A noted UBC forest ecologist conveys her infectious enthusiasm for the outdoor life and the scientific study of forests as she relates her discoveries in this unassuming and delightful autobiography. The very misogynist culture of the forestry industry was late in accepting the validity of randomized controlled trials, and, in the early 1990s refused to accept results of her experiments with these, which contradicted old conventional wisdom, and implied that their methods of forest management were doing massive needless harm to the forests and to the broader battle to combat global warming.
Using modern scientific methods, she almost singlehandedly proved that trees communicate with each other, provide mutual aid in times of stress and that the communication is mediated in large part through vast networks of underground fungi of many different types. Later experiments with numerous collaborators that she does not hesitate to acknowledge showed that the communication is not limited to trees of the same species and is often similar to neural networks in our brains, but perhaps even more complex. Both neural networks and mycorrhizal (fungal) networks transmit information molecules across synapses. Dying mother trees selectively send nutrients through the mycorrhizal network to her offspring. Douglas firs in a mixed forest even warn adjacent ponderosa pine trees of an impending pine beetle infestation, allowing them to up-regulate the genes of their defensive mechanisms!
The scientific methods used are described in language that should not be difficult for anyone with a high school education in biology to understand. The stories of discoveries are interspersed with personal details of her life that are variously comic or tragic; her persistence in seeking scientific truths in the face of fierce dogmatic opposition is admirable.
The author is the clear model for Richard Powers’ Dr. Deborah Westerford in his delicious novel, The Overstory. Her extensive research with far reaching implications is worthy of the Nobel prize that she will never get because of the powerful vested interests of the financially lucrative logging industry.
A must-read for anyone remotely interested in almost any branch of science, and our coexistence with other life forms. You will never walk through a forest again and not recognize the connectedness of all life after reading this story.
Thanks,
Alana.
The Passionate Reader 