Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest - Softcover

Simard, Suzanne

 
9780525565994: Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Softcover
ISBN 10: 052556599X ISBN 13: 9780525565994
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery

“Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that the world is a web of stories, connecting us to one another. [The book] carries the stories of trees, fungi, soil and bears--and of a human being listening in on the conversation. The interplay of personal narrative, scientific insights and the amazing revelations about the life of the forest make a compelling story.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

In this, her first book, now available in paperback, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

And Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SUZANNE SIMARD was born in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia and was educated at the University of British Columbia and Oregon State University. She is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry.

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1

Ghosts in the Forest

I was alone in grizzly country, freezing in the June snow. Twenty years old and green, I was working a seasonal job for a logging company in the rugged Lillooet Mountain Range of western Canada.

The forest was shadowed and deathly quiet. And from where I stood, full of ghosts. One was floating straight toward me. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. My heart lodged in my throat as I tried to summon my rationality—and then I laughed.

The ghost was just heavy fog rolling through, its tendrils encircling the tree trunks. No apparitions, only the solid timbers of my industry. The trees were just trees. And yet Canadian forests always felt haunted to me, especially by my ancestors, the ones who’d defended the land or conquered it, who came to cut, burn, and farm the trees.

It seems the forest always remembers.

Even when we’d like it to forget our transgressions.

It was midafternoon already. Mist crept through the clusters of subalpine firs, coating them with a sheen. Light-refracting droplets held entire worlds. Branches burst with emerald new growth over a fleece of jade needles. Such a marvel, the tenacity of the buds to surge with life every spring, to greet the lengthening days and warming weather with exuberance, no matter what hardships were brought by winter. Buds encoded to unfold with primordial leaves in tune with the fairness of previous summers. I touched some feathery needles, comforted by their softness. Their stomata—the tiny holes that draw in carbon dioxide to join with water to make sugar and pure oxygen—pumped fresh air for me to gulp.

Nestled against the towering, hardworking elders were teenaged saplings, and leaning into them were even younger seedlings, all huddling as families do in the cold. The spires of the wrinkled old firs stretched skyward, sheltering the rest. The way my mother and father, grandmothers and grandfathers protected me. Goodness knows, I’d needed as much care as a seedling, given that I was always getting into trouble. When I was twelve, I’d crawled along a sweeper tree leaning over the Shuswap River to see how far out I could go. I tried to retreat but slipped and fell into the current. Grampa Henry jumped into his hand-built riverboat and grabbed my shirt collar right before I would have disappeared into the rapids.

Snow lay deeper than a grave nine months of the year here in the mountains. The trees far outmatched me, their DNA forged so they’d thrive despite the extremes of an inland climate that would chew me up and spit me out. I tapped a limb of an elder to show gratitude for its hovering over vulnerable offspring and nestled a fallen cone in the crook of a branch.

I pulled my hat over my ears while stepping off the logging road and waded deeper into the forest through the snow. Despite it being only a few hours before darkness, I paused at a log, a casualty of saws that had cleared the road right-of-way. The pale round face of its cut end showed age rings as fine as eyelashes. The blond-colored earlywood, the spring cells plump with water, were edged by dark-brown cells of latewood formed in August when the sun is high and drought settles in. I counted the rings, marking each decade with a pencil—the tree was a couple hundred years old. Over twice the number of years my own family had lived in these forests. How had the trees weathered the changing cycles of growth and dormancy, and how did this compare to the joys and hardships my family had endured in a fraction of the time? Some rings were wider, having grown plenty in rainy years, or perhaps in sunny years after a neighboring tree blew over, and others were almost too narrow to see, having grown slowly during a drought, a cold summer, or some other stress. These trees persisted through climatic upheavals, suffocating competition, and ravaging fire, insect, or wind disruptions, far eclipsing the colonialism, world wars, and the dozen or so prime ministers my family had lived through. They were ancestors to my ancestors.

A chattering squirrel ran along the log, warning me away from his cache of seeds at the base of the stump. I was the first woman to work for the logging company, an outfit that was part of a rough, dangerous business starting to open its doors to the occasional female student. The first day on the job, a few weeks back, I’d visited a clear-cut—a complete felling of trees in a thirty-hectare patch—with my boss, Ted, to check that some new seedlings had been planted according to government rules. He knew how a tree should and should not be planted, and his low-key approach kept workers going through their exhaustion. Ted had been patient with my embarrassment at not knowing a J-root from a deep plug, but I’d watched and listened. Soon enough, I was entrusted with the job of assessing established plantations—seedlings put in to replace harvested trees. I wasn’t about to screw up.

Today’s plantation awaited me beyond this old forest. The company had chopped down a large parcel of velvety old subalpine firs and planted prickly needled spruce seedlings this last spring. My task was to check the progress of those new growths. I hadn’t been able to take the logging road into the clear-cut because it had been washed out—a gift, since I could detour past these mist-wrapped beauties, but I stopped at a massive pile of fresh grizzly scat.

Fog still draped the trees, and I could have sworn something was sliding along in the distance. I looked harder. It was the pale green trusses of the lichen called old man’s beard because of the way it sways from branches. Old lichen that particularly thrived on old trees. I plunged the button on my air horn to warn off the specter of bears. I’d inherited my fear of them from my mother, who was a child when her grandfather, my great-grampa Charles Ferguson, shot and killed one that was inches from mauling her on the porch. Great-Grampa Charles was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century pioneer in Edgewood, an outpost in the Inonoaklin Valley along the Arrow Lakes of the Columbia basin in British Columbia. With axes and horses, he and his wife, Ellen, cleared the Sinixt Nation land they had homesteaded to grow hay and tend cattle. Charles was known to wrestle with bears and shoot wolves that tried to kill his chickens. He and Ellen raised three children: Ivis, Gerald, and my grandmother Winnie.

I crawled over logs covered with moss and mushrooms, inhaling the evergreen mist. One had a river of tiny Mycena mushrooms flowing along the cracks down its length before fanning along a splay of tree roots that dwindled to rotten spindles. I’d been puzzling over what roots and fungi had to do with the health of forests—the harmony of things large and small, including concealed and overlooked elements. My fascination with tree roots had started from my growing up amazed at the irrepressible power of the cottonwoods and willows my parents had planted in our backyard when their massive roots cracked the foundation of our basement, tilted over the doghouse, and heaved up our sidewalk. Mum and Dad fell into worried discussions of what to do with the problem they’d unwittingly created in our little plot of land in trying to reconstruct the feel of trees surrounding their own childhood homes. I’d watched in awe each spring as a multitude of germinants emerged from cottony seeds amid halos of mushrooms fanning around the base of the trees, and I’d become horrified, at eleven, when the city ran a pipeline spewing foamy water into the river beside my house, where the effluent killed the cottonwoods along the shore. First the tops of the crowns thinned, then black cankers appeared around the furrowed trunks, and by the next spring the great trees were...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
052556599X
ISBN 13 
9780525565994
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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