"I’m standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of knowledge. I think it’s so important that we all recognize this. Th

scientific world there are certain things that could kill your career, and anthropomorphizing is one of those things. But I’m at the point where it’s okay; that’s okay. There’s a bigger purpose here. One is to communicate with people, but also—you know, we’ve separated ourselves from nature so much that it’s to our own demise, right? We feel that we’re separate and superior to nature and we can use it, that we have dominion over nature. It’s throughout our religion, our education systems, our economic systems. It is pervasive. And the result is that we have loss of old-growth forests. Our fisheries are collapsing. We have global change. We’re in a mass extinction.

I think a lot of this comes from feeling like we’re not part of nature, that we can command and control it. But we can’t. If you look at aboriginal cultures—and I’ve started to study our own Native cultures in North America more and more, because they understood this, and they lived this. Where I’m from, we call our aboriginal people First Nations. They have lived in this area for thousands and thousands of years; on the west coast, seventeen thousand years—for much, much longer than colonists have been here: only about 150 years. And look at the changes we’ve made—not positive in all ways.

Our aboriginal people view themselves as one with nature. They don’t even have a word for “the environment,” because they are one. And they view trees and plants and animals, the natural world, as people equal to themselves. So there are the Tree People, the Plant People; and they had Mother Trees and Grandfather Trees, and the Strawberry Sister and the Cedar Sister. And they treated them—their environment—with respect, with reverence. They worked with the environment to increase their own livability and wealth, cultivating the salmon so that the populations were strong, the clam beds so that clams were abundant; using fire to make sure that there were lots of berries and game, and so on. That’s how they thrived, and they did thrive. They were wealthy, wealthy societies.

I feel like we’re at a crisis. We’re at a tipping point now because we have removed ourselves from nature, and we’re seeing the decline of so much, and we have to do something. I think the crux of it is that we have to re-envelop ourselves in our natural world; that we are just part of this world. We’re all one, together, in this biosphere, and we need to work with our sisters and our brothers, the trees and the plants and the wolves and the bears and the fish. One way to do it is just start viewing it in a different way: that, yes, Sister Birch is important, and Brother Fir is just as important as your family.

Anthropomorphism—it’s a taboo word and it’s like the death knell of your career; but it’s also absolutely essential that we get past this, because it’s an invented word. It was invented by Western science. It’s a way of saying, “Yeah, we’re superior, we’re objective, we’re different. We can overlook—we can oversee this stuff in an objective way. We can’t put ourselves in this, because we’re separate; we’re different.” Well, you know what? That is the absolute crux of our problem. And so I unashamedly use these terms. People can criticize it, but to me, it is the answer to getting back to nature, getting back to our roots, working with nature to create a wealthier, healthier world.

EM One of the many things I appreciated in your book was that you repeatedly said that your studies and research were proving or revealing, scientifically, what had long been held knowledge by the Indigenous peoples of the areas that you were spending time in and studying. And this kind of recognition, again, is not common in Western science. Could you speak to the importance of this acknowledgment and recognition in your field?

SS Scientists stand on the shoulders of others. The way science works is that we advance the ideas, and we do one little piece at a time. So that’s part of my recognition, but most important is that our aboriginal people were highly scientific. Their science is thousands of years of observations of the cycles of nature, the variability in nature, and working with that variability: creating healthy salmon populations. So, for example, Dr. Teresa Ryan—who started out as a postdoc student with me and is now a research associate—is a salmon fisheries scientist and is studying, along the coastline, how the salmon and the coastal nations are one together. The trees, the salmon—they all are interdependent. And the way that the Heiltsuk, the Haida, the Tsimshian, and the Tlingit worked with the salmon is, they had what are called tidal stone traps. The tidal stone traps are these huge walls that they would build below the tide line on the major rivers, where the salmon would migrate to spawn. And when the tide came in, the salmon would be passively trapped behind these stone walls. And they would throw them back on the high tide; they wouldn’t collect those salmon. But on the low tide, they would go in and passively catch the fish, and that was their harvest. But they always threw back the big Mother Fish. In so doing, their genetic stock created more large salmon. The population of salmon actually grew and grew, and in that way, they could look after their people.

The salmon and the people were one, together. As the salmon migrated upstream, the bears and the wolves would prey on them, or feed on them, and carry them into the forest, and basically the mycorrhizal networks picked up those salmon nutrients as the remains decayed, and they ended up in the trees. So the salmon nitrogen is in the trees. And these trees grew bigger—it’s like a fertilizer—and then they would shade the streams and create a more hospitable stream, with lower stream temperatures, for the salmon to migrate into. And so, in that way, all was connected together.

Much of the history is oral history, but some is written, of course. Those stories have disappeared, but they also have been saved. And I’m listening to these stories and also reading, and discovering that these connections were already known. They already knew that these fungal networks were in the soil. They talked about the fungus in the soil and how it fed the trees and how the salmon fed the trees, and they would actually take the remains and the bones of the salmon and put them beneath the trees, or into the streams, to fertilize. And so I thought, “This has always been known.” We came—colonists came in and so arrogantly dismantled a lot of those stone traps. It was against the law for them to use those stone traps. They couldn’t fish using their traditional methods, and now the modern fishery basically takes everything. The knowledge, the aboriginal knowledge systems, were ignored, even ridiculed. People didn’t believe it.

We had this arrogance, thinking that we could come in and apply this very ignorant way of managing resources with only 150 years, versus thousands of years, of observation and science. And I thought: Okay, it’s kind of strange that, here I come along, I use isotopes and molecular techniques and reductionist science, and I figure out that these networks exist in forests. I publish it in Nature. The world is like, “Wow, this is cool,” even though there were a lot of people saying, “It’s not cool.” But suddenly it’s believed because it’s Western science, published in Western journals, and it’s not aboriginal.

I understood my role in this. I was a scientist who came along and was able to build on the science of David Read, but I’m standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of knowledge. I think it’s so important that we all recognize this: that there is so much knowledge there that we’ve ignored, and that we need to manage our resources properly, and we need to listen to our aboriginal roots—the indigenous parts of us—because we all are basically, at some point, indigenous. Let’s listen to ourselves and listen to what’s known. I’m glad people are tuned in and that it’s published and it’s understood, but I also want to recognize and acknowledge that I’m standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of knowledge.

EM I guess this leads to what you could call an underlying problem of the Western scientific lens, which often discounts traditional ecological knowledge and those thousands of years of wisdom built through observing natural systems, and this model reduces the whole to its parts and then often limits the understanding or awareness of the larger interconnected and interdependent whole you’re describing.

You wrote about this, and how in the university you have been taught to take apart the ecosystem: to reduce it to parts, and study these parts objectively; and that when you followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at these pieces, you were able to publish your results, no problem, but you soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of the whole ecosystem to get into print. Now, I imagine this is starting to change and your work has helped shift that, but this seems like a huge systemic problem.

SS It is. You know, earlier in my career, I published this work in Nature, which is very reductionist, and a bunch of different journals. And at the same time, I was working with whole ecosystems, and working with my birch-fir system, and trying to publish that work, and I couldn’t get it published because there were too many parts in it. Like, “Can’t you just talk about one little part of it?” And ultimately, I felt like the reviewers couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle the bigger-picture stuff. It was way easier to pick apart this small experiment on one test subject and see that it got all the boxes of replication and randomization and fancy analysis, and then, “Oh, you can publish that, but you can’t publish this, on this complex ecosystem.”

In fact—I think I said this in the book—I got one of the reviews back, and the reviewer said, “Well, you can’t publish this. Anybody could just walk through the forest and see this stuff. No, reject.” I was so discouraged at that point, and I thought, “How do you ever publish something on the whole system?” Now it’s a little easier. You still have to have all those basic parts—randomization, replication, analysis of variants, this very simple way that we do statistics—but now there are whole fields of statistics, and a whole understanding about systems and how systems work. It’s called complex adaptive systems science, and that’s helped a lot. A lot of that has come out of a group in Europe called the Resilience Alliance, and they’ve opened the door to these more holistic ecological-economic-social integrated studies. There are whole journals now dedicated to systems science. And thank goodness. But it’s still not easy to publish these large, far-reaching, integrated, holistic papers.

And I have to say, too, in academia, you get rewarded for the number of papers that you publish. They still count the number of papers. You get more money, you get more grants, you get more recognition, especially if you’re the lead author. Then you see, in areas like microbiology or even satellite imagery and remote sensing, if you can dissect your paper in these little bits and bites and publish these small ideas and have many, many, many papers, you’re much further ahead than writing that one big, seminal paper that integrates everything together, that’s going to be really hard to publish.

And so academics do. They put them in these little bite-sized pieces. I find myself doing it too. It’s how you can survive in that environment. And so it is a self-fulfilling system of always having these little bits of papers. It’s the antithesis of holistic work. And I think that was one of the reasons I wrote this book—I’m allowed to bring it all together. So yeah, it’s an ongoing issue. It’s changing, it’s getting better, but it definitely has shaped how people view publishing, and publish, and how they design their research and how they get funding, and how science therefore advances.

EM You definitely feel as a reader, in reading your book, that you are being very free about expressing yourself. And I found that, again, very touching, because often science feels like it creates a separation, even in the language and the way that scientific papers are. When I read your paper, I’m like, “I’m not a scientist and I can understand this.” But I also felt like, “I don’t know who Suzanne is,” for instance, and I don’t really know about your personal relationship with the place that you’re studying, or what you were feeling.

But in this book, it’s different. And you wrote, “I have come full circle to stumble into some of the Indigenous ideals. Diversity matters, and everything in the universe is connected, between the forests and the prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all other creatures.” This is a very spiritual statement. And actually hearing you talk for this last hour we’ve been speaking, a lot of what you’re saying feels spiritual. It doesn’t feel like what you’d expect to be coming from a scientist. It has a different quality to it.

SS I’m so glad you got that, that you get that spirituality from the book; because I’ve stood on the edge of death and had to really examine this—because I got really sick. I’d always been very afraid of dying, and death is sort of a taboo in our culture. Nobody wants to die, but we also try to be young and alive, at least the way I grew up. It was like we were trying to pretend it didn’t exist; and that’s a problem, because one of the results of this is that we sort of shove our elders aside. I think one of the expressions is that we put them in “homes.”

And I think there is a strong place for elders and the dead, and the multiple generations coming after that. My Granny Winnie, who I talk about in the book, lives in me, and her mum, my great-grandmother Helen, lives in me as well, and I feel all that. The aboriginal people talk about seven generations before and after, and that we have responsibility to our previous and forward generations. I truly, deeply believe this. I really saw that and felt it—I learned it—when I got so sick, when I was standing on the edge of death, and my own spirituality grew immensely. And so when I talk about connection and the wood-wide web, it’s a very physical, spatial thing, but it also is through the generations.

I talked about how the little seedlings tap into the networks of the old trees, and they’re sustained and nurtured by the carbon and the nutrients coming from those old trees. That is caring for their next generations. And those little seedlings also give back to the old trees. There is a movement back and forth. And that’s a rich, rich thing. That’s what makes us whole and gives us so much—the history that we can build on, and move forward. I wanted people to understand that we have connection to our future generations. We also have a responsibility to them; we want our next generations to be healthy and thriving and loving their lives, having happy lives, not suffering and facing a bleak future.

I have children, and they worry. It’s a worry, and I imbue in them my own spirituality. I want them to have me with them as they go through and make it a better world themselves. It was such an important personal revelation for me, but I think it’s also for all of us to remember that we’re one of many generations, that we have an important role in our own space and time, and that we carry things forward and we send them on into the future.

EM You wrote very openly about your experience with cancer in the book, and it seemed to happen in parallel while you were deepening your studies about the Mother Trees. How did your understanding of the Mother Trees shift during this time as you went through this period of transformation?

SS I was listening to myself and listening to where I was at, and my research was moving along, and it was so amazing how it all worked together. But as I was facing an uncertain future, my children were twelve and fourteen at the time, and I thought, “You know, I could die.” I had a mortal disease. I wanted to make sure that I was giving them all that I could, and to make sure they were going to be safe even if I couldn’t be there—that I would still be with them even if I wasn’t physically there.

At the same time, I was doing this research on trees that were dying. And our province had undergone this massive mortality event in our forests, where the mountain pine beetle came through and killed an area of forest the size of Sweden. And so there was death all around us, and I was studying what that meant. Like, were these dying trees just dissipating into nowhere, or were they actually passing on their energy and wisdom to the next generations?

I was doing multiple experiments with my colleagues and students around this at the same time I was diagnosed with cancer. And it dawned on me that I needed to learn from my experiments, but I also had to take my personal experience and fold it into what I was studying. So I just started really directing my students and my studies toward understanding how energy and information and our learning is passed on in trees as well, and finding out, yeah, that they do this—when a tree is dying, it passes on most of its carbon through its networks to the neighboring trees, even different species—and this was so important to the vitality of the new forest. The trees were also receiving messages that increased their defense against the beetle and other disturbance agents in the forest, and increasing the health of those next generations. I measured and analyzed and saw how the forest gives forward, passes forward. I took that to my children and said, “This is what I need to do too. I’m like the Mother Tree, and even if I’m going to die, I need to give it my all, just like these trees are giving their all.” And so it all happened together, and it was so cool, I had to write about it.

EM Talking about the future, in your book, you don’t shy away from the harsh realities of climate change and the looming threats that we face. But your story and your work is also inherently hopeful: the connections you discovered, the way that the living world functions. There’s a hope in being made aware of this again. And you also say that you don’t think it will be technology or policy that will save us but, rather, transformational thinking and becoming aware of what you’ve seen: that we need to heed the answers we are being shown by the living world and acknowledge that, as you said before, we are one. Could you speak a bit more about this?

SS Yeah. Now, as I understand how ecosystems work and systems work—one of the amazing things about systems is that they’re designed to heal themselves. All these connections create wealth and health in the whole. So systems have these properties. There are emergent properties, in that you take all these parts, and out of the parts interacting in their relationships arises things like health and beauty and symphonies in human societies. And so we can have this incredible, positive emergence of these things—and tipping points as well.

A tipping point is where a system will kind of move along. It’s under different pressures and stresses, and it can start to unravel if there are lots of negative things going on. We’re seeing that with global change—some things are unraveling. It’s like taking rivets out of an airplane. If you take out too many rivets, suddenly the plane loses its wings and it falls apart and crashes to the ground. That’s a very negative tipping point. And when people think of tipping points, they think of that negative, scary thing. But tipping points also work the other way in systems, in that, as I said, systems are actually wired to be whole. They’re so intelligently designed to transmit, across systems, information and energy to keep them whole and strong. And so there are positive tipping points too. You can do simple, little things, like not driving so much and taking the bus. All of that is important.

Policies are important too: global policies that say, “We’re going to decarbonize our future. We’re going to get off fossil fuels and find alternative energy sources.” Those are all little things that are being put in place. Joe Biden is saying we’re going to have electric cars in the US within fifteen years. Those are all little policies being put in place that are going to lead to tipping points—not the negative ones but the positive ones, where suddenly the system starts to become more cohesive again, more connected, more healthy and whole.

And I think it’s really important for people to understand this, that what you do is not hopeless at all. I know that maybe I said that policies weren’t as important—they are important, but behind policies are behaviors and the way we think. And putting these things in place, suddenly the system will start to shift, and suddenly it’ll hit a tipping point and it will improve. We’ll start drawing down CO2. We’ll start seeing species coming back. We’ll start seeing our waterways clean up. We’ll start seeing the whales and the salmon coming back. But we’ve got to work; we’ve got to put the proper things in place. And it’s so heartening when you see some of those things happening. I know that that’s how we improve: small things, big things, but consistently moving it along till we get to those hopeful places, those tipping points.

EM What you’re working on now seems like it’s one of those ingredients which can help us get to that place, which is the Mother Tree Project. Could you talk about what that is and what it aims to do?

SS I had done all this basic research on connection and communication in trees, and been frustrated that we weren’t seeing changes in forest practices. And I thought, Well, I need to do something where we can demonstrate how these systems work, and also test. If we’re going to harvest trees—which we’ll continue to do; people have always harvested trees in some way and used them—I thought, there’s got to be a better way than clear-cutting our old-growth forests. It’s like clear-cutting the salmon population—it just doesn’t work. We need to leave some elders behind. We need Mother Trees to provide the genes. They’ve been through multiple climate episodes. Their genes carry that information. We need to save it instead of cutting them down and not having that diversity for the future, to help us move into the future.

The Mother Tree Project’s main goal is—how do we manage our forests and design our policies so that we have resilient, healthy forests as climate changes? And so I designed a space-for-time experiment, where I have twenty-four forests across a climate gradient of Douglas fir—the distribution of Douglas species, Douglas fir—and then harvest those forests in different ways and compare them to our standard practice of clear-cutting, leaving Mother Trees in different configurations and amounts, and seeing what the response of the ecosystem is in terms of how it regenerates: the species that come back, the natural seeding in. What happens to the carbon in those systems? Does it respond like a clear-cut, where we lose so much carbon right off the bat, or do we protect it by leaving some of these old trees? What happens to biodiversity?

So that’s what that project is doing, and it’s a huge project. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever done. I started it when I was fifty-five, and I’m thinking, “Why am I starting this at fifty-five?”—because it’s a hundred-year project. But I have so many students, from fifteen-year-olds to fifty-year-olds, coming in and working in it, and they’re the next generation to carry this experiment forward. And we’re finding out some incredible stuff. We’re finding that, when you clear-cut, you create the most risky environment—keeping in mind, clear-cutting is what we do; that’s the standard practice. But we lose a lot of carbon right off the bat, and we lose biodiversity, and we have less regeneration. The whole system ratchets down. Whereas if we leave clusters of old trees, they nurture the next generation. They keep the carbon in the soil; they keep the biodiversity; they provide the seed.

This is really cool—it shows a different way to manage forests. We call it partial cutting, when you leave old trees. To practice partial cutting, we have to change our mindset in other ways too. Our government has what’s called a cut level, an allowable annual cut, that is actually legislated and assigned. If we said, “Okay, partial cutting and leaving Mother Trees is the best way to go,” that doesn’t mean that we’d just keep the cut the same level and do more partial cutting over the landscape. That would be a disaster, too, because we would end up affecting a much bigger landscape.

What we have to do is say, “We don’t need to cut so much. We don’t need to be managing our systems so that they’re on the brink of collapse all the time.” Which is basically what that allowable cut is. It’s like, “How much can we take before we destroy the whole system?” Let’s move back and say, “Let’s take a lot less and leave a lot more behind.” And we can use partial cutting but take a lot less. Then we’re going to be on the road to recovery. That is what the Mother Tree Project is about.

I would like to see these concepts applied around the world, because this idea of elder trees and their importance in forests, it’s not just important for our temperate forests; it’s important for arboreal forests and our tropical forests too. And ancient aboriginal cultures all have this reverence for old trees. They knew the importance of them, and I would like to see people trying to use these concepts in the management of their own forests elsewhere. And that doesn’t just mean carte blanche applying it, but trying different things—the principle being that elders are important.

EM Suzanne, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today. It’s been a real pleasure to get to learn more about your work and you and your life.

SS Well, thank you, and thank you for such insightful questions. Those are really great questions.

EM Thank you, Suzanne.

SS It’s been my honor.