Last month, I read an article in the local paper about a lawsuit against the local community college. A former instructor is suing for being fired during the COVID-19 pandemic for not adhering to the organization’s policies regarding vaccination and testing. Like many employers at the time, the organization required employees to either be vaccinated or tested regularly. This person states that both of those requirements conflict with her religious beliefs. As someone who used to work in healthcare, where we could be justifiably fired for not getting the flu shot (a number of my cardiac and pulmonary patients would have died if they caught the flu), I am not sympathetic to her argument. But beyond that, the article got me wondering - what is our responsibility to one another? We don’t live in a vacuum. The choices we each make do affect others. What if that isn’t a bug, but a feature of the system?
Early in Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, she talks about research she conducted early in her career on clearcuts left by the foresting industry in Canada. After logging, companies would replant the clearcuts with a single tree species that was best suited to their own interest of harvesting a particular tree again in the future. To their surprise, the replanted clearcuts often failed to thrive and Simard’s research began to uncover why.
The logging companies assumed that the trees would grow faster in an environment where they didn’t have to compete for resources such as sunlight and water. The foresters replanted in evenly spaced rows on land that was not only cleared of the harvested trees, but also of shrubs and weeds that they thought would impede the growth of the trees. However, the trees didn’t thrive. Not only did they not thrive, many of them died. The foresters were perplexed.
Simard had a theory. She suspected that the trees prized by the loggers needed other species of trees, the shrubs, and the weeds to flourish. Through rigorous research, she discovered that her hunch was right. The seemingly unrelated plants shared resources in a manner that improved survival chances for all. Simard discovered that much of the interspecies and intraspecies communication among these trees, shrubs, and weeds happened via mycorrhizal networks. These networks of diverse fungi are the highways of the forest, shuttling food, information, and other resources along roots between different trees and plants.
Through her research, she also proved the existence of mother trees. Mother trees are “majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience”. They support the growth of younger trees, communicate about threats, and in their death, shuttle all of their remaining resources to these younger trees to increase the odds of survival. With the absence of mycorrhizal networks and mother trees, the newly-planted trees were left to try to survive on their own, something they were never meant to do.
As I learned more about the complex forest ecosystem, I couldn’t help but think of us. How here in America, we are all about rugged individualism, the hero’s journey, and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We think that we can refuse a vaccine and also refuse to be regularly tested for a deadly virus during a pandemic. We are like the foresters at the logging companies - we don’t think we need others to thrive. We think that others can thrive without us. We think we can do it (it = life) ourselves.
But looking around, it seems obvious that we’re failing. The climate is in crisis, the surgeon general calls loneliness an epidemic, and in the richest country in the world, millions of people go hungry every day. Many of our most serious systemic challenges like racism and white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, are fundamentally about hierarchy and separation. Scarcity. On a more individual level, many folks work for abusive bosses and employers, don’t have adequate childcare, and struggle with health conditions our medical system is ill-equipped to manage (it me).
At the root (see what I did there?), we need more complexity in our lives, not less. Complexity grounded in strengthening, broadening, and diversifying our communities. (Side note - when I use the word “community” here, I don’t mean the towns we live in. I am referring to the people we’re in relationship with, which may include people in our town but likely extends beyond that.) Complexity rooted in deepening our connections and increasing our reliance on one another. We fear this will make us weak, but the forest tells us otherwise.
We are not conifer seedlings planted neatly in rows three feet apart. We are conifers, and cedars, and spruce, and aspen, and alder, and huckleberry, and salmonberry, and sword fern living messily amongst one another. Whether we like it or not, our flourishing can’t be assured by ourselves alone. Collectively, we can’t survive a pandemic if everyone refuses to be vaccinated and/or regularly tested, if not for their own wellbeing, then to protect others. Our resilience in the face of all of life’s indignities - and there are so many - is is expanded when we are buoyed by community. As long as we continue to subscribe to the belief that our existence is our own individual responsibility, our suffering will persist.
Day to day, we can look for opportunities to be more connected to our people, to be the one who shares resources, and to ask for and accept support when we are the ones who are struggling. The kind of resources I’m thinking of could be money, food, or doing our part to help mitigate a global pandemic of course, but they could also be a phone call, a card in the mail, a text, an email, lunch or coffee, putting down the phone at dinner, a book recommendation, basically anything that sends a tiny message of joy, of friendship, of connection. Anything that reinforces the networks bonding us to each other.
And when it comes to our biggest challenges such as racism or transphobia, I think that the small steps we each take towards strengthening the networks connecting us to our communities, expanding our communities, and increasing our reliance on one another is part of the antidote. In a healthy forest ecosystem, toxic plants and infections are managed and kept at bay naturally. A thriving forest doesn’t need Roundup.
In Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things, she often closes an episode with “the next right thing”. If this newsletter had “a next right thing” it would be in the form of a next right question: what is one small step you can take today, maybe even right now, to reinforce a connection to one person in your community? Take a few minutes and do it.
Until next time,
Kim
Kim! I loved this piece so much and it has me thinking about the theory of surviving and thriving individually and collectively. The language of trees is so vast and so researched and yet, I feel like we've only touched the surface on what they have to tell and teach us. Anyway, it was really comforting for me today to read something like this from someone I know and respect. Thank you!