Cooperation. Not competition.

After the catastrophic fires last summer, discussions quickly shifted to salvage logging--logging in order to recover whatever economic value that remains.

Why not leave those trees alone?

In fact, we should leave those trees alone and let them go through a natural process of death, says Suzanne Simard. 

Why?  

Because old dying trees have a lot to pass along to the young ones, Simard argues.  We need to remember "how old trees contribute to the next generations — that they have agency in the next generations."  Through salvage logging, "if we go in and cut them right away, we're actually short-circuiting that natural process."

A tree in a forest is not simply a tree.  It is a part of a system in which trees take care of each other. "Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too."

The communication and cooperation is not always visible to us:

Simard used radioactive isotopes of carbon to trace how trees share resources and information with one another through an intricately interconnected network of mycorrhizal fungi that colonize trees’ roots. In more recent work, she has found evidence that trees recognize their own kin and favor them with the lion’s share of their bounty, especially when the saplings are most vulnerable.

Among the religions, I suppose Jainism is the only one that would wholeheartedly endorse such a view, given that religion's acute attention to life and the natural environment.

If trees are cooperating so much, doesn't that contradict the popular understanding of Charles Darwin's argument that it is one hell of a competition out there and that only the fittest will survive? 

Darwin also understood the importance of cooperation. He knew that plants lived together in communities, and he wrote about it. It’s just that it never got the same traction as his natural-selection-based-on-competition theory.

Nowadays we look at things like the human genome and realize that a lot of our DNA is of viral or bacterial origin. We now know that we ourselves are consortiums of species that evolved together. It’s becoming more mainstream to think that way.

 If Darwin knew that, how come science ditched it?

We started very simply: we looked at single organisms, then we looked at single species, then we started to look at communities of species and then at ecosystems and then at even higher levels of organization. So Western science has gone from the simple to the complex. It’s changed naturally as we’ve become more sophisticated ourselves. It’s become more holistic.

Holistic, in an era of uber-specialization.

Suzanne Simard has a mother of a research effort--The Mother Tree Project:

Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. They are the glue that holds the forest together. They have the genes from previous climates; they are homes to so many creatures, so much biodiversity. Through their huge photosynthetic capacity, they provide food for the whole soil web of life. They keep carbon in the soil and aboveground, and they keep the water flowing. These ancient trees help forest recover from disturbances. We can’t afford to lose them.

The Mother Tree Project is trying to apply these concepts in real forests so that we can begin to manage forests for resilience, biodiversity and health, recognizing that we’ve actually pushed them to the brink of collapse with climate change and overharvesting.

We can't afford to lose them.