then there was also, you know, the whole economic machine at play. As you develop an industry, so in this case, industrial forestry, you know, it's about cutting down trees.
It's about preparing, putting machines in, and preparing sites for planting. It's about growing seeds and nurseries and planting them. It's about spraying the land to get rid of the native plants. It's about spraying them again, and then thinning, and then going in and doing that harvest again. Imagine the industrial machine that's been set up to service that idea. So there's a lot of resistance to change. There's a lot of money at play. AndI didn't as a researcher going, oh, you know, there's networks in here and it's a whole ecosystem—you're quickly shut down, right? Because of the big money. And I was, you know, I was in my thirties, I was a young mom. I didn't expect it.
I guess I was naive in a way about how powerful that lobby and that industry and you know, how it had built up, and how much money was really at play. And then from the academic side, there was also the theoretical challenge because the idea that species and ecology or ecosystems were founded on, or structured by competition, you know, that was a very strong prevailing theory and still is today. And so I was challenging that, and saying, Hey, actually, these plants are cooperating as well, you know? Yeah. There's competition, but they're actually cooperating in a very deep sense. And so that, you know, the academic world wasn't ready for that either, especially in the world of applied ecology. So I got it from all angles, I think is what I'm trying to say.
ELISE:
But it's amazing the perseverance and the way, I mean, it seems like, I don't know if you had a premonition, or an idea of the ultimate reality of your work. And I'm curious to know where it's going, but this idea of mother trees and this whole nuclear, or sort of this way that they are intelligent and are passing nutrients through, is it mycorrhizal, am I saying that right?
SUZANNE:
You got that right.
ELISE
That there’s this deep web of interconnectedness underneath the ground, which I think is now more mainstream. And more part of our consciousness. And, but you started, you know, it's interesting to watch the evolution of the experiments as you work towards this and like the steps, the plodding steps, that need to be taken. Because that first Nature thing was simply establishing that they're was it that they were connected, the Birch and Firs are, are feeding and sharing nitrogen and sharing resources and not competing, or they are competing that they're collaborating?
SUZANNE:
So they were sharing carbon and I think nitrogen as well, that we learned much later. So as Birch was shading Douglas Fir, it’s competing for light really, because it's shading, right? It's capturing light that Fir won't otherwise get, because it's in the understory. But at the very same time, the beauty of this is that Birch was providing Douglas Fir with carbon through the below ground network. And I look at that now and it's really the community of trees was seeking balance, right. Because the community, you know, why would Birch wanna kill its neighbor when actually when you look more deeply at all the other interactions that Birch needs its neighbor Douglas For in order to maintain balance in the soil against pathogens and other acidifying microbes.
And, and so, you know, are they it's evolved. That community evolved and adapted and to work together like that. And as scientists, we often look at one thing and we say, oh, that's the one thing it's competing for light. And then, and that's true. That's what people did. You know, the science, the experiments were simple, looking at one resource and not at the whole ecosystem. And so you miss all these other ways that they're interacting. And if we could look at the whole thing all at once, we would make completely different decisions about how to manage that ecosystem. But because people were so focused that Birch is competing for light and not just Birch, but Aspen and all kinds of like Red Alder, all kinds of other species. And that led to the, the wholesale herbicide of these native plant communities to get rid of these so-called competitors. And if we'd just known ahead that they were also collaborating at the same time, I think we wouldn't—any thinking person would never have gone in and poisoned these other plants. Because they create balance in the ecosystem.
ELISE:
Well, right. And it seemed if I'm understanding this correctly, that people weren't taking a long enough view. Right. So like this scorched earth approach, sometimes it would appear that the Fir, which was what they wanted to cultivate and had the most value was significantly out-growing. But then they start to fail. They become diseased, sun-burnt. And that over the span of time, there’s a dramatic difference right in the quality of the forest. And it's amazing that even as you were walking them through that one experiment where you, we were like, let's just actually go there and I'm not gonna stand in front of you with the slide projector. And like the, just firm us about what was in front of it's staggering,
SUZANNE:
You know, I think that they needed more evidence, right. That Nature paper was a breakthrough discovery. And in science, you know, science kind of works along where you get these breakthroughs, but then, you know the actual scientific community takes a lot more to be convinced that it's a real breakthrough. There can be years and decades to kind of chunk along, catching up to that breakthrough. And then when you get the confirming or verifying studies that say, actually this is true. Then the scientists come along and start doing that more extension, they call more extension kind of science. And so I was at that moment, you know, there was this breakthrough, people were going, oh, we need more evidence. Of course, all those other social factors at play that we just talked about. And so it's taken until now. So I did that study 30 years ago and here we are in 2022. And you and I are talking about this as though, you know, of course this, this makes sense that, that these networks very obviously exist and people know about it, and they're teaching it in high schools, but holy cow to get to this point, what a road, what a ride.
ELISE:
The last part of the book is so beautiful and the way, and I didn't know if I was understanding this correctly, but essentially also within these almost, is it a neural pathways? Will you talk us through exactly what's happening with the mother tree and then the chaos that erupts when those bonds are broken?
SUZANNE:
So I'm gonna take you through the development of a forest. So in a lot of forests and old growth forest in dry forests in the Western U.S. and Canada, and you know, a lot of forests are like this, where you have elders, you have younger trees, and you have seedlings. And so the elder trees, the grandfathers and the grandmothers, or however you wanna describe them, these old trees, they shed seeds, the seeds fall to the forest floor. They germinate and those new germinates are the next generation. And so those new germinates are, you know, establishing in little gaps in the forest, maybe an old tree fell over, or maybe there was a small fire that went through, or for some reason there's a gap that seedling establishes. It germinates, it sends a little root down into the soil and that root within a few weeks becomes colonized by the great network that is supported by these old trees.
And that network is the fungal network. It's the, the mycchorizal fungi and that there are thousands of species, it's a whole kaleidoscope of species down there doing their little jobs, you know, filling niches and getting nutrients and water from those big trees. You can think of it like a huge placenta, if you will. And these little seedlings tap into this enormous uptake capacity for all these resources. So they're falling into an established,nurturing grounding place. And then they start feeding from that network. They get their nutrients and water, even though they they're producing their little seeds or seed, their little needles and leaves. And then they have enough to get going because they're being supported and subsidized by that network and these older trees.
And then they start to grow up and become saplings. And then eventually they become old trees themselves. And then they're the ones that are producing the seeds and the seeds fall to the ground. And they establish within that network. So it's really this old forest self-regenerating in this way, and the fungal network is very much the starting ground, and forests vary across landscapes to, you know, there there's different kinds of forests. And so the distinct dynamics of a forest vary according to that landscape, but that's the basic idea of the cycle of a forest it's old to young and the nurturing capability of the old, to bring these young ones along.
ELISE:
And there's a preference right there. They don't disavow their, I guess, cousins or the other trees, seeds and saplings. They help them too, but they have a preference for their own children.
SUZANNE:
Yeah. So when we started, thinking about the scientific process, we started out just looking at, oh these trees are redistributing resources back and forth between them. And then the next was, oh, these old trees are distributing resources to young ones in the understory. And, and, oh, actually, you know, thinking through the succession of experiments, it was really an evolution of discovery as we went from one question to the next, but we started out thinking more generally: Where are these old trees redistributing their resources? Oh, you know, to all kinds of species and then, oh, and also to their own species. And then the next question was: oh, I wonder if they, they send more to their own offspring to their kin. And every time we asked those questions, we went, oh, you know, there is a preference, there is more going to the kin. So it was all a big surprise and one thing led to the next. So we did come to the point where yes, these old trees really do send resources to even other species and strangers, and understory plants, but they preferentially provide carbon and nitrogen and water to their own kin. And that gives those kin a head start.
ELISE:
It's like alloparenting. I mean, it's the same concept. And I wanna get into this idea of equality. Cause I thought it was so beautiful, but then this feels like I wanna, do you mind if I read to you from your own book?
SUZANNE:
Yeah. For, for sure, please go for
ELISE:
So you write: “Maybe society should keep old mother trees around instead of cutting most of them down. So they can naturally shed their seed and nurture their own seedlings. Maybe clearcutting the old, even if they're not well, wasn't such a good idea. The dying still have much to give. We already knew the elders were habitat for old growth dependent birds, and mammals, and fungi. That old trees stored far more carbon than young ones. They protected the prodigious amounts hidden in the soil and they were the sources of fresh water and clean air. Those old souls had been through great changes and this affected their genes. Through the changes, they gathered crucial wisdom, and they offered this up to their offspring, providing protection, laps into which the new generations got started and a foundation from which to grow.” Oh, it gives me chills. But that idea of crucial wisdom and the way that they're the discovery that they're not only nurturing, but they are warning, preparing, is so stunning. Can you, can you tell us a little bit more about that intelligence?
SUZANNE:
Yeah. And as you, you know, as you read that passage, it's been a while since I wrote that, but it is a beautiful passage. It takes, yeah so much science and puts it into this really understandable nugget of beautiful writing. It's really nice. I haven't listened or read that for a long time, but I'm just thinking about how many experiments, how many struggles went into being able to produce that paragraph. But let me explain a little bit more, you know, it was so many graduate students and studies that took us to understand that not only were carbon and water and nitrogen moving between these plants, these trees, but also information. And, and I have to say that I, you know, I'm at the point in my career, I'm in my early sixties where I'm not gonna be the one uncovering what that information is.
I just know that it exists because of the kinds of experiments I did. So my graduate students would do things like injure an old tree, you know, pluck off the needles and then label the tree with carbon 13, for example, and then watch that carbon move into the neighboring seedlings that were of their own kin and not, you know, their offspring and strangers and finding that a greater amount of carbon went straight into those kin seedlings and not just carbon, but it actually affected their defense system. So we could look at the defense enzymes that were produced in those little seedlings, connected to the mother tree, that's just been injured and we could see their defense enzyme profile get basically motivated to produce more enzymes. And so, you know, really what those seedlings were doing is they're dropping on their parents and saying, Hey, you know, or the parent is sending a signal, Hey, there's danger here and you need to protect yourself.
And so they did, whereas the stranger seedlings didn't get those messages. And so, so there's all kinds of things going on in that little experiment. I just described to you one, there's the recognition that this mother tree or this older tree has of their offspring. That's a recognition signal, that's information. Second, there's resources going between them, more resources, carbon, nitrogen, and so on. That's information. And the third bit of information here is, Hey, there's a herbivore that's affecting the mother tree. And the seedling is getting that message to upgrade its own defense arsenal. Just describing there, there's a lot of conversation going on there. There's a lot of information moving back and forth between these two trees. And that was many, many experiments to figure that out.
ELISE:
And you talk a bit about the ability to heal itself, the bounds of when it can't, when we're so destructive, that it's just, who knows when new life can take born. But when we think about, you know, you talk about in the context of climate change, beetles, a lot of these threats, you know, the way that we've completely disturbed these natural systems. Does it make you hopeful that if left to its own devices, if we could possibly do that, which I understand with our consumption, we can't right now, are you hopeful?
SUZANNE:
Yes, I am hopeful. And, and the reason I'm hopefully is because I understand these ecosystems. Because I've had the privilege of growing up in these forests, working in these forests, and studying them. I mean, what a gift I've been given. But in that whole life, I've seen forests recover and how they recover. I understand that, you know, these networks that are below ground, which are not just the fungi, but the bacteria and the whole soil food web is a connecting system that is integrated and interdependent. I know that it's evolved to help those ecosystems recover and regenerate. And so it really is only us, you know, really giving the power of that system. That's already in place giving it the power, the chance to recover. You know, if we keep hammering it, if we keep, you know, doing these cumulative destructive things like, you know, suppressing natural fire regimes, clear cutting, spraying herbicides, you know, planting the wrong species.
And then, and then going and cutting it again at a short rotation. If we keep doing that, then the system, you know, it does it, it suffers, but if we can slow down and let it heal in its own with its own devices, and even with, or help. We can help those ecosystems recover. And that is really what, you know, our Aboriginal people, that's how they lived with the land is they actually were caretakers. They understood how to actually increase the wealth and the health of those ecosystems by being the caretakers. But Western society has been more like the exploiters. And we know then that we can help the systems. We can allow the systems to recover on their own devices, and we can even speed up the process by putting in, you know, helping it by reintroducing the right plant species, the right fungal species, allowing the natural biodiversity to flourish instead of always degrading it tthrough our exploitations. So that's what gives me hope. I know what's wired to heal.
ELISE:
And do you feel like policy makers and obviously environmentalists, but do you feel sort of in Canada and obviously you have a tremendous amount of North America's forests. But do you feel like people are starting to align around that idea that this is critical and that climate change like is dependent on our ability to sequester carbon all of this stuff?
SUZANNE:
I think people, there are individuals of course, and groups that understand this. And of course the First Nations, the Aboriginal people out, it's just in their worldview, in their culture, in their cultural institutions and the stories, they're just waiting for us to figure it out and work with them. There is a great understanding I think, out there. But the rest of society is still enmeshed in this consumptive growth economy, that isn't going to change anytime soon, but what we can do and which gives me a great deal of hope is that even at the highest levels of world finance, like the international monetary fund, and even in the intergovernmental panel of climate change has recognized that restoring the biodiversity, using Aboriginal ways of seeing the world and, and working with ecosystems is the key to recovering our ecosystems.
And, and one of the economic drivers that can make this happen is to start valuing our ecosystems for more than just what we exploit them for, which is timber and, you know, paper and toilet paper. And, you know, a lot of stuff we don't need to be honest, right. We over consume these just because we can, and it's been like an endless resource. We need to pull back, stop consuming so much, be much more judicious with what we do use in the forest. And value those ecosystem goods and services that give us life, right. They give us air to breathe and water to drink, and we're moving in that direction by, and by putting a price on carbon and carbon, isn't the catch end all and be all, but it's the step in the right direction because everything is made of carbon.
A healthy, thrifty ecosystem is productive and produces more carbon. And we're finally putting, you know, a price on it and countries and municipalities and companies are starting to say, we wanna go to, you know, net zero emissions by X amount of time in order for them to do it, they’ll pay for it. And that means buying carbon credits, or buying carbon offsets, or investing in carbon projects, which are all about increasing the carbon sequestration capacity of a forest or other ecosystems. And the way that forests do that is by be being biodiverse and healthy. Then that goes back to the very basics of how do we look after these ecosystems, you know, about knowing the land, about knowing which plants belong there, about nurturing the salmon populations and the clam beds, nurturing the grizzly bears. So that that whole food chain of creatures is working together again to create a healthy ecosystem. So once we start valuing that on the economy, then we can make a big transformational shift in our society. We don't have to convince everybody, you know, that, that we have to do this. The economic engine has to get into place, and then we'll all go along with it.
ELISE:
Totally. And I think it becomes so much less abstract to consumers who want to make good decisions. And obviously are like this idea that we're responsible. It's such a much higher level, right? It's a corporate level, but yet they pass on personal responsibility. But once that carbon tax, like once we have an idea of what's a good choice and what's a heavy choice, it becomes much easier for consumers to understand that whole cycle and they don't wanna participate in something that's destructive. Most people don't—we're unwittingly dragged along and then blamed.
SUZANNE:
That's. Yes, exactly. We're told that it's the individual choice. You've gotta recycle more, or you've gotta ride your bike more, and not everybody can do that. And so you feel hopeless. But that's not where, I mean, all that is is important. We all have to act as individuals, but, you know, and do the best we can, but it really is at this higher level governance where it's gonna make a huge difference, and how do we get that. It's about voting. And so then it comes back to the individual: who do you put in power to make these difficult decisions, right? That that's where the individual really does have a lot to say, you know, writing to your congressperson, writing to your Senator, voting for the people, holding them to account, because it's so easy for them not to follow through on their promises. So you do have, you do have power as an individual actor with your political system, and then you need to hold your politicians to account so that they make the right, you know, policy decisions that, that support, you know, um, dealing with climate change in these ways.
ELISE:
One thing that's really exciting to me, and it was interesting. You didn't go into this deeply, but you, we were talking about it in the context of treatment for your cancer and it was at the, the Yew tree. But the science now that also enables us, or empowers us. The biotech that I know people are scared of. But this idea that you can actually isolate this, you could isolate whatever is in this Yew tree so that the Yew trees aren't stripped, killed, mined for drugs, and grow it. You can ferment it. There are ways that we can use nature's intelligence in much less exploitative. In ways that I personally think is really exciting. So we're really also obsessed with this idea that like everything that we use, that we put on our skin, it needs to come from plants. It needs to come straight from nature. And what we know is like nature can't support our consumption like that. But this idea that science can build a bridge of understanding exactly what that molecule is. So you're not destroying the whole plant or destroying the tree, I think is, it sounds so sci-fi, but it's honestly the only way that we can meet people's needs without destroying our ecosystem.
SUZANNE:
Yeah. I mean, you know, we are so intelligent as a species and we've created technologies that we can use to our advantage and to help heal our environment. And that's a really excellent example you just provided where yeah, the Yew tree was, you know, actually it was used by Aboriginal people for a long, long time for millennia here in North America as a medicine. In fact, the Yew tree produces Taxil as a defense for itself, right? It's a chemical, it's a defense chemical. So when it gets, you know, chewed on by some insect, it produces Taxil that makes, you know, it makes it unpalatable to whatever is eating it. So it's evolved, you know, it's a medicine that's evolved through, through millennia for the Yew tree. And then at the Aboriginal people used the plant as a salve an ointment to remedy their ailments.
And then it was in observation in Western medicine of the use of these plants that had high quality as anti-cancer agencies, that, that the Yew tree was actually screened by the USDA, department of agriculture as a potential medicine. This happened a long time, decades ago. And then the discovery that it has this, you know, using you using chemistry, that it has these qualities. It was like in the 1980s that suddenly it became, you know, oh my God, this plant can cure breast cancer and prostate cancer and all kinds of cancers. And so then, you know, yeah, you're right. Like, so then suddenly it was a bonanza to go and pull this plant out of the forest and use the Cambium, which, which is where these high concentrations of Taxil are.
And then, and then it was modern medicine and chemistry that pulled back and said, oh, we can produce through tissue culture, you know, the cells that actually produce the Cambium cells that produce Taxol. And then it became something that was no longer exploiting the environment. It was produced in the lab. And that is a breakthrough in medicine, that you could produce it on this scale. That it helped so many people, including myself, to overcome cancer. We can also move further and further, like one of the studies I'm doing with one of my students is, and this is where ecology and medicine can come together in a beautiful way isnpharmaceuticals. You know the Yew tree is such a responsive tree in its environment. It grows among Cedars and Naples that are all connected to it in this ecosystem.
It's a beautiful ecosystem. When you walk into them, they're like these matriarchs, these beautiful Cedars that are protecting the Yew with dappled light coming down and the smells coming out of the ground. It's gorgeous, but that neighborhood, that community of Cedars and Maple and other understory plants, the ferns and the orchids that are flowering there and the dappled light that community actually affects, we think, the production of Taxil. If it's a healthy community, then the Yew tree thrives and can produce more Taxil. And so then it actually could, you know, how we grow Taxil could affect the quality of the medicines that we get from it. And I bet the Aboriginal people looked for certain kinds of ecosystem to actually harvest the medicine from the tree. But in, in medicine, what we did is we actually took one sample of Cambium and we produced by mass-production tissue culture from a basic, almost like a stem cell. And that's been the origin of all the Taxil, all we produce as far as I know. And so, but we could go back to ecology and say, Hey, we could probably get, you know, even better if we manage these ecosystems for these beautiful communities that will actually enhance the quality and the quantity of Taxil all produced by that Yew tree. So you see how medicine can learn
ELISE:
Stunning,
SUZANNE:
Ecology, ecology, back and forth.
ELISE:
I want to talk about this idea of equality too, because you look at something like that, right. And potentially the Yew tree saved your life, right? Like there, we have this intense interdependence, codependency, or these complex relationships with nature. And yet the Western idea of course, is that we are Lords over matter. And you talk about it as sort of, and I agree, it's like this, there's this idea. We get very confused. I think between like equal, same like equity. We don't really understand these concepts of like, it's kind, they're not apples, they're apples and oranges. Like you can't balance these scales. It's much more complex and we are part of nature. Like, how do you, how do you think about that? Like, how do you bring people into right relationship?
SUZANNE:
So you're right that for hundreds of years or a thousand years, you know, originating back in Europe and with religion, and our economic system, that this idea of man's dominion over nature has affected a lot of our thinking. It is infused Western thinking that we are the shepherds of nature. We are the decision makers and we lord over nature. Look at where it's gotten us, honestly. But the other, you know, viewpoint by many cultures around the world is no, we're not the dominion over nature. We're part of nature. We're interconnected with nature, we depend on a healthy ecosystem. And so I think about this all the time, because that is the crux of the solution to these major global crises that we're facing, you know, environmental crises.
It is that it is that worldview. That is the crux of getting people on board to shift our economy, to a wellbeing economy, about a wellbeing ecosystem instead of one that's being exploited. And it is complex. And of course in ecosystems too, and in societies, you do have dominant members take, you know, rise up given power, and then there's others that have other roles that are more service roles in ecosystems. You do have dominant plants, you know, big old mother trees that occupy the big centers of the crowns. But I think that though the difference in our Western thinking is that, you know, the dominant, you know, say the dominant CEO, like, you know, the CEO of one of the big corporations that they win by competing, you know, that they win by taking basically, but in this other view of dominance, there's a responsibility that comes with that dominance, a responsibility to share the resources to gift the other members of the community that are doing other jobs with. Maybe gifting is not the right word, but making sure they have the resources, they need to do their jobs.
But we kind of lost sight of that, that society is an interconnected interdependent whole with say, yeah, you do have leaders. And so on to thinking that those leaders get everything, and when we see these ultra wealthy trillionaires and multi-billionaires rising up and there are just a few of them and they make more, and more, and more money, and they actually start governing the rest of us through philanthropy in very non-democratic ways, we know that we've lost our way with how the ecosystems are really meant to work, where dominance, you know, should work as more of an equalizer, as more of a distributor of wealth instead of the keeper of wealth.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's so beautiful. And the verb of mothering. And this idea, it all comes back too, to this fear of our own mortality and lack of understanding about our role and shepherding future generations, making room. Like passing on as you call it, like the most crucial material, like accelerating this wisdom, and in the West, we don't honor, we're so out of whack in that. Of even honoring or accepting that that older people might have something to teach us. And there's this like, disavowal that we're gonna die and we need to leave room, leave space, pass on intelligence. It just feels so macro to micro, to me at least.
SUZANNE:
I agree. I think that we have lost sight of the value of elders, for example, in our society, as, as that, you know, as that example, through COVID we saw that was unveiled, you know, that a lot of elders died because of COVID—while they're old, but also because of the conditions that many are living in, and it was really like an unveiling, of oh my goodness. We need to really look at how our elders are thriving or not. I think that we are human beings, we are evolved to care for each other. We've evolved to be social and to be caring. It's hard to get away from that. And so then I think that, I think that we just need to make an adjustment here, because what happened, I think is that the economy, what drives the economy took over our own collective wisdom about how we actually function, that we actually do function as this big network of caring individuals. We lost our way.
We have the history, we have the ancestry, we have the DNA. We've evolved to look after each other and we'll get that back. It's just that we've been oppressed. That part of us has been oppressed by our economic system, just like in a forest where we we took an old growth forest, we planted it with Douglas Fir and we oppressed all that diversity. That's in the soil, in the forest, or the seed beds. They're all down there, but they're oppressed by this cover of making money. You know, we planted trees to make money and we oppress the rest. And so we just have to uncover it and say, it's all there in our humanity. And in our ecosystems, we just gotta give it a chance and, and restructure some of our social institutions so we do a better job.
ELISE:
I am so grateful for the work of people like Suzanne Simard. Such a hero. A trailblazer. Clearly a woman who felt connected to an intelligence and a wisdom that’s eternal. And the way that she’s brought that awareness—through science—which is really one of the languages that we understand in the West, is so critical. Even though she remarks that she simply stumbled onto some of the Indigenous ideals, diversity matters. Which I know sounds so obvious to us, particularly now. But at a time when she was watching forests being demolished, sprayed, and sickened, really, she had to find her way to showing people that they were wrong. And she she writes at the end, “We have the power to shift course. It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse. By understanding their sentient qualities, our empathy and love for trees, plants, and forests will naturally deepen and find innovative solutions. Tuning to the intelligence of nature itself is the key.”