Suzanne Simard: Honoring the wisdom of mother trees and old-growth forests (ep308)
What does it mean for the world of forestry to see forest ecosystems as complex, sentient, and intelligent? How have the reductive tools of Western science been limiting in our abilities to fully understand the relationships within forests—as well as our human relationships with them?
In this episode, we are honored to welcome Suzanne Simard Ph.D., who was born in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia and educated at the University of British Columbia and Oregon State University. She is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry, and her research has demonstrated that complex, symbiotic networks in our forests mimic our own neural and social networks.
Dr. Simard has thirty years of experience studying the forests of Canada and is the author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Joan Shelley
“The English language is quite limited. We’ve developed words to describe ourselves as human beings, but we haven’t applied these words, like ‘intelligence’ and ‘sentience’, to ecosystems; they are just the purview of human beings. We don’t have words to properly describe what I’m finding out of these neural networks in forests and the communication between trees.”
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Transcript
Note: Green Dreamer is a community-powered multimedia journal exploring our paths to collective healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. The values, views, and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Please do your own additional research on the information, resources, and statistics shared. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: You've been in intimate relationship with and studying Canadian forests for over three decades. What’s your background, and what was the spark of curiosity that led you down this path?
Suzanne Simard: Well, I grew up in the woods of Canada, more specifically in the interior rainforests of British Columbia. These are incredible forests. They're really diverse, very productive. They’re where the big cedars grow, big hemlocks, birches – everything is big there.
And as a kid, it was my home. We had so much fun. We lived part of our summers on a lake called Maple Lake, which is where my grandparents lived. We lived on a logger's houseboat. My grandfather and his brothers and his dad and my dad were all loggers. They were horse loggers. And so that's how I grew up – in that environment. And horse logging was just normal to me, you know, it was normal practice to me. It was dangerous work. It was exciting work. It was all-consuming, but it was fun, too.
So that's what I grew up knowing. And the forests were very resilient to that kind of logging. And so I grew up knowing the forest was a resilient place and a place with great complexity and diversity and that was just full of life. And so yeah, that's how I grew up. ln my DNA and my bones and my blood. That's who I was. That's where I came from.
Kamea Chayne: In the sustainability space, a lot of people speak about forests as incredible carbon sinks, though that framing is based around their functions for humanity and for the climate crisis that our dominant system has caused.
What perspective shifts did you make and do you hope to inspire in regards to how we view trees and forests as complex beings and communities in their own right?
Suzanne Simard: For one, as I've become a professional forester and then a professor who researches these forests, I've spent my life studying the very forests I grew up in. One of the things that we are looking at is carbon stocks in these forests and biodiversity and finding that those two things are highly correlated.
More diverse forests in more productive climates are also the biggest carbon sinks. In fact, our West Coast forests of North America are among the biggest carbon sinks in the world, rivaled only by the Amazon.
One of our research discoveries was that when we clear-cut log, for example, you pretty much lose half of the carbon right off the bat because the trees get converted into different products. Some of them are very ephemeral like pulp or toilet paper or things that just basically disappear within a year as CO2 into the atmosphere. Some are converted into long-term storage products. Following that chain is really important.
But mostly, I think that the message I want to send is that these highly productive forests in these special places on the Earth and in these sort of carbon hotspots are incredibly important for not only conservation of carbon, but conservation of biodiversity. Carbon has become the language that we speak in nowadays because we're dealing with climate change and worried about what to do about it. And we know that how much carbon we emit into the atmosphere is crucial and underpins that.
But it is also a really good overarching property of ecosystems that is an umbrella for conservation of all other things as well. In some ways, that's really fortunate, because we can focus a lot on carbon and conservation of carbon to mitigate climate change, and at the same time, it will help us conserve other crucial ecosystem functions like biodiversity or water quality and quantity.
So it's not a bad thing to think about it. And I think that the more we study it, the more we realize how important it is to really try not to cut down these old forests. Especially in these really productive areas where the old-growth forests are. They are huge, huge, important storehouses for carbon and biodiversity.
Kamea Chayne: In many ways, using carbon as a measure can be an incredible way to understand our forests and their resilience as incredible carbon sinks. But I also wonder if there might be other ways in which it's limiting to view our forests and the role of trees through the lens of carbon.
So, for example, as we talk about what we can do to address climate change, a lot of people who are more focused on techno-fixes will give arguments that when you plant trees, it is not guaranteed that they're going to thrive and survive and grow into old age to sequester carbon long-term.
I wonder if you think there are also limitations to taking this approach of using the lens of carbon to understand the complexity of what forests can really do?
Suzanne Simard: Yeah, that's an excellent point. There's always a danger to looking at ecosystems that are complex systems through one lens – looking at one variable to represent all.
I think what I'm saying is that we're fortunate in that carbon dioxide and emissions to the atmosphere are a huge concern. Luckily for us, if we do need to focus on that a lot, it captures a lot of other ecosystem processes. But it's not perfect. And let me explain.
For example, the dryer forests of North America, not the coastal forests but across the mountains in more of the central areas of our continent, these forests are not as productive. But it doesn't mean that we should be cutting those forests down as well, because when you look at the biodiversity of those forests, although they have poorer quality soils because they're glaciated soils, they host a huge amount of biodiversity.
So when I say biodiversity is correlated with carbon, I'm really specifically talking about tree biodiversity. As you go northward, for example, the diversity of trees actually goes down. So if you move, for example, from tropical to temperate to boreal forest, the number of tree species in those forests declines, but the diversity doesn't decline. Instead, it gets shifted into these understory layers – the understory plants include the shrubs, the herbs, the mosses – and then even into the soil. As you go further northward, there are more and more species of mycorrhizal fungi, for example, which is what I study.
Simply looking at it through the lens of tree diversity definitely does not capture the full biodiversity of forests. And all these other plants and fungi and bacteria in the soil all have crucial functions.
For example, in the understory forest, those plant species, the herbs and the shrubs, are important brush species for wildlife. They’re homes for small mammals. Diversity is important for carbon storage deep in the soil. So we do need to take that broader look across the forest ecosystem. And that means that we have to be really judicious about how we manage these forests.
The other part of your question was about planting trees. As a solution for climate change, it's not a perfect solution. And I'll just say one thing right off the bat – yes, our old forests, our forests that are the primary forests that have been going through their natural successional cycles, those forests are naturally very resilient. They reproduce very well under normal climatic conditions and they store old carbon that's taken hundreds, if not thousands of years to stabilize and store. And so what we need to do is leave those primary forests and those old-growth forests alone as much as we can—not clear-cut them, especially not the great, big, productive forests, which, from the logging industry perspective, are the ones that they want to cut down because they bring in lots of profit. They're the ones that we want to keep from a carbon and biodiversity point of view. So we really need to be valuing those forests more for their full suite of ecosystem services rather than just for the simple products that the forest industry makes.
As far as tree planting goes, tree planting is not an excuse to cut down the old forests. We still need those forests, those existing, intact forests. We should be focusing so much on trying to keep them there, keep them in their normal dynamic status as they are now.
Where we've deforested or where the forest is degraded, we need to replant or augment their planting. That's a complex issue in itself in that ecosystems are highly evolved—they coevolved with all the creatures in those ecosystems. If we just carelessly prescribe species that are not suited to those places or that aren't able to keep up with climate change in some way or don't have the right companion plants, then those plantations can easily fail.
Also it takes them decades, if not hundreds of years, to catch up to the carbon status of an old-growth forest. So the planting itself is not an excuse to say, okay, we're going to plant, but we're going to cut down that forest first. That's the wrong way to go about it. What we should focus on is replanting the degraded, depleted forest now and making sure that we match the species with the land properly.
Kamea Chayne: There are lots of things to question. For example, in our current economic system, a dead tree is more often than not more valuable than one that is still standing. And as you say, old-growth forests and the existing forest that we have today are really irreplaceable because of all the complexity that they've built over decades and centuries as well.
I know you have some really fascinating stories in terms of how you came to the realization that trees are complex creatures and that they talk, which was and still can be controversial. What research or finding gave you the confidence to make this statement? And why might there even be pushback against this narrative?
Suzanne Simard: I’ll address the dead tree part first. People need to keep in mind that forests are really dynamic places. That means that there are constantly some trees dying, seeds are being shed and new trees are coming up. Disturbance by fire or by wind or by other pathogens or insects is a normal part of forest ecosystems. So there's naturally going to be turnover, mortality, and natality going on all the time, birth and death. That's normal.
So even when we conserve an area like an old-growth forest, some people will argue that, well, it's going to just burn down eventually anyway, or those trees are going to die anyway. And they're partially right that these are dynamic places, but it doesn't give us an excuse to go and clear-cut them, because what we need to do is plan for recruitment of old-growth forests into the future and plan for the fact that there is going to be this dynamic turnover. We need to be really smart about this. And we need to be attuned to the land, know what's going on, so that we can respond to make sure that we're not losing forests. But we have plans in place so that there's recruitment of old forests into the future.
Then with regard to the talking trees, what I study is how trees compete with each other, but also how they collaborate with each other.
As a young forester, what I discovered is that normal forestry practices focus too much on managing competition in forests. This comes from our long-seated understanding of natural selection, which is based on competition at the expense of understanding the many other interactions and sophisticated ways that trees communicate in forests. Trees don't just compete, but they collaborate as well.
I was seeing in my practice, as a forester, this focus on taking out plants that we didn't want because we viewed them as competitors. If we didn't want cedars, we would brush them out or even the little berry-producing plants. This reduces the diversity of our forests. It also introduced all kinds of avenues for insects and disease to get a hold of these forests and start attacking them.
So I started examining in my doctoral studies and in my masters’ studies how trees interact in other ways. Do they also collaborate? And sure enough, I found that trees and plants are in constant communication through various avenues.
What I studied mostly were mycorrhizal networks, which are below-ground fungal webs where trees and plants will exchange resources like carbon and nitrogen and water, as well as information like whether or not they were stressed out or being attacked by an insect. They even communicate whether they're related to each other.
That really opened up our understanding that there is so much more going on in the forest than we understood simply from our parochial, narrow view of competition as supreme. It brought a lot of controversy and criticism because the whole forestry practice – what species we plant, how far apart they are, what plants we weed out of them, how we thin them – is all predicated on this notion that the trees only compete with each other or with other plants.
And so, of course, it meant a real shake-up of how we viewed forests, but also how we managed forests. So, yes, there's been a lot of pushback. But at the same time, most people look at this research and say, this makes sense. I see this even when I'm in the forest, that trees are in this sophisticated relationship with all their neighbors and the ecosystem.
Kamea Chayne: I've really resonated with the saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and this applies to a range of things, including nutrition, wellness, and ecology. This seems to be especially the case with our forests in that the trees and the mycorrhizal networks and the root systems underground that connect them all – they have symbiotic and synergistic relationships with one another that really build on their collective community resilience.
I wonder if you can speak more to how the forest beings support one another, especially involving this underground network, and how their social systems might remind us of how we build human communities as well?
Suzanne Simard: You said it so eloquently yourself. Let me give you an example of how this works. An ecosystem is a complex system. What that means is that all the different parts of the ecosystem - the trees, the plants, the bacteria, the fungi, the little spiders, the fish, the animals - they are all part of this beautiful system. They're all interacting and have relationships with each other, and these relationships are complicated and sophisticated and they've evolved over millennia.
When you start looking at complex systems like this, and if you were to dissect it into all of its reductive parts, you would never be able to put it all back together and make it a working ecosystem again. The reductionist view that you can take all the trees out, for example, and, take all the forest floor away and take all the animals away and then put back trees, plant trees, and then hope that there's a forest in the end, well you’ve taken away so many parts that that forest really can't reconstruct itself very well or at least will take a long, long time to do so.
What emerges out of all those relationships is this beautiful ecosystem, and we call that beauty an emergent property.
An emergent property of systems means that there are higher-level functions and processes that you could never predict from just adding up the parts.
So those are things like the productivity of the forest or that beautiful feeling you get when you walk in the forest – that mystery and spirituality – or even just other things like the ability for it to clean air and provide us with this biosphere where humans can live.
We could never recreate that ourselves because we don't completely understand the system. The system has a lot of these emergent properties. We need to honor that and respect that. If we don't, then the systems will start to collapse. If we start taking away too much, the system collapses itself. And we don't want that to happen. We can't afford for that to happen.
We need fully functioning ecosystems so that they can continue to support the life support systems that we rely on and we take for granted because we've evolved in these beautiful systems.
We think that ecosystems are here for us. And yet, they require care as well. They require us to carry out our responsibilities as members of these complex communities. And I emphasize the word “members”. We don’t have dominion over these places. We're only members. We're equal partners to the trees and the wolves and the bears. And they're relying on us to carry out our obligations to them and the ecosystem and to our future generations. In a lot of ways, we forget that obligation to the land, and we really do need to get it back.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of really dismantling human supremacy and taking on a more biocentric viewpoint, there's a lot of narratives and worldviews that we have to question. In your book, Finding the Mother Tree, you say “If the mycorrhizal network is a facsimile of a neural network, the molecules moving among trees are like neurotransmitters.”
I think this really alludes to the intelligence and wisdom of trees that we tend to overlook, although our measures of intelligence and sentience, for example, are often very anthropocentric and measured against the ways that humans experience and perceive the world.
What I wonder is, for example, brain scans can measure neurological activity but not be able to show what a person is actually thinking or processing in our minds at that moment. So then I think about what we don't know and can't see and may never know in regards to the processing and exchange of information and knowledge in the tree and forest network that is merely represented by the exchange of molecules, which is what our very limited tools and ways of knowing are capable of detecting right now.
Suzanne Simard: Yeah, that's really well said. I love how you talk about if you take a brain scan, we can see the neurotransmitters or we can use isotopic tracers and see where things like serotonin and glutamate – our major neurotransmitters – are moving around in our brains as we have thoughts. But we can never understand fully how chemical interactions give rise to thoughts or our ability to sing, for example – these amazing behaviors that we have that we can never fully reconstruct by looking at brain scans. It's the same thing in forests.
What we did in our research is we took essentially a brain scan of the forest floor. But we used molecular tools to do this instead of an MRI machine. We actually dissected the forest by taking all the fungal material, looking at the DNA sequences, especially little short sequences. We were able to actually map what this network looked like; it is the same pattern, or a very similar pattern, to a neural network, a biological neural network.
That means it has different hubs and nodes and linkages and even the compounds that are moving through the mycorrhizal networks in the forest – some of those compounds are exactly the same as in the brain. We know that glutamate travels through the mycorrhizal network, for example. We know plants produce serotonin. We know these things that are so similar and conserved across species in the whole kingdom of life.
And we will never fully understand that in forests either. In fact, we're going to understand it probably less than we do in humans because we've focused so much of our research and our dollars on ourselves because we think we are the most important things in the world. We don't put nearly as much money into understanding forests. Yet we've discovered these things that we'll never fully, completely understand.
But that's also a good guidepost for us.
It lets us know that we shouldn't be pretending that we can reconstruct a forest by taking away all the legacies from the past and then just trying to reconstruct it by planting a few species. We really should be taking the message that we need to keep all the parts.
That's what Aldo Leopold said. He said, don't throw away the parts because no amount of tinkering is going to give you the ability to reconstruct that incredibly evolved suite of species that form that ecosystem together.
Kamea Chayne: So if we aren't able to fully understand the complexity of these systems, then it's impossible for us to actually bring that back, because we won't even know what we're missing by removing all of these elements and pieces.
A lot of your work, whether intentionally or not, I think really invites greater empathy for trees and forests when we might see ourselves and our loved ones and relationships and networks reflected in their ways of being.
Although, in the scientific community, there's often a warning against anthropomorphizing more-than-human beings, out of concern that people can misinterpret the behaviors of creatures that we don't fully understand and may put them or ourselves in danger. That is definitely an important concern.
But also, Western science, in general, has a tendency to encourage people to remove their emotions and feelings from research and writing to maintain objectivity. I do think that's valuable in many ways. But I also think that all life is based on relationships. Ecosystems are based on relationships. And the choices that we make are often guided by our emotions, which are shaped by how we relate to our kin and others and the world. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the value in or concern with our ability to relate better to trees and forests, rather than dismissing them as inanimate and simple and without wisdom and intelligence of their own kind.
Suzanne Simard: You've hit on a really key thing. We affect forests and manage forests with a very narrow perspective, and that narrow perspective is based on our scientific understanding of the time.
Over the last few hundred years, especially since Darwin came up with his natural selection theory, we’ve focused so much on competition, and we've managed our forests based on the notion that this is the most important, if not the only interaction that’s happening in forests.
When we closed our minds to the possibility that other things could be going on, the consequence of that is that we lost so many species. We all know that we're in this huge mass species extinction. Well, a large part of that is from land-use change and deforestation and then trying to grow back plantations where we've lost a lot of species. That's based on our own ignorance or our own very narrow understanding of how these ecosystems work.
And also, as you said, we’ve separated ourselves from nature because it’s one of the cornerstones of Western science to be separate, to be the dispassionate observer of these systems, or even reduce them down and try to understand their parts. When we do that, when we take that reductionist approach to science, the consequences are huge. The consequences are that if we focus so much on competition, we're losing ecosystem function, our climate is changing, our species are declining.
There are huge consequences to this inadequate understanding of how the system works. And part of that is this Western science of the separation of man from nature, of holding ourselves as superior – dominion over nature and not seeing ourselves as part of nature. So when we separate ourselves and say, oh, we're superior or I'm the dispassionate observer, you've missed the opportunity to see how the system works, and you misinterpret behaviors that way, too.
What I'm trying to do is say, look, there's way more going on here than we saw in the past and that collaboration is as important as competition. There's all this pushback against that, and I'm trying to relate to everyday people to say, we need to change. We're desperate to change because we don't have much time left. We need to wake up to the fact that these forests are complex places and our lives depend on them.
When I use terms like “mother trees”, I get 90 percent of the people. That's who needs to understand. Because we all have mothers. We all have empathy for mothers. We have families. We start to see the forest as a place where it's not that different—those are social places as well, and there are old trees that nurture their young and recognize they're young.
Scientists will get their backs up that this is anthropomorphizing. Using words like “communicating” or “intelligence” or “sentience” is even more loaded. Yes, those words are using human language to convey some of the new understandings of forests, but it's only to help us get to a better place. And I would argue that by removing ourselves from the ecosystems, we've created so much damage that a little anthropomorphizing is going to do a lot more good than not putting ourselves back in.
Also, the English language is quite limited. We've developed words to describe ourselves as human beings, but we haven't applied these words, like intelligence and sentience, to ecosystems – those are the purview of human beings. And we don't have words to properly describe what I'm finding out of these neural networks in forests and the communication between trees.
What other words are we going to use? I want to argue that in the ancient languages, in the Aboriginal languages of North America, for example, who have long known for millennia about connection – in fact, the whole worldview of Aboriginal peoples is that we are part of nature and we're all connected together -their old ancient languages had the words for what I'm trying to describe using these very simple human words.
So in the English language, in some ways, we're hamstrung by this. And we're hung up on this anthropomorphizing because we don't have other words for these phenomena, these emergent phenomena that I'm describing and discovering. So we need to then move beyond and find new words.
But I truly believe that we need to put ourselves back into nature. We need to understand that we are not that different from the social lives of trees. Our social lives are so similar. In fact, the trees are our ancestors. We've evolved from those social creatures ourselves and from the bacteria and the fungi that also have social lives. We have a lot to learn from that and a lot to gain from seeing ourselves as connected to them.
Kamea Chayne: That's really powerful. And as you say, perhaps the English language itself reflects our dominant culture of human supremacy and disconnection or disassociation from nature. So it kind of reflects this dominant worldview that is embedded in the current system and the dominant culture as well. There's a lot to unpack in terms of how our vocabulary and language are tied to our worldviews, which influences how we relate to the world and consequently all the choices that we make as well.
As we embrace the complexity and wisdom of trees, these ancient beings, and the resilience of complex forest communities, how can we use all of this knowledge to really work to reinforce the ways that they already build resilience for our collective whole so that we can become regenerative in our impacts to address climate change, and also so that we can remember our roles as members of this greater community of life on Earth?
Suzanne Simard: I just want to emphasize that with anthropomorphizing and the critiques of the work, that we shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture. As you said, the big picture is that we want a healthy place for us to live, for our children to live, and for the next generations. We have an obligation to them as people, as inhabitants of the current time. And so how do we do that? We need to do our best.
Our ancient cultures did that – we had these obligations and we fulfilled our responsibilities to each other and to the land. That is what we want to do.
What I'm trying to convey is, what is a helpful way to do that? To see yourself again as part of nature. And once you do, then you can discover what is your obligation to help that and what is your responsibility and how can you play a part in this.
We all have a role to play – they can be small and they can be big and they’re not always the same. But in a very practical way in forests, what it means for a forester, which is what I am, is to know your land and observe and watch and change as needed, to adapt. Knowing the land means being observant and being there with it and seeing the changes and if help is needed.
For example, we know that the velocity of climate change is far faster than any plant or tree is capable of migrating. Historically, paleoecologists can reconstruct how quickly, for example, trees move northward as the climate warmed in different epochs or eras or move southward as it cooled. And when they reconstruct those pollen records, they can actually say, well, they've moved up at this rate, which is really, really slow and climate change is moving at 10 times that rate or even faster now. So in that case, we want to make sure these ecosystems don't collapse as trees start to die because they can't adapt quickly enough to the changing climate, to the warming temperatures or the new droughts or the new floods. And as people, we don't want these systems to collapse. We want them to continue to function – to clean our air, to provide clean water, to store carbon. And so we need to help them.
In order to help them, some things we can do are things like helping species migrate, for example. We can take a species and move it a little bit further north and provide a good ecosystem for it to be migrated into and cared for. So yes, we have a huge role in this, and if we want to continue to be on this planet and be a thriving species and have earth be a healthy place for our children, then these are the things that we need to learn to do. We need to do them. We need to do them for our ecosystems and for ourselves.
Kamea Chayne: As we're nearing the end of our discussion, I'd love for you to share the greatest lesson that you've personally learned from trees and working with forests, as well as your calls to action for our listeners.
Suzanne Simard: Our relationships are the most important thing about our lives, and they're also the most important thing about all creatures’ lives. It's out of our relationships that we have lovely lives, that we can have fulfilling, rich, beautiful lives.
So looking after those relationships is paramount – caring for your parents, caring for your children, your friends, having a good social structure that looks after people, doesn't pit people against each other, that provides safety nets for all of us, that brings us all up and gives us all a healthy home because we all have these rights, as do the squirrels, as do the trees, as do the grizzly bears.
And what can people do today? There are so many things you can do, as I said, from small to big. But I would say as a forester, the first thing I would call on people to do is in addition to decarbonizing your own energy consumption, decarbonization has to happen at huge levels, like in our global community as well as on small levels. That's number one, is that we need to decarbonize our energy sector so that we can at least have a hopeful ability to mitigate climate change.
The second thing I would say, that goes hand in hand with this, is that forests play a huge role in this. Forests account for about a quarter of climate emissions. If we clear-cut our forests, we're going to lose our life support systems. And our old forests are especially crucial in this. They store huge amounts of carbon. They're the storehouses of our biodiversity. They are absolutely essential. And so if you can, lobby your government or vote the right way or write an op-ed or write a letter to your representative or whatever you want to do and say “we need to save these forests.” That is absolutely crucial. And not just old-growth forest – that goes for other ecosystems as well. I'm a forester, but that would go for old scrublands as well or old deserts or the ocean or the Arctic – conservation is super important at the same time as we decarbonize our future. So those are a few things.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. I have three final lightning-round questions for you before we wrap up. What is an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Suzanne Simard: I've been reading Yuval Harare's Sapiens. It puts the modern human being into the perspective of the whole evolution of humans and the changes in the planet. And I think you realize where you sit in that whole realm of time and space and that the here and now is just such a small slice. We have this big, long evolutionary history. It's important for us to understand that so that we can know our role moving forward.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Suzanne Simard: The biggest motivating thing for me are my daughters and my nieces and nephews and their lives. I see myself as a mother tree for them. And I want them to have successful and happy lives. I should say happiness is the most important thing. And then they will have children and have happy lives.
So they inspire me. And also, all young people – I consider myself young, too, even though I'm getting older – but it's our young minds. It’s the youthfulness in us, in our brilliance that gives me great hope. And when I work with my students, they're so brilliant and so resourceful and so hopeful, and it's the least I can do to help them create a better world for themselves and for me to do my part, to use my own wisdom and knowledge to help make a better world for them.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?
Suzanne Simard: I was trained as a reductionist scientist, which has lots of limits. And you quickly see what those limits are. Then there's a whole new field of study called complexity science. But I shouldn't call it new because it's about the study of systems. And the reason I say it's not new is because for thousands of years, the First Peoples of this earth understood the Earth system as a complex system where all the parts are interacting and creating this emergent, beautiful place.
But the thing about that kind of system understanding is that through relationships, systems build and they have tipping points. They have big changes. Those changes can be positive or negative. And in the climate change parlance, people worry about big tipping points where suddenly the ice sheet is melting and a big glacier carves off or Antarctica is losing a huge ice mass. And then the ocean currents are changing. And that sets up a bunch of feedback loops that can make climate change even worse very quickly.
But the positive thing about complex systems is it doesn't have to be that way. It can go the other way, too. And so if we put in place good policies, slowly or even rapidly, the policies put in place now can suddenly pay big dividends in a few years. There'll be big payoffs. So things like decarbonizing as quickly as possible, converting to electric cars, relying on other energy sources like solar and wind – those things will have very positive and rapid feedbacks that will be really helpful. But we have to put them in place. We have to do the work, and then we will see those kinds of very positive, rapid changes. That gives me huge hope.
Our systems are built to recover that way because they're complex systems. They have evolved to heal. And that gives me incredible hope.
Kamea Chayne: It was an honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Suzanne Simard: Keep up the good fight. It all matters. You matter. And everything that we do to convey our wisdom to our neighbors, to look after our fellow creatures, including the trees, our brothers and sisters, is important. Keep doing it. Do anything you can in a positive way to help make a better future for all of us. It all matters.
