The Science, Art and Meaning of Forest Wisdom - Suzanne Simard, Ph.D.

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thank you and thank you Bill for inviting me and and for Simon for recommending me to come and speak here um so I'm a scientist and when I talked to Bill I thought well you know this isn't my usual gig and I agreed and then it seemed like only a flash of a second later and I'm sure it was months he asked for a title and so I sent this title I actually called it the science art and meeting of forest wisdom and then when I went to put the presentation together I thought what was I thinking can I change that title but I think that what the title does is it draws me out of my usual comfort zone so in this talk I'm trying to mash together my science with with a broader understanding of culture and art and how this informs the me our understanding of the meaning of forest wisdom I have two really hard acts to follow yes my style is a bit different and I'm very sciency so you're going to see some science uh it may seem so simplistic it does to me sometimes and and I you know so I usually give a very you know a very science oriented talk and I was actually asked to give a TED talk not that long ago in New Orleans a TED Edie and the the audience were teenagers and so it was a completely different thing again and so I had to you know I developed this TED talk that was geared towards 14 year olds and so I really changed what I said and so um not the meaning of it but but how I delivered it and then it went up on YouTube which is like like gods cesspool of awful things I think in the first comment that came up was that's the worst TED talk I've ever seen and then there were some good ones later but um so I can only get better from there and I'm going to grace you with some of the images that I presented in that TED talk so here we go um I'm a scientist I'm also a forester and I'm also a person who's very connected to the land and I grew up at in the time I was in the 60s in a town called Kamloops which is an Indian town First Nations it means a meeting of the waters and in my town and in my high school there are lots of First Nations kids we didn't distinguish them we were inseparable from them we were we didn't really recognize as kids the difference but a lot of those kids went to the residential school and I'm going to talk about about that in the sack but I'm putting this image up because this is a Pacific coastal First Nations culture the cultures in of the First Nations of which of the 53 First Nations in Canada 52 are actually in British Columbia because the diverse topography and language they're all interconnected and seamless with the forests so forests and trees is just part of them so I'll you know speaking about how you know they how we view nature is separate from us it is the opposite way in the First Nations cultures so you can see it in their art in their in their use of their tools I'm not an anthropologist so I'm going out on a limb here but um you have to bear with me because I think this is a really important part of the story so British Columbia is a an awfully beautiful place it's full of networks of rivers and streams and mountains a lot of it is pristine forest it's one of the great storehouses of carbon and biodiversity in the world it's where I grew up and I'm very much part of that land and I actually grew up in a in a forestry family so my my parents actually came from Quebec or my grandparents there's a good chance that they're I'm 80 but we haven't traced it back that far if you looked at my sister you would think that she was a Cree Indian but my my family grew up logging in the hills of British Columbia we were just part of the forest ourselves and I can remember you know as a kid just the richness of the cedar hemlock forest and the amount of snow it was like this and my grandfather's and his uncles logged like this with horses and and their their their signature on the landscape was extremely light and so when I grew up it was it was like you know it was it was like nature in the raw and we were we were part of that and um I became an earth person actually I think I grew up as an earth person because I used to eat dirt all the time so talk about eating plants while I ate dirt went right through me actually all those bacteria and worms I think they stayed inside but so I consider myself a person of the earth um I I was fortunate enough that I was able to UM study the earth the soil the trees became a forester I got a job where they pay me to do this and it's become my lifelong passion and so today what I want to do is talk about about what I've discovered in science about nature and the congruence of the balanced respectful reciprocal relations I've observed in forests with science with indigenous cultures in our in Canada so I have to say you know you're gonna have to bear with me because I'm just thinking on the spot as I go this for me is an exploratory adventure because this is new to me and I want as you as you're listening to me think of questions you know because I don't have all the answers I just have little insights into what I think could be happening but there's so much more to know so I wanted to dissect my title a little bit or in new lingo unpack it science what is science what I mean by science so you know I went to graduate school in forest ecology and I learned reductionist science I apply reductionist science I see the limitations of reductionist science I try to bring my own sensibility to to look at it in a more holistic way but I have to say we have a long way to go before we actually truly study holistic the holistic properties of forests and ecosystems um so and cut what do I mean by culture so we talk about language language is hugely important as we talk about plant intelligence and behavior of plants so I wanted to to just throw this out here I actually found this in a dictionary culture is when you have language and society that transcends the individual to a broader system and I just call it a complex adaptive system so it's the interaction among the individuals and that creates something that is more than what an individual would do and there's Western culture and I'm going to just contrast that with indigenous culture in my talk and then there's there's wisdom do forests have wisdom do plants have wisdom well this is a definition that I also got from a dictionaries the respectful reciprocal connections relationships communications from which you merge healthy resilient structures and functions which I adopted it a little bit so let's see let's check back after I give you my science whether or not we really do have forest wisdom okay I just now I want to also acknowledge some interactions I've had lately with um Chris Nicholas who is Adonai in the Ottawa Valley who has become very interested in my work on plant communication and mother trees and I'm going to talk about mother trees and he he says he phoned me up and he said Susan we want the elders have been looking at your work in the den a nation and we want to work with you to inform so that we can inform your research and our research can inform what we're doing because we think that when we bring them together that there will be a greater voice for indigenous people and their rights in Canada and elsewhere in the world and so we've started working on trying to identify these mother trees or he calls them grandmother trees other other cultures call them grandfather trees or elder trees and in British Columbia we have lots of examples of these sort of iconic trees I've called it up here a cultural keystone species so this is western red cedar it's considered a cultural keystone species because it has this sort of preeminent status in the culture of the First Nations on the Pacific coast in that it's handed down through narrative Lord it's uh there's multiple uses of this tree it's used in everyday life in the structures in the art in the tradition the cultures and it remains there from generation to generation to generation and so according to Nancy Turner who is an ethno botanist at University of Victoria this qualifies Western redcedar as a as a cultural keystone species and the end of the dhenuka the Salish the Haida Indians call it the Tree of Life there's many many examples of these cultural keystone species or even you could think of them as cultural keystone forests so an individual tree exists within its own family right it's it's forest so I think it's really important to note that a cultural keystone species could easily be transferred to our understanding of cultural Keystone for us and in my work with Chris Nicholas and some others we're going to be trying to identify these cultural Keystone's forests as well as tree species and um this is a wonderful picture because I think that it shows this connection this respect this reciprocity between First Nations and their trees this is the tree species that that is from Kamloops the town that I grew up in is what ponderosa pine it's an iconic tree it's a cultural keystone species in that environment other other ones paper birch I'm just going to show a few um this is a fascinating photo I wanted to show this because you know we as Westerners are quite separate from our forests we live in towns or cities and we don't interact that much with trees and forests and this phenomena is becoming increasingly a problem because you know as soon they're predicting that 80% of our population worldwide will be in cities whereas here you can see the indigenous people are just living respecting part of their forest their whole community revolves around the forest you can see in the background there's actually some Westerners there on the outside looking in I think it that needs to change if we're going to make some progress here we have to be on the inside looking out and we have to be seamless and inseparable from our forests as well or they're going to continue to be at threat because we view them as other cultures around the world trees are sacred and um yes and in most cultures there are these sort of elder trees or grandmother trees or grandfather trees that have held reverence within societies that they're they're the pastor's of knowledge I'm just going to show you a few places and of course uh along come Westerners or Europeans and 1491 I believe and changed things in North America so that this was the first impact this is in British Columbia this is a Western redcedar that tree of life and this was our response to it Western Europeans is to cut it down and okay cutting down one tree is okay but we didn't just stop there we cut down a lot of trees this is in British Columbia this is crosses traditional territory unresolved treaties the land is totally cut up you look anywhere in British Columbia it looks like this or worse it's not just one spot this is roughly oops sorry that area was roughly where the Northern Gateway pipeline is supposed to go through another travesty waiting to happen the other the other arm of the Keystone pipeline and so the first nations are completely opposed because it will ruin their their what their tree of life their way of life it will ruin our way of life too because these pictures these images this is a forest but they're really a symbol of global change not just deforestation land-use change overuse of resources our huge ecological footprint um and it's funny you know we've left a few trees here we could say well maybe those are grandmother trees and we you know in my neck of the world as a forester what would I've noticed that we've done is that you know the forest companies and the government will make rules okay you've got to keep some grandmother trees if we identify grandmother trees is important while those rules get followed just you know to race to the bottom to see how cheaply we can do it to keep those grandmother trees and so we do stuff like this we saved a few but it's a mess isn't it it's a mess um it's um it's amazing when you look at how greed will make us do these incredible things that we look back on in horror and now it's being propagated up to big global scales so it's not of not none non importance oil sands okay now I'm going to get positive here in a little bit to take me a sec so in my town there was a residential school there were residential schools all across Canada they're uh they've been um there's a truce and reconciliation committee council going on across Canada now trying to give a voice to the people that lived in the residential schools um my sister could be one of those people she looks like those kids and uh she used to go to the residential school when she was a kid because her friends she looked like an Indian she fit in well and she'll she would spend time there and she said that when she went there all there all the beds in these big auditoriums and at night when kids went to bed all that you could hear was the crying yeah pretty profound and that when the priests would come they would take the little kids and they would shove them up in these little cubby holes so that the priest wouldn't find the little ones I know this is profoundly upsetting isn't of its profoundly upsetting and the reason I'm talking about it is because we've treated them the same way we treated the environment we have to change this we have to change this um mrs. Dennis saddleman he's my age he's from my town Kamloops and recently he was on CBC with his poem and it was called I hate you resident was called monster and it's the most touching moving poem you've ever heard and I just want to read to you four lines from this poem and he talks about how how the residential school tried to break the kids and break the culture and actually separate the people from nature so he goes sorry I hate you residential school I hate you you are a monster a huge hungry monster built with steel bones built with cement flesh you were a monster and it goes on I think that this is this is wonderful that we have this that this this is an oral history that he's passing down he is would be considered an elder okay so we have a lot of healing to do but we have this huge potential that's the good news is we are geniuses humans our nature is genius there are so many pathways that we can take and it's there for us to learn about and apply to do to act and I'm going to show you some of those things today so as I go through and talk about my science what I want to do is make the connection with indigenous beliefs worldviews and the science that I'm seeing about how trees are connected in in nature and these are the concepts that I'm going to talk about and culture and science okay so symbiosis I'm going to talk about how this symbiosis oops is relevant in both indigenous cultures and in what we call mycorrhizal fungi and fourth and this is just a little quote that I found in when you have healers and indigenous communities there's often a payment for the services but the payment is not like oh you owe me this amount of money it's like it's more like give what you can to resend that amount that that person gives is supposed to be how much they can afford but also to reflect on the service that's provided by the healer so with our reciprocity in in nature the analogy would be a symbiosis and in our forest in our temperate and boreal forests we have mycorrhizal fungi either that our trees are obligate on they form this relationship where the fungus has mycelium that grows to the soil and picks up nutrients and water and brings it back to the tree and trades it for carbon so the symbiosis is that that they're there together in physical contact and they're trading for mutual benefit this symbiosis is ancient so this is one of the earliest fossil records of a what's called an hour bus cooler mycorrhizal fungus and it got out you can see on the left there there's a little tree it's called Ann Arbor and the tree is this membrane envelope through which there's exchange of nutrients from the fungus with carbon from from the tree so this symbiosis actually was essential for the migration of plants from the ocean onto the land that's where we actually start to get plant life in terrestrial ecosystems and it was through the development of this symbiosis the evolution of the symbiosis that eventually plants started to photosynthesize which ultimately allowed us to evolve and breathe oxygen so they really are a fundamental core part of life and symbiosis I was going to mention to UM you know where our symbiosis right I mean we're not just individuals here by ourselves we're full of bacteria we got mites all over our faces that are feeding off of our well I won't go any further but to think that we are individuals this is a really I'm just going to diverge a little bit here you know um this is really important to me personally because uh is this the point to say this stuff let's see okay oh yeah I'll just uh okay I'll say it so a couple years ago I realized I was in a symbiosis not just with my bacteria and mites but with my friends and um I got breast cancer and uh it was profoundly shocking and I thought oh my god I'm gonna die or I could die I'd say I'm gonna die i'ma die and you know I I went through everything I I had the full surgery chemotherapy radiation therapy I almost did die from the treatments um and and I was standing on the brink of death you know looking down and going what does it all mean Who am I and I realized that what brought me out of this sorrow of losing what I had this health that that wasn't just me and it wasn't certainly wasn't all those drugs although I think they helped it was my friends and and and it was our interaction with our friend my friends and they were hope there were a bunch of women going through chemo at the same time as me we became this network of people and it's because of us as a group that that we're also here and healthy and doing great and and I realized and I was reading of course at the time on human psychology and you know new new science in neurobiology talking about where is the core of me you know can we identify where me is in this brain is there a spot there isn't really a spot our brains are these huge networks of neurons and axons and and neurotransmitters they're hugely complex there's no central part that's me and I realized in my interaction with my friends that I was growing my brain was growing we were growing together our minds were expanding together in a symbiosis and I realized you know our brains exist outside of ourselves they exist between you and me it's our culture it's our communication that's our wisdom it's not just me my little brain I can't survive without you guys none of us really can so that was a divergence back to the symbiosis symbiosis in nature so um see if this works this is a this is a root actually if you took a root and you sliced it in half at the root tip you would find this so this is actually a mycorrhizal root so I'll just point out a few things these great big cells are called cortical cells they're full of you know organelles and membranes the selves on the outside are fungal cells and then the cells that are around the cortical cells are also fungal cells so this is called an EXO mycorrhizal fungal Association and so the the exchange that goes on between the plant and the fungus is at that interface around the cortical cell and the and the fungal cells this mantle on the outside is where the hyphy emanate out into the soil and grow everywhere okay so so there is so the it's the emanating high feed that bring the nutrients and goodies back to the plant and exchange it at that cellular level and there's active transport mechanisms there's some passive ones it's certainly not osmosis as as Jeremy noted lots of active transport so um there's so much mycelium basically what that does it does this is a root chip with it that's mycorrhizal is extends the surface area of gathering apparatus into the soil so you know as you're walking through the force I use this line in the TED talk as you're walking through the forest under a single footprint there's 300 miles of fungal mycelium stacked and on end mass of hay it's huge can you imagine how much carbon is stored there can you imagine the activity that's going on there can you imagine that every time you walk that you're on this big superhighway with all this stuff moving around all over the place it's huge its massive most of the carbon in a forest is below ground over 50% is below ground it depends on what kind of forest you're in this is just a little picture showing how the fungus so the fungus fruits so the mushrooms you see in the forests are the fruiting bodies so in temperate forests they mostly form these eczema arises in boreal forests they're mostly what we call Erick wide Mike arises in tropical forests are mostly endo or vesicular Arbus cuter Mike arises the reason you don't see very many mushrooms in the tropical forest is because those are busk Euler micro Rises have minuscule fruiting bodies you can't see them there are some ekta mycorrhizal tree species in the tropics but they're not that common so that's probably why you don't have this mushroom culinary culture in the tropical forest but certainly in our forests the big showy fruiting bodies most of them are ACTU mycorrhizal fungi um so this is a temperate rainforest near where I grew up so the way that it works is that and this is also from my TED talk seed falls on the ground it's germinate the seedling sends little roots everywhere they become colonized within three months by these mycorrhizal fungi the the seedling starts to grow a little bit photosynthesize give some of that carbon to the fungus and the fungus grows further and further and what it does eventually is that the fungus grows and grows and girls can you know imagine hundreds of miles of this network under your feet everything gets linked together so every plant I mean there are some night non-microsoft like corn corn well it can be micro razzle but all the crap that we throw on it like fertilizer and water there's no way that the plant is going to be micro eyes'll with that because it's got everything it needs right doesn't need to have a symbiosis so yeah corn could take over the world but only if we let it only if we Cultch cultivated yeah so everything's linked together this is work that was done in the 1980s by a David Reed at the University of Sheffield and he was the first one to actually use radioactive isotopes to show that seedlings can be linked together in a laboratory setting okay I want to just draw a little relation you know a little relationship with indigenous cultures and this has been said before to today these indigenous cultures are often no local small populations and they're related through complex networks just like plants and their relationships develop through kinship uh and friendships we'll talk about that some more okay I want to talk about an experiment that a series of experiments that I've done with my graduate students so we worked in a Douglas fir forest that had a range of tree sizes and ages old trees that were about 300 years old younger trees and then seedlings that were coming up this is called an uneven aged forest or a multi aged forest there's self-regenerating for us meaning that you get little small disturbances you get some regeneration and eventually those little trees become big trees in the cycle goes on and on and on and with them it will look after itself right so what we wanted to do was see whether we could actually map this below ground network in the forest nobody had ever done it before so you know you can imagine trying to you know unearth all that soil and following these 300 miles and miles of fungi it's like impossible Taos no wonder graduate students flew when I tried to invite them to do this study so instead what we did is we we use molecular techniques so we picked two fungi to look at in this forest these are dominant fungi in Douglas fir forest they're what we call old-growth fungi they occupy about 80% of the root system of Douglas fir when it gets old when it's younger when Douglas fir is growing up and going through succession there's a whole range of other fungi associates with a lot of them are generalist fungi not too specific and we can get up to a hundred fun fungal species on a single hectare of forest a single tree can have about 20 fungal species associated with it and it when it's a little seedling but when it gets to be older as predominant dominantly make associates with this species raisa pogon is a below ground truffle forming fungus forms these micro rhizome mats or networks like we see in the left hand picture there so what we did is we used this technique called where we took looked at the es region of the DNA and we use a technique called micro micro satellites and we looked at short sequences of base pairs so that we could identify whether an individual fungus that was on this tree is the same individual fungus that's on this tree and therefore are they linked together up until that point we just kind of guessed or use laboratory study so we really had to use everything we could muster up scientifically to actually understand in a real forest what was going on so we did that and this is we came up with maps we did this in six forests and I just will try to explain this quickly so those little dr. Seuss characters are trees the blobs are fungal individuals or Genet s-- and the lines are the trees that are linked to those fungal genna's so what we found is that every tree was linked to every other tree that the little trees were linked into the big old trees so they had established within the network of the big old trees that the big trees were linked to more trees than the little ones so we call those big trees hubs they're like Chicago in your Airport Network they're the Chicago's of the forest or the grandmothers of the forest and we called them mother trees so that big dr. Seuss down here in the lower it was linked to 49 other trees and that was just in the little space that we looked at that's a tree okay so this was a hugely important to us so this is just a little animation of what happens so the trees are all linked together and the little ones grow up within the network of the bigger trees and those bigger trees are feeding the network right there they have this huge capacity to fix carbon goes down their trunks they feed it into the network and there's this massive amount of carbon available to those little seedlings that have little tiny cotyledons that basically can't support them when they get get going so they tap into that great big network and they're able to grow up even in shade where there might not be enough light for photosynthesis and then they grow up and it's this beautiful cycle eventually they become other trees it goes on and on and on so this kind of network these are regular these are patterns of networks that people have studied in science technology transportation systems social systems in our brains and what we find in natural systems is often or even in the transportation systems as they fall what we call a scale-free pattern where you have hubs or the most important key individual I know I shouldn't say most important but one that links to everything else it's kind of like the elder in the community all right or that go-to person who knows everything about the i.t so so most natural systems whether it's mycorrhizal networks whether it's your neural networks whether it's landscape patterns whether it's disturbance patterns people have looked at the the pattern of these as well it follows this scale-free pattern in this so it transcends biology and when you see things that transcend across biology there's important messages there that we can capitalize maybe that's not the right word but gotta watch my language here okay so how does this relate to ell or indigenous of course there's elders in indigenous cultures elder is not considered a noun it's a verb it's an action being an elder it's the role of that person you know a young person can be an elder we all know people that are brilliant and they're only 20 right or people that are 80 and they haven't figured out the key to life so it's a verb and I think in forest it's very true so in in First Nations Canadian culture the work of elders is defined as the maintaining culture and passing down traditional cultural knowledge and particularly in our northern the grandmother's are the keeper of knowledge and in the in the den a nation Chris described to me how the grandmothers were hugely important in carrying knowledge from generation to generation so they had to remember learn by rote memorization every detail of the territory the hunting territory the gathering territory it was crucial to their survival so they had to spend all they spent you know their childhood as young girls growing up learning this oral these oral stories they were Keystone people in their communities for passing down the knowledge so and they became the grandmothers themselves oops I shall not picture this is just another illustration of my network from that forest and I just wanted to show you so these circles are now trees not dug deduct I've replaced the dr. Seuss's with circles just to show a different image of the map so the bigger the circle and the darker the circle the bigger the tree in the older the tree and so those little yellow ones are actually seedlings and I just it's just another visualization of the extent of that Network and that I only looked at two species out of a hundred in this forest so it's going to be if I put all of them on there it would be opaque okay some other trees you're the big old trees in the forest this is a redwood up there in every forest they can be you know little short forest like in the boreal they can be black spruce and little islands of trees with you know huddled around each other for protection but there's always a key tree there that things gather around other trees will gather around I'm just going to move through some of these okay another principle that I want to show you a science and we talked about this reciprocity is the basic principle of indigenous people people taking care of people people taking care of their environment environment taking care of people that's what's important I see reciprocity in my science and I find it really exciting I just want to quickly go so here's some reductionist science for you this was actually my PhD work published in nature in 1997 so that was when we weren't allowed to use the word communication and scientific articles when you talked about plants or intelligence you know I was getting rotten eggs thrown at me from the UK when this came out but basically what I did is I grew three species together two of them were ektu mycorrhizal and one was our busker mycorrhizal so the two ecto mycorrhizal species could link up and they did and then I shaded them to different degrees that's what these little tents are and then I labeled them with isotopes two isotopes C 14 and C 13 so one plant got c-13 one got C 14 and then I could see how much went into the other plant okay got that it's very simple okay this is the network and I wanted to see whether carbon I was interested in carbon does carbon move from plant to plant actually and through the years with my graduate students I found not just carbon but nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and hormones and pesticides move from plant to plant through these micro Raizel networks so I just want to show you quickly from my PhD ancient history already but it's really important I think so I did this two years in a row for one so the one thing to notice is that the two species that were ektu mycorrhizal Douglas fir and paper birch exchanged carbon that's the blue bar and the purple bar in the first year they exchanged equal amounts so there was this reciprocity back and forth in the second year Douglas fir got a lot more than paper birch they had changed their stage here in the community because they grow at different rates cedar was hardly getting anything it was our busker and mycorrhizal sol was involved in some other network with other folks so it was a good indicator though of how much was moving through soil versus through the mycorrhizal Network so this is reminds me of it I saw this quote Harvey to tus to chooses First Nations elder who was paid for his healing work giving to someone who was sick one dollar is what he got but that's all he had so therefore he gave 100% it's the same thing in my mycorrhizal networks okay so I shaded Douglas fir two different degrees and then I looked at how much net transfer how much was it gaining relative to paper birch and I found that the more Douglas fir was shaded the more stressed out it was the more paper birch gave to it this is like the opposite of how we think about plant communities or have until this point no wonder they were throwing rotten eggs at me it's it tips things upside down doesn't it it's not just about competition it's about facilitation as well and about 10 other and/or more interactions I'm not going to read this I'm going to keep going so I had a graduate student who took this further and she says well okay so we know what's going back and forth I did that first experiment in the summer she said she thought well why how would this change over the season so she looked at transfer in the spring summer and fall between the same two species and she found again so these first three bars it says bi-directional transfer spring is yellow green is summer a blue is fall in in the springtime paper birch is not yet leaf doubt but Douglas fir is growing in the summer time paper birch has leaped out and it's over topping the Douglas fir and then in the fall the birch is senescent the Douglas fir is still growing below ground and so she looked up 2-way transfer that's the bi-directional transfer and she found that it increased over the growing season so there was lots of this back and forth exchange but the net transfer who gained the most changed over the growing season and it changed according to who needed it most so Douglas fir which was doing really well before birch had leaped out in the spring gave more to by paper birch and then it reversed in the summer when birch was overtopping Douglas fir and then it reversed again in the fall it's beautiful back and forth cycle reciprocity I just put this picture in just to bring home how much is going on there can you imagine like this it's like this huge superhighway it's like this huge airline network of back and forth massive amounts of carbon below ground moving moving feeding balancing reciprocity mutual respect okay um so okay so there's carbon moving around what does that mean for the forest so I had another graduate student these grad students spend a lot of time doing this stuff Francois and this is just a teensy tiny part of it experiment but he looked at he tried he grew seedlings around mother trees so the big old trees in these little bags that would either let a network form between the seedlings and the mother tree or not and he had different levels of connections so just the 0.5 means that they were not that the little seedlings could not connect to the mother tree they were isolated and 35:25 and no were increasing levels of connection to the mother tree and this is survival of those little seedlings over two years and so there was four times greater survival in this really harsh environment when they could link into the network and he found that was associated with carbon transfer nitrogen cat transfer and water transfer so the mother tree was definitely giving back further experiments that I don't have a figure for but I want to talk about them because I know you're interested so I had another graduate student Amanda Issei who looked at whether or not seedlings that work in or related to the mother tree would get more carbon water and nitrogen than those that were non kin or stranger seedlings whoa I'm not supposed to go there yet might as well might as well why so what um what she found did it stop there no gone what she found was that yeah that more much more carbon was going to the kin seedlings I hope it's going to stop okay amazing hey so the kin the mother tree could recognize her kin and the way that that carbon moved was through the mycorrhizal Network so it's not just a recognition of the mother tree with her young but it's also recognition through mediated through this mycorrhizal network so there's recognition multi-species recognition involved it Sam it's amazing to me we have a pretty good idea of what compounds are moving from from tree to tree there are simple amino acids but there could be more complex ones there's also some carbohydrates but mostly amino acids I wanted to also mention one other set of experiments that we're doing and this builds on the work that is going on recently about defense signals moving between plants through volatiles but we've also discovered that they move below ground so we've got experiments going right now to try and uncover this in douglas-fir forest but let me just give you a quick explanation so when one tree becomes infected and there's been work done with diseases and insects with an insect so we're working with something in Douglas fir of sport forest called Western spruce budworm it stresses that tree right it loses some needles it goes into a stress response that starts to produce a methyl jasmine 8 or jasmine ik acid I should say that signal then moves down into the root system of the stress tree goes through the mycorrhizal Network and is picked up by the neighboring trees that are not attacked yet the healthy trees so we've done all these elegant treatments where we can isolate that pathway goes through the mycorrhizal Network into the neighboring plant that neighboring plant then up regulates its genes so they're looking at different defense genes they up regulate those genes they start to produce more defense enzymes which makes them less palatable to those Western spruce budworm x' and then when we introduce the Western spruce budworm back into those up regulated seedlings they're resistant to the spruce budworm so and this has been actually shown our studies are still in progress but there's been about four or five papers published that show this with aphids with different diseases on tomato plants there's about four papers out there now allelochemicals is another another topic but another chemical that moves from plant to plant how am i doing for time Oh perfect okay okay so there's a lot of communication going on you know I would never have used that word before but to me this is communication especially when so signals are being sent we can identify those compounds we there's an understanding on the part of the donor and that the receiver needs something the receiver detects that signal that's communication it's an intelligent system the fascinating thing is that these mycorrhizal networks are structured just like our neural networks they might not be the same cells but the actual biological start structure that the pattern of the network is it the same I find that really exciting this brings me to the idea of complex adaptive systems I'm so sorry for this reductionist picture after those pictures Wade showed I thought I got to take this one out but here it is anyway in all its glory the symbols that we use to try and understand systems and this is me working with some foresters who are trying to couch our frame what we know about how for is function and how humans interact with forests in a better framework than just this you know plants are individuals competing for resources and so we're sort of building on in other fields this idea of complex adaptive systems your own brains or complex adaptive systems in that they're constantly changing in response to outward stimuli growing even interacting with me as you're looking at me your brain is changing - - it's the same in an ecosystem so these little oranges are supposed to be parts of the system so mycorrhizal fungi trees interacting with bacteria nutrients they interact and out of the interaction emerges something that's greater than the sum of its parts as Aldo Leopold said those are called emergent properties so so when we think about you know your brain cells out of it comes this and not it's not just a jumble of nerves and well I feel like a Dumbo nervous times but our brains are not just jumbled cells out of them emerges this incredible beauty and sophistication that is more than we can ever piece together in science it's the same of my smile it I call them my silly little experiments with networks we you know we're looking at it with this very narrow very narrow my treatments and chemotherapy reflect that just brutal right a very poor understanding of the system but I think that was this it with this lens that we can start to open up and understand that it's not just a bunch of oranges interacting is actually something much more beautiful and sophisticated than that and that this complex adaptive system that feeds back and influences the parts themselves so it's this constant cycle of adaptation because we're biological beings and because we we learn socially not just humans but other animals too we have this ability to constantly adapt and change that's why they're called complex adaptive systems so mycorrhizal networks are a perfect metaphor I guess for trying to view forests or even cultures as complex adaptive systems and what you know we have this interaction across scale so you go from genes to mycorrhizal high feed to networks to forests eventually to which eventually interact with insects and diseases which eventually interact at the global scale which feeds back to mike rizzo fungi and things at lower scales so everything is feeding back on each other okay I wanted to mention here's just another this is some work done by Christina cockle in the tropics and I put this up I know it's a horrible graphic sorry Wade you're so eloquent in your graphics mine are so clumsy but there's a lot of really cool information here this is called a nest web so there's cavity nesting birds in all of our North American Forests but also tropical forests are all over the world and there is primary cavity nesters secondary and tertiary cavity nesters and I've been working with Christine and Kathy Martin trying to link together what's happening at the below ground web level with the above-ground webs so in this case the micro Russel network begets the forest as I explained to you the forest the trees become old and decayed they become grandmother trees they soften and woodpeckers find homes in them those woodpeckers are considered primary excavators their holes eventually become more and bigger and so then secondary nesters like ducks can happen habit them and then they get worn and bigger and eventually tertiary nesters come in like bears and so on so you have this huge Network like a trophic web that's linked to the below ground network as well it's a very nice example of a complex adaptive system just another this is I call this a meta Network where you have net these networks interacting with each other informing each other at different scales our brains are no different so this just a quick example of you know I talked about neurons and axons and how you know when we behave and do things neurons that wire to fire together wire together and we create behaviors it's very similar in ecosystems and none of this emerges beautiful things but we can also break our system if we trash it and it's the same with our ecosystems and I think I think that we can learn from psychology sociology ecology does bring the sciences together to understand how these systems work better so and I just wanted to show this because you know the patterns again are the same and it's the same outcome we can either nurture those networks and the parts of the networks and have an integrated holistic system or we can cut the trees down and create chaos or rigidity ok ok um I've got more stuff but I wanted to comment that that elders you know we think of we have this sort of view of what an elder is an indigenous society so it's an old person but it doesn't necessarily have to be an old person it's a person that's maybe a medicine person but doesn't necessarily have to be a medicine person in a forest it can be a Douglas fir but it doesn't have to be a Douglas fir it could be a paper birch they have qualities different qualities there's diversity there so this is a quote a Cree teacher in an elementary school once said an elder isn't just someone that's old an elder is somebody in the community that as respect is respected and earned that title okay it's the same in forests and that these are just different kinds of elder specialties that have been identified in First Nations across Canada you can see there's about ten different roles medicine people elder herbalist traditional teachers seers ceremonious midwives orators advisors same thing in forests mother trees the elders they have specialties as well different tree species but they also have different roles and they maybe they do multiple roles same thing in the indigenous communities so these include things like nurturing their young and their neighbors providing nutrition defense support structure sounds like a human community carrying the legacy of genes from previous times or being the legacy regulating their own genes for themselves and for their neighbors providing key habitats for the web of forest species massive carbon storage massive beyond just adding it up is multiplicative their regulators of biogeochemical and hydrologic cycle cycles and they're spiritually integrated with the human spirit and of course they need to be protected and nurtured themselves so there are elder apprentices it's the same in forests an old tree doesn't last forever so we have to plan for it we have to apprentice trees to become elders in the future too we have to leave enough for us not just those little islands based on the rules we need a whole intact forest because elders depend on having their community it works both ways so I just wanted to quickly talk about a little study I know that I'm running out of time but this is a grad student who worked in the Arctic tundra and we were looking at carbon transfer I got two minutes left in Arctic tundra communities and working with some First Nations youth these are quite different than forest communities this girl is Julie desolate she was doing her PhD here up at Toolik Lake and she wanted to see whether or not carbon was moving between different plant species and she looked at so these I'm showing this because these are not big tree these are little tiny plants in the tundra but they have the same patterns in the same behaviors or very similar and so she wanted to separate how much carbon was moving from plant to plant through roots rhizomes soil and through mycorrhizal networks and she labeled her plants with c-13 the isotope and she found that a lot of carbon was moving between the mycorrhizal Network and most of it or all of it so she looked at Bachelor Nana which is the dominant Tundra shrub species that's expanding in the Arctic right now and she looked at how much carbon was moving between Bachelor Nana's and then between Bachelor Nana and all the other species and between Bachelor Nana and this other laboratory and she found that all of the carbon moved from Bachelor Nana to Betty Lou Nana through the mycorrhizal Network or most of it went through the mycorrhizal Network so what does this mean it's a positive feedback loop isn't it it's a positive feedback loop because The Bachelor now is looking after itself and we see Bachelor Nana increasing across the Arctic as the soils are warming in the permafrost is melting but the biosphere is also trying to dampen that effect of soil respiration because it's a Bachelor Nana is growing because it's able to access nutrients and in turn from a Tundra community to a shrub community to suck up more carbon because there's too much freakin carbon up there so it's trying to dampen the effect I'm not answerable moralizing this but but the biosphere is react in the most intelligent way it possibly can given what we're given it yeah and I'm going to end to say that we need to integrate what we're learning in nature with what the aboriginal and indigenous communities are trying to show us desperately saying look work with us because we're losing this battle you know we got we got to move and they're you know within their own communities you know they're going through a huge changes themselves and their own critiques and scars um but they're trying to integrate Western science and culture with their own cultures so that they can speak to us in our language so that we can listen to them to start to make the changes that we need to make so with that I leave you thank you very much
Info
Channel: BTC Institute
Views: 39,993
Rating: 4.8686132 out of 5
Keywords: science, art, forest wisdom, forest, bioethics, bioethics forum, nature, nature intelligence, Wisdom (Quotation Subject), Suzanne Simard, Consciousness (Taxonomy Subject)
Id: pLU9EPo1iwQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)
Published: Fri Jun 13 2014
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