Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree

So, everyone who's been hassling me for the last three years about this: congratulations, I've finally read Suzanne Simard's book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Please stop hassling me (about this one book. Keep recommending more!).

But it was a tricky read for me, and here's why.

As a long-time tree-hugger whose family visited the local health food store almost every Saturday when we went into town, whose family farmed in the 60s and 70s not because they were back-to-the-landers but because they were never-left-the-landers, i can't always tell whether I have a finely tuned sense for woo-woo, or whether I have a low tolerance for woo-woo.

I start with this point not to say that Simard's Finding the Mother Tree is an example of woo-woo, but to confess one of the crucial reasons that I find myself reluctant, too often, to read environmental nonfiction, including Simard's. I need to trust, and when there are grounds for me to distrust, it's a difficult read.

In Simard's case, my default was simply to accept the science before getting around to the book, since unlike many writers of environmental nonfiction, she's an actual scientist. For a time, I more or less rolled what I was hearing of her insights into the ways that I was thinking and talking about the world. When I started hearing thoughtful critiques of her ideas, I started trying to roll those into my thinking as well. When something matters as much as environmental nonfiction should, though, you should quite quickly run out of faith in Pierre Bayard's claim that one can talk sensibly enough about books one hasn't read, and it was clearly past time for me to dive into Finding the Mother Tree.

The book's basic concept is easily explained, and because literally thousands of readers have quickly explained it already to those who haven't read the book, I'm not saying anything new here: the crucial part of a forest happens underground, where various fungi and sundry other organisms do the real work of feeding and culturing trees, and where trees themselves are exchanging food, water, nutrients, and chemicals. The exchanges are richer and more complicated than we'd ever imagined, which is a really exciting thing for us to be only learning now. I'm not a scientist, but the experimental design looks careful, and Simard's peer-reviewed articles have kept stacking up, and her articles have kept getting cited approvingly, so I'm on board.

On the other hand, those thoughtful critiques mentioned earlier haven't gone away. If you need to see those, you might start with Leon Vlieger's version at The Inquisitive Biologist, which he has articulated clearly in an otherwise positive review, in a forma that's both accessible and patiently technical.

To be clear, absolutely I accept that Simard has faced a whole career of slights, often misogynistic and often motivated by an attachment to status-quo forest practices. (I spent some time in BC government circles myself in the mid-90s, starting in the Wildlife Branch and with some windows into Forests, and I see no reason to doubt her story.) Those aren't the critiques I've been mulling over, and they're not the ones animating the Inquisitive Biologist, either.

What I'd characterize as legitimate critiques have to do with what Vlieger remarks on by saying, "there is not much here in the way of signposting where her ideas become speculative.... These are interesting ideas, but my concern is that lay readers will unquestioningly accept them as established facts, Simard’s track record as a publishing scientist giving them an air of legitimacy." As Vlieger argues, leaning heavily on Merlin Sheldrake's own critiques of Simard in his book Entangled Life to do so, Simard's Finding the Mother Tree relies heavily on human-centric metaphor in order to explain both her findings and her speculations, which includes her sense for what intelligence means.

Simard, for example: "This forest naturally knew how to rejuvenate itself when allowed a proper start, seeding into soils that were receptive, killing my planted trees where they didn't belong, patiently waiting for me to hear what it was saying" (p.285).

Clear why a research scientist is likely to resist Simard's phrasing, yes?

It's a lovely read, though, genuinely inspiring in its autobiographical elements as well as in its science. If you can just remember to be usefully critical of or resistant to some of her phrasing, the book can carry you a long way toward a frame of mind that'll prepare you to do good in the world. I could go on, but so very many people have read this book that I don't feel any pressure to do that.

So, that's the takeaway about Finding the Mother Tree. Everything after this point is mostly for me, because when I struggle with a book whose objectives are so near my own, I need to think out loud to myself.

Here be dragons: A small-minded critique and epilogue

Early in the book, I was jarred enough by three separate details that I struggled to recover my willingness to trust Simard's writing. It's unreasonable of me, I admit, because they're very small details, but when I lose trust in what I'm reading, it's hard for me to rebuild it. Two of them are simply family stories, what one might call apocrypha. In a memoir, sure, use them, because family lore is part of how we're defined, but when the memoir is one where you're looking for your reader's trust in your scientific accuracy, well....

Early in the first chapter, remarking on the fact that her great-grandparents had settled in Edgewood in the early 20th century, along Lower Arrow Lake, Simard notes that "Charles was known to wrestle with bears" (p.11). No. Just no.

In a photo caption two pages earlier: "We arrived [to go camping at Shuswap Lake] in our 1962 Ford Meteor after barely escaping a rockslide on the Trans-Canada Highway; rocks flew down the mountain straight through the car window and landed on Mum's lap" (p.9). It'd have to be a small rock if it could land gently enough on her mother's lap not to injure her, I think we'd agree? But the physics of objects in space means that a larger rock will likely move faster and further than a smaller one, so what about the rest of the slide? My point is that some misgivings aren't unwarranted about this point, either.

The third comes at a crucial moment in Simard's narrative. At this point a grad student working for a forestry company, she's puzzling over the unexpected things she's seeing in the field, and she's thinking hard about why she might be seeing fungi thickly covering the tips of tree roots. It's midnight at the bunkhouse, and the puzzle is keeping her from sleeping: "I wandered to the kitchen for a beer, grateful that the boys had left a few cans of Canadian for the taking.... In bed, a threadbare sheet over my sticky knees, I sipped the beer and absentmindedly peeled the label" (p.62).

In the 1980s, though, cans of Canadian didn't have labels. The labels were painted onto the aluminum, so if there's a label, it'd have to be a bottle.

And to be candid, I was already worried about this chapter before we got to the beer. It opens with her saying that as of "high noon" (p.45), she had ridden her bicycle a hundred kilometers so far that day. At the chapter's opening, she's pedalling through a mixed forest of Douglas-fir and ponderosa pines on her way to Logan Lake, where her brother is bull-riding at the rodeo. She spends some time puttering in the forest, then rides to Logan Lake, where her brother dislocates his shoulder on a heroic but failed ride on "the worst goddamned bull of the rodeo" (p.56). She then gets back on her bike, only realizing her hunger when she's "[h]alfway to [her] car" (p.57). Again she spends some time in the forest, excavating fungi and examining the root tips of some trees, eventually getting back on her bike and returning to her VW Beetle, arriving back at the Lillooet bunkhouse before midnight.

That's all fine, because she can choose her own routes, and who am I to judge? But it's only 150 kilometres between Logan Lake and Lillooet, so if she's cycling more than 100km, it's a puzzle that made me curious. At first I assumed Ashcroft, which would mean she wouldn't be riding much on the highway, but Ashcroft's only 60km from Logan Lake. Spences Bridge is about 100km away, but there's nothing in the book implying a 40km ride along the Trans-Canada, and she'd have had to do that if she was riding more than 100km each way.

Anyway. The bear-wrestling great-grandfather, the stray rock in her mother's lap, the impossible beer can, even the suspicious mileage on her bike: not a single one of those things has the slightest relevance to Simard's science. They shouldn't bother me, but collectively, they jarred me out of faith in the book's memoir element. When a work of environmental nonfiction draws heavily on memoir, the two elements need to reinforce each other: appreciating the personal story means you'll buy into the science, and if you buy into the science, you'll be ready to appreciate the personal story more than you otherwise might.

And I couldn't, so I remained suspicious throughout, which made me sad.

Back to what I said should be the takeaway. Finding the Mother Tree really is a lovely read, genuinely inspiring both for its science and for Simard's autobiography. If you can just remember to be usefully critical of some of her scientific phrasing, and if you can read the autobiography for its patterns instead of its details, this book can carry you a long way toward a frame of mind that'll prepare you to do good in the world.

Recommended, but I have more and stronger reservations about saying that than I ever expected. Why are so many readers that I trust so very positive about this book?