Bonus Ep: Suzanne Simard and the Social World of Trees

title: Bonus Ep: Suzanne Simard and the Social World of Trees
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2021-05-07T18:09:51-04:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/bonus-ep-suzanne-simard-28854e/audio.mp3

word_count: 10264

Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community-funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join us over them section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us. And listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHOY. There's a point during the second episode of Timber Wars, the episode about old growth for us, where we mentioned something called the Michael Riesel Network. But we didn't get into it because it's so complex and mind-boggling that it really needed its own episode. Well, we thought we'd bring you that episode. In a way, Suzanne Semard is one of the leading scientists who is dug into this underground network of roots and fungi dubbed the Wood-Wide Web. Her groundbreaking research revealing that trees share resources and even communicate with each other has spread into popular culture. It's inspired everything from the giant tree in the movie Avatar to the scientist's character in Richard Powers book The Overstory. Now Suzanne has a book of her own out called Finding the Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. And I leapt at the chance to interview her for her book launch event at Powell's Books. We wanted to share the conversation with you because it might explode the way you see the trees towering over your head and the soil beneath your feet. It was recorded live over Zoom before an audience from around the country. And we weave in some of their questions throughout. I'd love to begin with the way you begin the book that your very first line is for generations, my family has made its living cutting down for us. And I was curious if you'd introduce us a little bit to your family history and why you wanted to start this book about trees by saying you come from a long line of loggers. Well, yeah, I grew up, as I write in my book, I grew up in the forest. And my family, which had emigrated from France in the late 1800s, eventually moved across Canada. But they stopped in Quebec and lived there for quite a long time and logged. They were horse loggers there. And then moved west and ended up in British Columbia and settled in an area we call the Inland and Rainforest. And my great grandfather and my grandfather and my uncles and my dad, they all became horse loggers. And so that's how I grew up, just in that environment. And it was our way of life. And I got to know trees in a really intimate way, just watching them and being around them. And soil too, right down to the flavors, is that? Yeah, well, you know, some of the first photos of me, I have a mouth full of dirt and worms. And so, yeah, so I had this early attraction to soil. And of course, when we lived at Mabel Lake, and we lived on a houseboat that my uncle Jack had built for logging. And there was an outhouse, of course, off the gang plank on the shore. And that also gave me a great opportunity to learn more about soils. You know, as I write in my book, our dog fell in the outposts and that gave me a whole world or this whole view of the soil under our feet. And I look to delving into that soil a little bit. But right out of college, your first job was kind of following in your family's footsteps and getting into the world of logging. And the company you went to work for as you write, you weren't just the only woman employee, were the first woman employed they had ever hired, correct? Yeah, that's correct. I guess maybe just take us back to that time a little bit. And what kind of work were you doing and how did Forrester's see Forrest, especially the old ones at the time? Yeah, so when I started with that Forrest company, it was the late 1970s and then in the early 80s, I continued working for them for a few years. And yeah, I was the only girl there. And so first of all, they didn't know what to do with me. Well, they did, but how to behave around a girl. They had their, they were big, boisterous men who loved their work and it was dangerous work. And so along with that culture came a lot of, I don't know, a bravado, I guess. And so being a girl, I got like 20-year-old young woman going into that environment was challenging for me. It was challenging for them too, though. And then the work that I did was also very dangerous as it was for them as well. And so that was kind of at the beginning of ClearCut logging that we had moved from sort of like this small scale, slow horse logging, selective logging that had been done like with my family to this more industrial approach. And so that's what I started in is looking at or helping them with this clear cutting. And so yeah, and it was in grisly countries, so it was very dangerous. I, you know, I worked, you know, I worked not only just trying to regenerate these, these clear cuts with seedlings, but I also helped them lay out roads and cut blocks and do the whole thing that is forestry from harvesting all the way to reforesting. So yeah, it was really interesting, really dangerous. And I loved it. And the time was there any consideration given to the soil and what's going on underground or was the complete focus purely just on the cellulose? Yeah, I mean, I would say no. I mean, there were soil scientists, but they were more interested in agriculture at that time. And so forest soils wasn't really a thing that people studied very much. But certainly in the logging industry, their biggest concern was putting in roads and, you know, moving soil and blasting rock to put roads up big steep mountain sides. But the ability of soil to actually grow trees wasn't really thought of that much. But what they did know is that they grew seedlings that we, that, you know, I helped them plant in soil or in the nursery in these little, like, sort of rooting mediums and rooting mediums. It's sort of like commercial and commercial soils that's not really soil. And when they grew these seedlings in the nursery, they were, you know, they were kind of weird. They had these kind of funny roots that went straight down without little tiny roots coming out of them. They were more focused on the above ground part of the seedling instead of the below ground part. And I think this was part of the problem as I read in my book about why those seedlings when they we were first putting them out in these clear cuts were not doing very well. Because they were just grown without any of their natural, you know, soil or flora and fauna that is associated with soil, real soil. And that's, I mean, you tell a very vivid story of looking at these seedlings that we're all dying because they scraped away the top soil and we're planting them in kind of the granular, more mineral soil below it. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe when you first started to realize what might be happening down there and the importance that it could be playing in the health or in this case, the lack of health of these trees? Yeah, well, even early on at the beginning of my job when I was 20 and I was, you know, I would go out with the planters and then go after and look at how the seedlings were performing a year and two years later. You know, certainly when the planters planted back then they use what's called a matic and a matic is like a big axe with a shovel handle on one end and an axe head on the other hand and they would have to, you know, pull it down like basically make a hole in the soil. It was brutal work, honestly. And, but they had to scrape away the forest floor and, as you said, put it in mineral soil, which is, you know, kind of cold and granular and that, but that was the thinking was that where all the water and the nutrients were. And we didn't understand that then I think that the forest floor, which they were basically scraping away with their matic was full of these, the fungi and the soil food that actually cycled nutrients. And so I started when I was looking at the seedlings not doing well, I would have to pull them out. I mean, that was part of my job is to figure out what was going wrong. And I would pull them out and, you know, the root systems basically looked a year later like they did when we put them in the ground, they weren't really growing outside of the, what they're called the plug, the little area that they grew up in the nursery. And so that's what got me started in thinking, what are we doing wrong here? And why did these roots look so different than the naturally regenerated seedlings which had big roots that went off in all directions? And they had, you know, even though they might look small and tiny from the vantage of standing in the forest, the low ground as I pulled them out, they were huge spider webs of of roots and fungi and very complex. And that's when I started to think, you know, this is where we might be going wrong. And introduce us to that fungi because it's got a starring role in your book. What is mycorrhizal fungi? Yeah, so I talk about this quite a bit and try to describe this so carefully in my book, but there's basically about four groups of fungi of which in forests, of which mycorrhizas are one. And yet, so I'll just tell you that the other three are there are pathogens which kill plants in trees, so they're like parasites. There are sapricose, so they decompose material. And then there's endophytes which is a new group that we're studying, you know, in different labs around the world now which actually live inside of plants. But I was actually, these mycorrhizas were not any of those. They were a mutualistic fungus that all of the trees all over the world associate with they have, they have to. They're in this obligate relationships that is relationship that is usually mutualistic. It's a symbiosis in that the fungus grows inside the root of the cell of the plant. And there's different kinds of these mycorrhizas, so depending on what kind, it forms this interface with the fungal membrane and the plant cell membrane. And what the fungus does is it grows through the soil, picks up carbon or nutrients in water, brings it back to the plant and the plant gives the fungus carbohydrate or photosynthase in exchange. It's like this market exchange that goes on. And so the plant is gaining its nutrients in water that it needs and the fungus, because it doesn't have leaves, gets the photosynthase and does this, you know, in exchange for the job it does of traveling through the soil. And the fungus is huge, right? It's not trivial. Like there are thousands and thousands of kilometers of fungi in the soil underneath your feet and they coat every soil particle and every soil pore in order to do this job. And as you started to pay some attention to them and ask, you know, what is the role they're playing here? You were met with not exactly open curiosity from your colleagues, correct? Can you take us through your kind of early hypotheses and what the reaction was? Well, so, you know, back then, I mean nobody really thought about mycorrhizus, right? They were these mycorrhizal fungi. They were kind of like I said, they were, the agriculturalists were thinking about them, but certainly not the foresters. And so I actually didn't talk about it at first because I just thought, well, that would be even more risky for a girl being one of the only ones, you know, at least the only one in my company. And so I just kind of kept it to myself when I started studying and then, you know, I even bought a microscope and put it in my, you know, put it in my room and I would study these roots at night. And I got a book about fungus from the local library. And I started to learn about them. And the more I learned, the more I, you know, I started to form in my head, you know, we're missing, maybe this is the missing link. Maybe this is what is wrong with the seedlings. And it wasn't until years later, I actually never really talked to the forest industry people about it at all. It wasn't until years later when I joined the Ministry of Forest in British Columbia as a researcher that I was actually given the opportunity to look at the some more detail. And then I started talking about it. And I also was doing a lot of reading. And I learned about this study that had been done in the United Kingdom where David Reed, who is a myologist, somebody who actually studies fungi, I was a forestry, right? He was a specialist in these fungi. And he had done this amazing study where he had grown seedlings together in these little garden boxes in the lab and labeled them with carbon, one of them with carbon 14 and could see that actually the fungi not only associate with a single plant, but they can actually link plants together. And so that's what really got me interested in this topic. And what ultimately led you to a PhD in the state that is proud to house pals, Oregon. Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose Oregon State University as the place to study this and then the shape of that early research, which is I don't know, it's so delightful and dangerous and spectacular. Thank you. Yeah, so I was an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia at my home, my home province. And, you know, I was a kid from the woods so I had to go to the big city to do my undergraduate degree. And it was challenging for me. I mean, when I went to Vancouver, I didn't even know how to take the bus. I was just such a backwards kid. And I finally finished my degree and I thought I'm never going to go back there ever again because it was so difficult. And then I'd heard about Oregon State because Oregon State in the hallowed halls of UBC was like the other forestry school that you could go to that was like the best forestry school in the world. At least that's what we said and thought, you know, along the west coast. And it was true. And so I, you know, so I wanted to do my masters. I didn't want to go back to UBC because I'd already been there. And so I applied to Oregon State and I got accepted. And so I never looked back. I did my masters and my PhD at Oregon State. And so in my PhD, yes, I did this study where I'd learned about this work by David Reed with his plants, his pines and the root boxes in the lab. And I thought, you know, could this be the could this be a clue as to why our plantations in Canada were not doing so well. And I'd also, you know, as a researcher, been studying, you know, actually how even, you know, the cultivation practices we use, not just planting, but the, but the brushing of the competitors out of these plantations was actually causing disease in some of these plantations. And I wanted to find out what were we doing that was seem to be so wrong that was making these plantations, you know, sick and part of the trees dying. And so I took, I did that study in my, for my PhDs. I actually went out in the field and I looked for these networks that David had talked about, you know, that he'd found in the lab. And sure enough, I found that they also existed in our forest, in our rainforests, up in Canada as well. And I mean, kind of the way it works is you're actually putting plastic bags around trees and infusing them with radioactive carbon and then tracking whether it's flowing into the roots and the bodies of other trees. And maybe dosing yourself a little bit in the process. Try not to, but accidentally yes. Yeah, so I was, I did this experiment where, you know, which was, you know, not really what the forest service wanted me to do because they were so focused on trying to get weed out plantations, like weed out the cottonwoods and the birches and the asthmens. And by weeding it to both like hand pulling as well as the water spring with herbicide. Spraying with chemicals and or cutting them with chainsaw or or or or clipping them. So or a combination of that would would really do the trick. And and they were really, you know, so they started spending millions of dollars trying to get rid of these plants. And it all kind of grew out of influence really from Oregon State University where, you know, that practice had really taken off in planting the the Douglas Ferd Forest of the Oregon coast range. And so we borrowed that technology to try and grow faster trees bigger trees in Canada as well. And I just thought that, you know, what about the diversity of this forest like what are we doing here? And seeing the diseases. And so I I went back and I wanted to find out was what David Reed looking at in his little lab studies happening in our forest and finding that these networks did exist. And then what did they do? And so I I actually would yeah, I would put these plastic, I would grow seedlings together in these little triplets, Douglas Ferdipest, which was the evil competitor and Western Red Cedar, which at the time was not also not considered a commercial value of valuable tree. But it was blueberry very focused on growing Douglas Ferdipest. And so I grew these these triplets together. And I would in order to find out if if these networks existed and whether or not they were doing anything, I put a plastic bag over the fur, a plastic bag over the birch and I injected different isotopes of carbon in each one, carbon 14 and carbon 13. And then I trace or I was able to, you know, a later would dig out those plants and see where those isotopes went. And it turned out that paper birch was giving a lot of carbon to Douglas Ferdipest. Douglas Ferdipest was giving some back to paper birch, but it was mostly paper birch donating to fur. And that the more that fur was shaded by paper birch, the more paper birch gave to Douglas Ferdipest, which was the antithesis of what the weeding people were saying, right, that birch was just as competitor. But at turns out, it was at the same time it was competing for light. It was collaborating by sharing these resources. It's not just the antithesis of what foresters believe, but it's kind of the antithesis of what evolution holds, that everything is competing for survival. And maybe you help your own genes and your offspring, but you're certainly not going to be helping a different species. And so at the time, I mean, this research ended up making it into the prestigious science journal Nature and landing on the cover and they coined the phrase the the WoodWide web. Can you tell us a little bit about what the response that was for you? I mean, that should be like a moment of great pride for any PhD candidate. You're on the cover of Nature. Yeah, I mean, it was amazing, but I mean, I didn't really, I mean, I knew about the journal Nature, but I didn't know how important it was. And really, because I was so young and I was from Canada, I didn't know that, but I took it all in. And you're right, right, that there was a big backlash. And it was from the academic side and it was also from the practicing foresters side. From the practicing foresters, it was like they didn't want to change their practices for a whole bunch of reasons. But from the academic side, it did sort of fall in line with Darwinian theory. As you're so aptly described, we were so focused on competition in ecology and the practice of forestry. And that was borrowed from evolutionary theory that natural selection is based on competition and survival of the fittest. But even Darwin, I think if he saw how his ideas, his theories were applied, would have said, hey, you know, there's some collaboration that goes on as well. Because he did write about that in his early writings. And now we know that, yeah, competition is still a very strong evolutionary force. There's no doubt about that. But now we know more that collaboration and co-evolution is also has also been very long important. And so people like Dr. Lynn Margulis developed what's called the endosymbiotic theory where where creatures or organisms co-evolved together. And that's what led to the evolution of eukaryotic organisms and ultimately people. And now through other projects like the Hunanman Geno project, we realize that we're all consortiums of organisms and we're co-evolved as well. And so now it's mainstream knowledge. But back then, it was not. It was quite rejected. And I think that I, you know, my work kind of fell into that argument that was going on at that time about evolution and ecology and the blending of these things to so focus on competition. And one of the questions in the Q&A kind of fits into this because this, a lot of these elements of your work and the response to it thus far very familiar to anyone who's read Richard Powers, the overstory. And it's kind of the story of Patricia West referred. And one of our viewers, Daniel Trefeth. My list is going to make this hard Trefeth, Trefeth then. I hope I got that right, Daniel. Once you know if, do what degree your career was kind of the inspiration for the character of Patricia in the overstory. And personally, I'm curious, did Richard Powers talk to you about it at all in his writing process? Or was that a little bit of a surprise? It was a total surprise to be honest, honestly. But I was thrilled to find out that that character was, it was actually developed around my character as well as another, another, another forestry scientist. But I since learned, so Richard would did a number of interviews and he was asked if who that character was based on. And he said that it was, you know, strongly based on my work. And so I think that he gleaned my character and my history from the TED Talks and the things I'd written. But it was a really, it was a lovely rendition. I mean, it's not of course, it's based on multiple characters from his past. But certainly Patricia Westerford was interested in and did research on plant communication, but above ground, which is also a fascinating area, you know, and researchers have figured out that trees do communicate through what they call volatile organic compounds. Like, you know, these incredible, even when you walk in the forest and you smell these, you can smell these compounds. These are the trees communicating with each other and all of their, you know, all of the other creatures that rely on trees, like the pollinators and so on. So it wasn't quite exactly my work, but it was very close. And then, you know, and also the trouble that Patricia Westerford for it encountered in her life, the backlash against her work was very much modeled after my own difficulties, I think as well. And then from there, it kind of diverged, but it was, it was very lovely. Yeah. And let's pursue that divergence because once you got a professorship then at University of British Columbia, you went on to map these connections, not just between three trees in a little test plot, but across an entire segment of forest. Painted is a picture of just how extensive this wood wide web is underneath the ground is we're strolling through the trees. Yeah. So I got a graduate student, Kevin Byler, and I worked with my dear colleague, Dr. Dandaral, who I did a lot of work with. And we decided that we were going to address this issue that just remained in the the crawl of the scientists that were looking at micro-risal networks through the 2000s. And the field seemed stuck to me. They were stuck in that we needed to visualize what these networks looked like because, you know, to the to the naked eye, they're pretty almost invisible. You know, in some forests you can see them directly when you look under the forest floor, but in a lot of ecosystems, like the coastal systems of Oregon, for example, you could you could try to find them, but they're hard to see. And so we wanted to show what they looked like to really dispel this part of the controversy that they were, you know, that they're hard to see. And the other part of the controversy was what did they do, right? What is there any benefit to even if there are connections? And so I picked a forest that was what we call an uneven age forest. These are interior forests on the, they would, you would call them east side forests. And so they're drier forests, Douglas fir and their self-regenerating forests, meaning that they they have all ages of trees that where the little ones come up under the old trees. And so I wanted to have that kind of a forest structure. And we knew enough about Douglas fir and the main fungus, which is called Reisopogon, which has been studied extensively at Oregon State, by the way. We had those tools that knowledge, and we just went into this forest and we took up all the the fungal DNA and the tree DNA of these of six forests. And we used that DNA and it took Kevin five years to do this to create a map showing where each individual fungus was and how it linked individual trees together. And what emerged from that map was that pretty much every tree was linked to every other tree, which was astounding. And not just once, but multiple linkages, you know, each root had multiple linkages to other trees. And that the biggest trees and the oldest trees were the hubs of those networks, meaning that they were connected to more trees than any of the other smaller trees. And so we started doing, well, interpreting our data, but doing a number of experiments with these old trees and found out that the young seedlings are the seed that was dispersed by these old trees and that would germinate on the forest floor that within a month or two, they would tap into that big network of the old trees, this micro-risal network. And they would start acquiring resources, and this really gave them a big head start. It allowed them to actually survive way better than if they couldn't tap into the network. And so yeah, so we started recognizing the value of these big old trees. And we started calling them mother trees because of their nurturing ability in the forest. And so they're passing back carbon and phosphorus and nitrogen and water. And then you also discovered that they're passing neuro-trained amino acids and what are essentially in our brains, neuro-transmitters? Can you unpack that a little bit for us and what that means? Yeah, so you know, I worked with my many students and we always worked with isotopes and we, you know, these are just different formulations of the common nutrients in the forest. And we worked with carbon and nitrogen a lot. And we found that carbon and nitrogen went past between the trees along with, as you said, water and phosphorus. But carbon and nitrogen are especially important because they form amino acids. And it's really the amino acids that transmit mostly through the network and are taken up by neighboring plants. And so through just through the mass balance of the ratio of carbon to nitrogen that moved, we estimated that the main nutrient was glutamate. And glutamate is an amino acid that is actually one of the neurotransmitters in our brains. So you're right. It is a neurotransmitter. Although in the soil, it's just an amino acid. It doesn't serve as a neurotransmitter because it's not a nervous system. It's not a brain. But the pattern of the network is a biological neural network. That means that the pattern is the same kind of pattern that we have in our brains where you have, you know, axons and neurons where there are big hubs and smaller nodes. And that's, you know, that's the beauty of how our brain works. And in the soil, it has the same kind of pattern. And it turns out that this amino acid that is the main one that's moving through the network is this glutamate that is also happens to be one of our neurotransmitters. So that, to me, was just an incredible discovery. And you use in talking this neural network and this communication, use the word intelligence. And very specifically, like I feel like for most people, that's a very broad term, but it's very specific. Tell us a little bit about what you mean that there's an intelligence to the forest. Yeah. So I go into a great deal of detail in the book about this, but what this means to me. So, you know, as I said, when we look at the pattern, the mathematical pattern of that neural network in the soil, that was the mycorrhizal network. It is a biological neural network. It does have these glutamate transmitters in them that move through the network. And that structure, that process of communication or that transmission of that amino acid, those nutrients, it elicits a response or a perception or a perception of all the trees to each other. Right? It's a way that they communicate with each other, perceive and respond to each other. And it's not just a simple response. Like they're actually attuned to the health of their neighbors, where their neighbors are, the kinship, whether they're related to their neighbors, the species of their neighbors, how much resources those neighbors are taking up, whether they're stressed. And the system also is it because of the way the network is structured, it also makes it very resilient. So, that means that the structure actually allows the forest to regenerate. Right? It allows the seedlings to tap into this network, receive these messages, and then to rejuvenate the forest. And to me, this was a this is this is a highly evolved system, right? Like our brains are highly evolved brain systems organs and a we are highly evolved species. And the forest has got so many conservative patterns that are conserved across evolution, that it is an intelligent system. It's got the hallmarks of intelligence. And so I use that word. And it's true that some people don't really like using words like intelligence to describe natural systems like that. But to me, it is the most apt word because it describes this so efficient system that is resilient and rejuvenating and holds the ecosystem together. Which really makes the question as we walk through the forest and take in the trees, are they in turn taking in our presence? Well, you know, I haven't studied this specifically. So there's a lot of I don't know in that. But I can't tell you what I have done. And so we've done a number of experiments where we've manipulated plants and trees. To try to, you know, we've actually tried to kill trees in the lab. We've stressed them out in various ways. We pulled their needles off. We've bent them over. We've attacked them with budwards. We've infected them with pathogens. And then we tried we've looked at, you know, what are the signals that there's transmitting through their networks to their neighbors. And so one of the things when you injure a plant, it elicits this biochemical cascade of reactions. And so if you pull a needle off of a plant, if I pull a needle off of a plant, if I clip the needles with a pair of scissors, that cascade of responses happens immediately. So the jasmotic acid pathway, which is a defense enzyme pathway, is triggered. And it starts developing all these defense enzymes. And also other defense compounds like monoturapings. And so that is the human being doing that, injuring that plant, right? It could be a squirrel that cuts off its needles. It could be an insect that's attacking and defillating the plant. But the plant is sensing this injury. And does the plant know the difference between me clipping the plant, the needle's off versus a budwrene eating the needles? Yes, the responses are a little bit different. They're more dramatic actually when I clip the needles off, than when the budwrene eats the needles. And so I think that the plant is distinguishing a difference. So I'm getting going in a roundabout way to say, yeah, I mean, it totally makes sense that they respond. They understand that we're doing it there and or that there are other creatures out there doing things to them. And there's a biochemical reaction, a physiological reaction. I haven't, okay. So that's where I know and where it stops. However, you know, people are, you know, and I would like to do some more research on trying to understand how they're perceiving us in a more, you know, in a deeper way. We've mostly stopped cutting the old growth forests here in America, although there's some controversial proposed logging and mature forests and certainly a lot of controversy over salvage and hazard tree logging that's going on on a big scale right now after last year's fires. As I understand it, there's still a lot of old growth logging happening in Canada, given how complex these forests are, what happens when we clear cut them and replant them with with little seedlings that have been grown in a nursery? Well, there's a lot of things that happen. Yes, we are still harvesting old growth in Canada. In fact, it's become, you know, it's a real, it's a hot point, a hot issue button right now because in British Columbia, actually where the, you know, these iconic old growth, West Coast forests exist, we actually only have 8% of them left. And on Vancouver Island, where the last stands of forests and people are protesting this now, basically blockading the companies from going in. There's only 3% of these old growth forests left. So there's very little left. And they are being clear cut at a rapid rate. And ultimately, you know, those that are not in parks, which mostly parks cover, you know, small forests or high elevation ice and rock and they don't really conserve these big old forests. So it's a huge loss, right, to our province, to the people, not to mention the ecosystems. And so let me tell you a little bit about the ecological implications of this. These old growth forests, including those in Oregon, Washington, Northern California, Alaska, British Columbia, these West Coast forests are huge carbon sinks. So they store huge amounts of carbon. There is important as the Amazon and the Boriel Forest. And they're also that carbon storage capacity is correlated with their biodiversity. So they're also very, very diverse. And so they're actually hot spots for conservation. And so that's why people are upset is because we not only are we losing, you know, the places that we love, but these are essential forests for dealing with climate change. If when we clear cut these forests, there's no way that we can, you know, that we can even, we don't even account for the carbon losses. We lose carbon immediately from the harvesting of the trees and then we start to lose some of it from the soil. And almost, you know, about 65% of it is lost almost immediately because it's converted to, you know, short term products. And so the conservation of these forests just from a carbon point of view is hugely important. And from a biodiversity point of view too, because a lot of species only grow in these forests, right? They're endangered species, they're species at risk. And we're losing these species. So, you know, it's actually kind of, you know, it's great that these two things are related together because if we could conserve these forests, if we could save these forests, we actually, we accomplished two things. We are, you know, we're better able to meet our carbon commitments for reducing the impacts of climate change. And we're also able to save a lot of endangered species, the biodiversity of the forest. And we have a question from Andy Thrams that is related to this and knowing all you know about what is happening to these forests as we cut them and with climate change and wildfire and drought. How do you square that with your own personal feelings? And I mean, I would ask also, where do you find hope? You know, I have tons of hope. Yeah, I have two daughters for one. I have no choice but to be hopeful for them. And for all the generations coming up. And just the way that we're, you know, our systems, our social systems, our societies, our ecosystems, these systems are structured to heal, right? I talked a lot about these networks and how their biological neural networks, those things are designed for recovery. Just like, you know, I had this huge illness myself that tested my own resolve of hope. And that is that when I went through breast cancer and I had a network of friends and it was the resilience in that group that lifted me up. And that is how our systems are wired, right? That's how they evolved to do that to heal, to recover. And when you start putting in intelligent policies, you start doing a little thing like, you know, like decarbonizing and converting to electric cars and using mass transit more. And you know, all those little, they don't seem so little, but they are small steps add up to a lot until you reach sort of like these exponential changes. And that is kind of, that's how we're designed to recover, right? We start, it goes small, small, small, and then all of a sudden you can be these, these tipping points. And generally when we talk about tipping points, we're talking about negative things, but they can be very positive as well, right? They can be over, over a tipping point, it's all going to fall apart, but we also have tipping points where suddenly it recovers as well and heals. And so that, that is what gives me hope. And also the ingenuity that we have too, right? You know, we, we're so smart and our kids are so smart. And, and we can do this thing, right? We can shift this. And our kids, I mean, family is so important in this story and relationships. And I feel like I, I highlighted a line that I wanted to share. And now I'm not going to be able to find, oh, we're defined by our relationships. You write at one point. And to me, it's really interesting the way you then kind of towards the end of the book that you talk about how your research and our understanding of ecology and kind of the Western scientific paradigm is really coming back around the ecological knowledge that is bent at possess by Indigenous communities in our region for time in memorial. And that is that everything is connected. And this relates to one of the questions we have that is referencing Robin Wild Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which is a wonderful book, exploring a lot of this where she talks about the cooperation between corn and beans and squash. And so I guess the question that was asked by the audience is how similar are those relationships to the neural networks you're describing? And there are several other questions that also ask about agriculture and farming or city trees too. Are these relationships in this interconnection? Is it taking place everywhere? Yeah, yes, it is. And yes, you know, we are defined by our relationships in our own social communities and also the forest because it's a very social place. Trees are defined by their relationships with other creatures as well. But yes, these networks do occur in agricultural settings. They're different kinds of micro-risal fungi, but even in the three sisters that you're talking about that that Robin Wild Kimmerer writes about in her her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she talks about corn and beans and squash. How do they grew them together? The three sisters that they helped each other out so that the corn grew tall to capture light, the beans fixed nitrogen from into nitrogen gas from the atmosphere, and turned it into usable forms. And then that nitrogen was available to the corn. And the squash sort of was a mulch that held the water in the ground and brought water up and fed the corn and the beans. And so it's a beautiful combination. And that's how I do my gardening too. But those three plants too for micro-risas, they form what's called our buscular micro-risas. And they join those plants together. And so it's not just that they're shading each other and supplying nutrients and water, it's actually transmitting directly through these very complex networks that join them together. And so yeah, and relationships is it is how all plant communities, and all communities not just the plants and trees, but animals and people, fish that were all connected into this one world. And yes, and in our Aboriginal people, they've known about this for, like you said, time and memorials for thousands and thousands of years, because they've been here on Hyde Gwai, for example, 14,000 years. And just practicing in nature, and learning about these connections and then honoring them and cultivating the connections and ensuring that they're whole. And that is what led to the thriving societies that were here. And that is ultimately, I think, how we are also going to be thrifty again and heal our own environmental problems. And along those lines, what ramifications of your research and other research looking at this, what ramifications do they have for how you think we should be managing our forests? Because we also, I mean, as you write, we need wood. And so how should we be going forward in managing how we log or protect or relate to the forest around us? Yeah, so there's some principles, right? So one of them is knowing the land and knowing the forest. And this is really becoming indigenous ourselves, right? To really know and respect the land that we live on. Forestry in North America is really a lot of it since colonization has been borrowed from Europe and then adapted to become more economically lucrative, really. And it's led to really the clear-cutting planting and really disconnection in forests where we grow these trees, we grow Douglas fir, for example, by itself without its neighbors or without neighbors other than other Douglas firs. And really trying to reduce that forest to a few things that are water, light nutrients trees produce big trees, make lots of money, right? And that's not a resilient system. So if you get something like Swiss needle cast or you get Western spruce budwerm or disease in the forest, those forests are very vulnerable because they're lacking in diversity. And so really what we need to do is make sure that the relationships that are so important in making a resilient forest are intact. And so that means, too, leaving the old ones behind as well so that they provide some of those connections. So old trees, for example, have micro-rises that are old growth micro-rises. I call them old growth, but they're just older, more abundant, more robust micro-rises that are really strong linkers to the rest of the forest. You lose those if you only always grow young forests of just one age and one species. And then these old trees also leave legacies for like the genes, for example, in their seeds are adapted to like variable climates from the past. And so those seeds will provide robust and healthy and adaptive forests for the future. And so my vision then for forestry is conserving those relationships and conserving those legacies, the old ones because of their essential role in bootstrapping ecosystems back to healthy systems. And so that means, you know, moving away from this like sort of across the board clear cutting to maintaining old trees and not just one tree, but groups of trees, families of trees so they can protect each other. And because you know, one tree alone is really vulnerable. And that is what tends to happen, right? We have this one tree in British Columbia where they try to leave trees or these residual trees they call them. And they left one huge tree called big lonely dug. Well, dug is pretty lonely out there and very vulnerable. And this is not the answer, right? The answer is to have groups of trees and not always doing the same thing, having those groups designed according to the landscape, according to the forest type that they're in. I could go on and on. There's many things to do and we shouldn't always do the same thing everywhere, right? We need variety, we need connection at landscape levels. We also need to you know, you mentioned salvage logging earlier in the program and you know, old trees even when they're dying, even when they're on their way out, they're contributing back to the ecosystem. So we've done experiments, for example, that as a tree is dying, that it actually transmits about half of its carbon through its micro-risal networks straight into neighbors, so seedlings that are growing up around them. If you cut down those trees before they've had the chance to give back to the community, you're actually short circling that natural process and setting the future generations of trees up for, you know, maybe not doing as well. And so yeah, even salvage logging needs to be reconfigured, I think, following things like wildfires or insect outbreaks so that these old legacies get left behind to do their good work of bootstrapping that ecosystem into recovery again. That was a really interesting point for me because I've always heard, you know, we need to save trees and we shouldn't be salvage logging because they provide habitat for many different animals, but it didn't occur to me that as they're dying, they're still playing a very integral role to their ecosystem and to the trees specifically, not necessarily to the birds and the squirrels and the things that dwell in them. Yes, all those things are important too, but this is yes, this is another important part that is pretty new, you know, it's new, new way for us to think about their importance. And talking about salvage logging and in particular fire, James Williams has a question of have you studied trees response to fire? And I guess what implications your research has for how fire affects forests and what we should be doing about it? Yeah, I mean, all of the forests in North America have fire plays a role in their vitality and their regenerative ability, their fire origin forests for the most part. And so, you know, exclusion of fire actually is a really not a very good practice, and that is what we have practiced generally. We try to protect, you know, the value of forest for ourselves basically and our property and to protect our, you know, lives and so on. But fire is an integral part of the vitality of forest, like I said, and fire exclusion is led to all kinds of problems build up of fuels and combined with climate change, this means that the fire that fire regimes are changing, we can have more severe fires than we then maybe historically. And so, I think that, you know, reintroducing fire in a controlled way so that, you know, where it needs to be controlled, like if there's people living around them, around where fires are going to be restarted in ecosystems, it's an important tool that we need to hone, that we need to develop, and to restore our forest so that they're healthy and vibrant again, because, you know, fire suppression leads to sort of like, I don't know, a big, or understory buildup actually starts to sap the remaining trees a little, sometimes in some cases, of their, you know, their ability to be vigorous. So it's important, but it has to be managed now, because we've populated our mountains and river valleys and to such a degree that just letting them go wild isn't an option in much of the country, or, you know, maybe in the borough for a sub-Canada, you can do that, but generally they would need to be like controlled burns. And another question we have is have those fires damaged or destroyed the micro-risal networks, or what is the relationship there? Yeah, no, I mean, the micro-risal networks are adapted to fire too, right? So micro-risal networks are dependent on living plants. They need photosynthase, and of course they need spores, and they need to be able to regenerate on these, on these plants that are seeding back in. So it's, you know, they're going to come along with the plants. As long as the native plants are coming in, the the natural micro-risal fungi, as well, they will, they will, you know, the spore rain will still be there, they'll still recover. It can take a while for them to recover, they start out simple, sort of like with a few species, and it takes about, about 50 years to sort of recover to like an old growth kind of stage, at least 50 years. But they will be intact as long as there are plants and trees still there, and that's also a good reason for leaving old trees, right? That they still have harbor, or they're still host to these, you know, thousands and thousands of species of micro-risal fungi. And so, you know, if there's a harvest, or if there's a fire, and if the, you know, a lot of those old trees don't get burned down because they've got thick bark and they're resilient, the resistance of fire, unlike a lot of our young plantations, then those micro-risal fungi are there and they will repopulate the burned areas. If the fire is really severe, and burns right down through the forest floor, which is where most of the micro-rises are, so, and we're starting to see some of this in Canada where the burns can be so severe, because of years of fire suppression and climate change and higher temperatures, that in some of those cases where the forest floor is just basically burned to ash, I'm afraid that though in those cases, we might have to go and reintroduce some of the micro-risal fungi, or it's going to take a little while for them to to basically recover. Which actually links to another question we have, which are there issues with invasive micro-risal fungi species, and how different are micro-risas networks in different parts of the world? I mean, is it, can you kind of grab from how close of a forest would you need to grab from for a micro-risal transplant? That's a really great question. So, it's an excellent question. So, you know, there were some early studies done and there are companies out there that actually sell micro-risal inoculum. And I think that those inoculums are getting better and better all the time. They're more sophisticated than the first go at it. But those early studies show that when you add micro-risal inoculum in a forest setting, like a natural forest, that it doesn't take very long before the natural micro-risal community just kind of takes over from the inoculum that's been put in there. And so, yeah, the native community will, you know, take over those weedy species that you might add in as an inoculum. But that inoculum could be important at the beginning if you put it in a planting bowl just to get that seedling started. So, even though it might disappear within a year into, it's already done its job and then it's it's worthwhile. But yeah, so that inoculum, you know, some of it can be considered kind of weedy, but I don't think there's a very big concern really about them becoming escaping into the environment just because you know, the native micro-risas will just sort of take over and colonize the native plants on their own. If you were to bring in, say, you know, there are, we do have to be careful to a certain extent because there are disease or pathogens that if you bring in soil or if your inoculum is not clean, you could introduce a pathogen to the soil. But most of the micro-risas would not would not do that. That would be like an accidental introduction. As far as soil transfers go, that's a really cool thing. I do a lot of that in my own research and I've actually worked on regenerating a whole mind-spoil site using soil transfers from the nearby forest and it works beautifully. So, if you, you know, you use soil that is from, you know, nearby, right? So because the local variants or the, you know, the the the micro-risal fungi are locally adapted. The trees are locally adapted and matching up those locally adapted organisms and that symbiosis is the best thing you can do. So taking the soil from a nearby forest is the best way to go. Put it in a little, in a planting hole, put your seedling in it and it will actually cause or it will result in a great beautiful inoculation and diverse fungal community on your on your plants. And you don't talk about it in this book that I remember but I've heard you talk about it in lectures is the other thing that maybe we'll begin transplanting its trees that we almost might need to assist them as they migrate in response to climate change. Can you discuss that a little bit? Yeah, that's such an important topic. So, you know, climate change is happening pretty fast and the velocity of climate change far outpaces the rate at which trees or plants can migrate. You know, that and we've been able to figure out how quickly they migrate based on paleoecology studies. So looking at pollen records in, you know, you know, sediments that are stable and we're able to sort of reconstruct how fast trees have moved historically. And there's no way that they are able to might, going to be able to migrate as quickly as they need to to keep up with the changing climate. And so the geneticists are working really hard on what's called assisted migration. And I think there, this is a really good idea, right? It's basically humans helping the forest to migrate. And so taking seedlings from warmer climates and migrating them to cooler climates because those cooler climates are going to become warmer, you know, over in the coming decades. And actually, I have a project called the Mother Tree Project where we're doing this very thing where we're harvesting for, we're trying to find alternatives to clear cutting and we're harvesting for us in ways that conserve mother trees and, you know, groups of mother trees and then allowing them to naturally regenerate. But at the same time, we're migrating in genotypes from warmer climates to augment that natural regeneration. And then natural regeneration then works with those migrated seedlings to to provide a good, healthy environment for them to to begin their lives in. And I think if we didn't do that, like if we just migrated, you know, these genotypes from a warm climate to a cooler climate right now, they're extremely vulnerable. You know, at the early parts of their lives, they could get killed by frost in an unusual year or an unusual frost that year. And then the migration is, you know, it can't work. And so if you migrate them into these communities of of native plants and naturally regrowing trees at the same time, you can slowly change the community so that it's healthy and resilient. And that's a great diversity of of a range of genotypes that are going to be adapted to this changing climatic condition. Thank you. We are running out of, well, we're actually over time, but I would love to end on a question from Paul Haney that is what are some of the best ways the average person can get involved in protecting our forest ecosystems? That's a really, really great question. I wish I knew the exact answer and I have tried in many, many ways in my life to do this. I, you know, but I would say, you know, working, I've worked in government, I've worked in industry, I've worked as a consultant, I've worked as an academic, and I've tried in so many ways to influence forestry practices so they're more sustainable. And generally, I would say it hasn't worked very well, that, you know, in Canada, we're still clear cutting at unsustainable rates, and it's still clear cutting instead of like more partial cutting. And so how do we do this? And how how come we're, you know, I grew up in the province of old growth forests that's now a province of clear cuts. So how do we make the changes? We've only got a few percent left. Well, at this point, I would say, you know, civil action protests, you know, writing to your, writing to your governments, to your senators, to your congresspeople, to say, you know, we, this is unacceptable, and there are different ways to do this. And I think that right now you have a government that might be receptive to those, to that. And but, you know, working on the inside is we need those people to, but we also need people pressuring, pressing your governments, voting, making sure you hold your, your, your elected officials to hold their feet to the fire, make sure they fulfill their promises. And we need to do the same thing in Canada. It's all of it is important. We need multiple, multiple pronged approaches in order to elicit this, these kind of changes that we need. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Suzanne, for, for spending your evening with us. Well, thank you for having me. Those were really great questions. That was Suzanne Samard and I talking at a Powell's books event for her new book, Finding the Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. You can find more about Suzanne's work online at themothertreeproject.org. To find out more about our show, TimberWords, head to opb.org slash TimberWords. Thanks for listening.