Hawkins: Yeah, it reminds me of recent readings in panpsychism and consciousness. Do you think trees are conscious?
Simard: I think so. I mean, we can't speak to a cat, but we know they're communicating with us. And all the creatures. It's a communication going on. And honestly, you know, the more we find out about what makes up an individual -- like, are we individuals or just actually bags of bacteria and viruses and fungi with a brain? Is that sense of individuality in our heads? I mean, even as we're talking right now from great distances apart, we're having a conversation that's together, right? It's an emergent thing. And trees are like that with the root system.
Hawkins: Your learning experience with trees as a young person on your knees examining mycorrhizal fungal networks is so much more rooted in the real and concrete than the way you describe your academic experience of trees late in the book. You write:
Somehow with my Latin squares and factorial designs, my isotopes and mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, and my training to consider only sharp lines of statistically significant differences, I have come full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: Diversity matters. And everything in the universe is connectedbetween the forests and prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all other creatures.
Good stuff.
Simard: What we really need to pay attention to is the beauty and the mystery and the cleaning of the water in the air and what makes life liveable on this planet. Yeah. And, you know, and by focusing on those reductionist things, we make so many frickin mistakes. Right. Like get rid of the weeds, these native plants. Well, that causes more diseases, you know, and also reduces carbon storage. And reduces biodiversity. And now we know those things are important.
Hawkins: Tell me about the Mother Tree Project.
Simard: You know, I did all this research, right, and there was a lot of backlash. A lot of resistance. My research was never really adopted in forestry. It still isn't. It's still work to get through to people. Clearcutting, planting like one or two species and weeding it and the whole thing, the whole shebang. I was frustrated and I wanted people to dig in to my research. It just sits there, and you can talk to the chief forester and the policymakers and say, look, look, look but they don't hear. And so how else am I going to get this information out there? I needed to write a book that everybody could look at and understand. And then they might move on it. But without a big critical mass of people saying we need to change things, we'll just go down. We'll be like lemmings going off the cliff. So, the Project and the book is a way of getting the word out.
Hawkins: Yeah, lemmings. Reminds me of George R Stewart's post-apocalyptic novel, Earth Abides. The sun also rises. We don't want to fix things. The Earth is going to go on without us and we're not going to be missed. We're just another species here and if we choose not to be symbiotic or, you know, interconnected with each other, then Earth will go on.
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