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But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance.
this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links.
Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.
The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.
An interesting comparison!!
When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.
This implies that possible damages are passed down through different generations of underground roots so problems that may be fixed might show up in another generation
The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing.
I’m interested omggg
This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.
YOOOOO one heck of a line I love
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.
I was the first woman to work for the logging company,
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.
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.
This is what happens when human-made objects are subjected into nature … it changes and kills the surrounding ecosystems
Humus is the greasy black rot in the forest floor sandwiched between the fresh litter from fallen needles and dying plants above and the mineral soil weathered from bedrock below. Humus is the product of plant decay.
I pulled another spruce seedling from its planting hole, wondering if the answer might be in the roots, not the needles.
There was an utter, maddening disconnect between the roots and the soil.
Or maybe these yellow threads weren’t connected to Suillus mushrooms at all and were instead from a different fungal species. More than a million exist on earth, about six times the number of plant species, with only about 10 percent of fungal species identified. With my scant knowledge, my chances of identifying the species of these yellow threads felt like a long shot.
I have a tradition of trusting that nature is resilient, that the earth will rebound and come to my rescue even when nature turns violent.
This was his profession, he loved it, and he was getting paid to get it as right as he could.
I pointed out that they were well away from the cutting-permit borders. Including them would be illegal. Not only were big elder trees an important seed source for the open ground, they were favorite perches for birds, and I’d seen bear dens under the necks of the roots.
By the time we were done, we’d stolen at least a dozen elders from the edges of the avalanche tracks.
Give an inch they take a mile
“Doesn’t matter. It’ll grow faster, and it’s cheaper.”
What had happened to that little girl who ate dirt? Who’d made braids of roots, entranced by complex natural wonders? Places of terrible beauty and layered earth and buried secrets. My childhood was shouting at me: The forest is an integrated whole.
Was the root system of the aspen leaking some water into the soil for them to access?
I wondered if these tiny mushrooms might be helping not only themselves but the trees in need of water or perhaps nutrients where the trees were surviving the cold.
I knew bull riding was the most important thing for Kelly to do, in his blood as much as the trees were in mine.
This exquisite underground mushroom system sure looked like the lifeline between the tree and the precious water in the soil.
A mycorrhizal fungus formed a relationship—a life-or-death liaison—with a plant. Without entering into this partnership, neither the fungus nor the plant could survive.
A two-way exchange. A mutualism.
Mycorrhiza. How would I remember that word? Myco like fungus, and rhiza like root. Mycorrhiza was fungus root. My. Core. Rise. Ah.
Foresters hadn’t considered mycorrhizal fungi all that helpful to trees, at least not enough to teach about it, but a little thought had gone into inoculating nursery-grown seedlings with fungal spores to see if they helped the new shoots grow.
I chuckled at the humanness of this—we are always looking for the quick fix.
Litrrally the human way
encouraging the development of the
Without the saprophytes, the forest would choke from accumulated detritus, as our towns and cities would from garbage.
The mycorrhizal symbiosis was credited with the migration of ancient plants from the ocean to land about 450 to 700 million years ago. Colonization of plants with fungi enabled them to acquire sufficient nutrients from the barren, inhospitable rock to gain a toehold and survive on land. These authors were suggesting that cooperation was essential to evolution.
The dying seedlings had no mycorrhizal fungi, which meant they were not getting enough nutrients.
I was in love with forestry but furious at what was happening.
“The Coast Salish say that the trees also teach about their symbiotic nature. That under the forest floor, there are fungi that keep the trees connected and strong.”
I pulled out the trail mix, and she picked through it for the chocolate.
Moood HAAHA
What was I doing? I was in charge of an experiment that required me to kill plants, creating yet another type of displacement. My task suddenly felt contrary to all my aims.
but we needed rigorous, credible science that started with what the government believed before we could convince anyone of how to make changes.
That meant figuring out, step-by-step, how different doses of herbicide affected the seedlings and plant community. And comparing whether we should use clippers instead, or do nothing.
I devised four weeding treatments, testing three volumes of Roundup, one, three, and six liters per hectare, plus one manual-cutting application. We also added a control, where we’d leave the shrubs untouched. We needed to repeat these five treatments ten times each so we could be sure which worked best. We randomly assigned the replicated treatments, one to each of fifty circular plots.
The experimental set up
She hated killing these plants as much as I did.
It's giving me "vegan, with strong anti-animal cruelty vibes, working at a meat industry processing facility" vibe
The best treatment for making a free-to-grow
plantation turned out to be the maximum dose of poison.
I won a research grant to test whether conifer seedlings needed to connect with the mycorrhizal fungi in soil to survive.
Is connection to the right kind of soil fungi crucial for the health of trees?
The more water alder took up, the higher its photosynthetic rate and the more energy it could invest in the nitrogen-fixing process. But at the same time, the less water it would be leaving for the pine seedlings. A trade-off.
The alder was sucking up most of the water and leaving the seedlings dry.
