Spiritual Touchstone:

There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature – its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity. – Suzanne Simard in Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Former GTUCC Associate Pastor, the Rev. Tom Emanuel, takes a walk in Muir Woods.

Even among the best tree-huggers living in Northern California, there is so much more to be learned about healthy forests and natural communities. And even more to be learned about how healthy human communities mirror their natural counterparts and in fact, are ALSO part of those communities.

What happens to the trees, happens to us. And what happens to us, happens to the trees. Separation between humans and the natural world is a product of human imagination and hubris. 

If you're truly willing to immerse yourself in Suzanne Simard's marvelous book, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," it will transform your thinking about who you are and the place we occupy in the scheme of things. It also offers peer-reviewed, hardcore science that debunks some of the myths humans have created about trees, the natural world, and perhaps even human community.

Trees do not simply compete with each other for sunshine and resources, they are also collaborative and have complex communication systems using intermediaries, such as fungi, that help them to thrive. Like humans, they need each other and live best in a healthy diverse community in balance. 

Last week was Mother’s Day, a joyous holiday, but also complicated for many others. One of Simard’s best discoveries is that there are “mother trees”. These old growth trees perform the best functions of “mothering” by helping their “seedling kin” resist disease and by providing water and nutrients with the help of friendly fungi. And even more importantly, when mother trees are healthy, the forest is “wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing” as central hubs in networks that look very much like our own neural networks.

There are at least three principles to be learned from the wisdom of trees that might help us be healthier human communities. 

First, we cannot go it alone. A single redwood tree, no matter how large, is dangerously unstable. Part of how these massive trees reach their great size is because their roots underground wind around one another to create a stable grove. Folks in the U.S. are grappling with an epidemic of loneliness that can only be healed by nurturing healthy communities and social infrastructure to bring us back together.

Second, diversity is essential. Science has proven over and over again that  monoculture farming degrades soil and makes trees more vulnerable to disease in addition to destroying habitats and additional carbon emissions. Human communities also need the gifts of differing perspectives, skills, and generations to be healthy. 

Third, we must preserve and protect time-tested wisdom and wise leaders. When Simard’s family first homesteaded in Canada, they left the large old growth trees in place. She later learned that through clear-cutting and destroying the old growth mother trees, the long-term health of the forest became precarious. We live in a human culture that denigrates the gifts of older people and opportunities for intergenerational learning outside of a particular family are increasingly rare. We’re quickly moving to an information economy that has lost touch with the past and the well-reasoned paths of wisdom. Misinformation, disinformation, and toxic rhetoric clutter our information networks making it hard for wise and reasoned voices to be heard, much less heeded.

Finally, it might turn out to be true that if we can save the trees, the trees will save us.