This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Finding the Mother Tree" by Suzanne Simard. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is the wood-wide web? How does it help trees communicate with each other?
In Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard discovered that trees are intertwined via fungus in a complex resource-sharing network. She compares this to an internet satellite system, which she refers to as the “wood-wide web.”
Learn more about the wood-wide web below.
The Wood-Wide Web
Another reason Simard’s research has been so strongly resisted over time, she says, is simply the tenacity of the long-held competition model and the way it reflects the cultural perspective it grew out of. Competition for resources has been the prevailing paradigm for understanding nature throughout the history of modern Western science. In fact, it’s the predominant model for understanding all relationships, including those in human societies and economies.
Simard’s research suggests that competition is not the defining nature of the relationship between the trees and other plant life; the major dynamic is cooperation within the wood-wide web. We’ll look at how the wood-wide web model reflects a different view of nature, one that’s more consistent with our understanding of how our own bodies work, as well as with how some non-Western traditional societies function.
Anthropomorphizing the Trees
Some ecologists still critique Simard’s conclusions and emphasize the importance of recognizing competition in ecosystems. This seems to be a major ongoing battle of perspectives.
Simard has been accused of “anthropomorphizing” the trees, while simultaneously overemphasizing their cooperative nature. However, seeing trees as inherently competitive is more modern-human-like. Perhaps the scientists who can’t imagine trees having a symbiotic cooperative nature are more guilty of anthropomorphizing them.
In an interview, Simard says, “Our culture is not merely one of competition for scarce resources and the profits inherent in that scarcity. It is competition for competition’s sake…we compete aggressively just to do that, not for any gain.”
Forests as Organisms
In terms of how its components function interdependently, Simard concludes that a forest is essentially a single organism, like the human body. The wood-wide web between trees, she says, is similar to the neural networks in our brains, with the mycelium being the synapses along which nutrients, like neurotransmitters, travel. And like our brains, this is also a communication network that she says is “wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing.”
Of course, there is some amount of competition and dysfunction in a forest ecosystem, Simard acknowledges, just like in our bodies. We get diseases, and if we’re nutrient deficient our various organs and cells may compete for those nutrients. But if the body is healthy, the major operational mode is cooperation between the parts. Simard says a forest operates the same way.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Suzanne Simard's "Finding the Mother Tree" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Finding the Mother Tree summary:
- A look at Suzanne Simard's research on the relationships among trees
- What a Mother Tree is, and how it takes care of its community
- How trees communicate in an interconnected, underground network
