Back in 1904, Peter Kropotkin published the anarchist classic Mutual Aid. He wrote it as a response to the prevailing pseudo-Darwinian notion that life, both animal and human, was defined by a perpetual struggle for survival - a view that drove the ravages of colonialism, the exploitation of labour by capital, and the wars which engulfed Europe in the years after its publication.
For Kropotkin, this view is a mistake. He starts in the animal kingdom, going through ants and bees forming huge cooperative colonies, birds forming flocks for food gathering, protection and navigation across migrations, mammals forming packs for cooperative hunting and herds for mutual protection. Throughout the animal kingdom, he says cooperation is the norm. For mammals and birds, certainly, it is solitary competition which is the exception.
He then moves on to spend most of the book talking about cooperation and mutual aid as a driver of human history, from prehistoric tribal life through ancient villages and towns, medieval society and into his own day with its unions, voluntary societies and so on. These forms of cooperation, he says, should be the basis on which we build a more just, less violent form of social organisation.
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Simard's fame as a scientist rests on her and her colleagues' research into cooperation between trees. Over a series of long-running, detailed experiments she has shown not only that various tree species share nutrients among themselves, but that they share across species. For instance, they showed that Douglas firs and birches share nutrients, with the birches passing nutrients to the firs during the warm summer months when birch leaves dominate the canopy, and then the firs returning the favour in winter when the birches are bare. This is not a case of theft but of symbiosis - both birches and firs grow better when paired than when isolated from one another.
A key to this sharing is the mycorrhizal soil fungi which connect the tree roots to one another and pass nutrients back and forth. Hence there is partnership of three - the two tree species and the fungi. The fungi also play a crucial role, not just in passing tree sugars back and forth but in bringing other nutrients from deeper in the soil in exchange for a dose of plant sugars produced by photosynthesis.
Simard is far from a lone maverick in the world of forest ecology, with US, European and Asian scientists making similar discoveries in their own forests. Yet to say her research got a frosty reception in the British Columbia forest industry would, perhaps, be an understatement. Forestry is big business in BC and the prevailing practice is to clear-cute swathes of forest, with huge machines mowing down everything in their path in their quest for the big pines and firs that generate huge profits, replanting evenly-spaced rows of single, fast-growing pine species. Their reasoning is that clear-cutting is the most 'efficient' way of extracting timber, and mono-culture plantations keep the money trees free of competition from commercially worthless rivals, ensuring future profits in the shortest possible time.
No doubt the first part of this process makes some superficial sense, at least in the absurdly short time horizon that is the limit of 21st century economics. However, Simard's research showed that the second part is just plain wrong. She was set on this course by her early experience as an intern with a forestry company, assessing plant health in newly-replanted clear-cuts. There she found that the planted seedlings were struggling and mostly dying, their roots bare and isolated in the soil. Meanwhile, naturally-regenerating saplings in the same plot were growing vigorously, their roots encased in a mass of fungal hyphae. Her research confirmed her hunch as to why - to regenerate, trees needed helpful neighbours and friendly fungi.
Yet rather than listen to this evidence, the policy wonks in the forest service who had designed the practices she was critiquing pushed back. Some of this was quibbling about the research methods and data, but underneath it was a deep vein of sexist arrogance - to her face they called her 'Miss Birch', a poorly disguised substitute for the name they used behind her back, and they were not above physically standing over her to shut her up. She found her services unwanted in the Forestry Service but more than welcome in academia, where she has thrived despite the opposition.
Her most famous, indeed iconic, concept is that of the 'mother tree'. Many tree species, such as the Douglas firs she has studied extensively, can live for centuries. Most of their seeds fall nearby, and she and her various post-graduate students and post-doctoral fellows have shown that the old mature trees actively favour their own offspring in the sharing economy, passing nutrients to them in preference to unrelated trees growing up in the orbit of their roots. This has led to experimental plots in which they have persuaded foresters to leave older mature trees in various configurations to test the impacts of each configuration on regrowth. This is a challenging prescription for foresters to follow, because the mature trees are worth so much money!
All this could be rather dry account of some fascinating but complex science, but Simard is too good a story-teller to let that happen. Instead, she weaves the story of discovery in with the story of her life. She tells of her grandfather and uncles selectively logging their patch of BC forest with hand saws and swales leading to the river, leaving the forest to regenerate and floating the huge logs down-river to the mill. She tells of her lifelong friend Jean and their close encounter with a Grizzly and her cubs, spending hours sheltering in tree branches while she prowled around beneath them. She tells of her own mother raising her and her siblings after the divorce from their father, and of her own two daughters who she has nurtured into budding forestry careers of their own. She also talks about her many other colleagues and friends who research alongside her, adding to the shared pool of knowledge. Her own family and scientific community grows alongside and is nurtured by the mother trees, their frequent field trips into the rich, diverse forest communities providing relief from the relentless march of clear-cutting and climate change and the increased ecological stresses of our time, a little microcosm of mutual aid that matches the mutualism of the forest..
One of the themes that comes through clearly in her writing is that there is a very real sense in which she is recovering knowledge, or perhaps translating ancient knowledge into modern scientific idiom. The first peoples of BC have long known that the forest is interconnected, that the mother trees are the cornerstone of the forest and to be treated with respect, indeed reverence. They use the trees, of course - the timber for building and tool-making, the bark for baskets, the leaves and sap for medicine, the fruits to eat. The difference is that they do so with respect, looking to the long-term, taking only what they need and leaving the forest intact. Increasingly, Canada's first peoples are fighting for control of their forests and over time Simard has worked with various nations to help them design and advocate for sustainable, Indigenous-led forestry practices. The fight is hard and often unsuccessful, the legacy of colonialism living on in short-sighted, extractive forestry directed by colonial corporations with the backing of national and provincial governments.
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All of this has got me thinking about what we call 'Western science' and the scientific method which we claim to prize so highly. This method has certainly brought us great knowledge - machines that can fly, dig and build like nothing in human history, medicines that render once feared diseases innocuous or even virtually unknown, vistas of life and the universe beyond anything our ancestors could imagine.
Yet at the same time it has left us strangely powerless and bereft. We have discovered we are alone in the universe, and we have divided that universe into tiny compartments, each of which we deal with as if it were a separate thing. Sometimes the questions we ask determine the answers we will get. Sometimes we literally can't see the forest for the trees, studying the chemicals, the formation of the leaves, the growth rings of the trees we have cut down, but failing to see the connections between them, the role they play in the lives of other species, because we didn't ask that question. The not asking is not always accidental - when people started asking, the rich and powerful blocked their ears because then they could go on exploiting the trees as if the forest didn't matter.
The forest has its own answers to these things, but how it answers depends on how you ask. If you ask respectfully it will show you a story of regeneration, of trees that can re-seed and communities that can rebuild, of dense forest floors that can sequester some of the carbon we have foolishly kept on emitting long after we knew better. But if we fail to ask the question the forest has to speak much more loudly, in the roaring of forest fires, the rushing of water and mud down denuded streams and rivers, the glare of heat radiating off the bare landscape and, ultimately, the sound of bombs and missiles as we tear ourselves apart.
Kropotkin was definitely onto something, if only the people of his day had been prepared to listen. In nature, both human and otherwise, there is both competition and cooperation. Both these forces operate within each species and between the species. In the realm of human society, this competition is not inevitable. We have the power to choose peace over war, cooperation over competition, the rehabilitation of the rest of nature over its continued destruction. Certain very wealthy and powerful people will lose some of their absurd wealth if we do so, but most of us, human and non-human, will be better off for it.
The choice is ours. How will we make it?
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