The Forest is Full of Socialists Dec. 13, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
I have two points to make today. The first is very practical and the second is deeply philosophical. The first is that by paying attention to science, especially in forest management, we can increase the profitability of our natural resources while sustaining our old growth forests which is good both for people in the construction business as well as for people who breath air. The philosophical point is important, but you’ll have to be patient with me to sus it out. For most of modern history, we have assumed a Darwinian competition in nature and economics which pits individuals and species in a life-or-death competition for resources that allows the victors to survive by killing off rivals. Like many such assumptions, you can point to evidence because it is partly true, but it is not entirely true and in fact, it is a crucially flawed assumption. But let me start with a conversation about forests.
Do you remember the 2009 blockbuster film, Avatar? Sure, the 3-D technology was amazing. The blending of CGI images with actual filmed actors was state of the art, and even the whole, space travel, sci-fi nature of it, that would normally have me in a theater seat watching it several times in a row didn’t redeem this film for me because, in spite of spending record setting amounts of money, $237 million, to produce it, it seemed to me that they had forgotten to hire a writer.
They had three dimensional images, but the characters were so two dimensional and the plot was so predictable that if it had not been for the popcorn, it would have been a waste of money. The intent was to contrast capitalist consumerism with the sacredness of nature.
The plot seems to be a 3 hour long rendering of Dr. Seuss’ book, The Lorax. But, if I may set my role as movie critic aside for a moment, I will have to say that there was a certain redemptive aspect to the too thin plot. In its enthusiasm for accentuating the sacredness of nature, it portrays all of the distant planet’s flora and fauna to be somehow neurologically connected with a single great mother tree which seems to retain the voices of generations of natives and to possess profound healing properties.
But what is really weird about this terribly anthropomorphic plot line is that it contains a shocking amount of truth to it. As a spiritual community, one of the things that we are passionately concerned about is the health of our planet, about restoring and preserving the health of our ecology, but it is one of the most difficult things to discuss in church. But, as I have read about this work with forests, it increasingly seems to me, that we’re really talking about people.
It turns out that beyond the philosophical statement that “we’re all connected” and that flora and fauna are also connected, it seems that trees quite literally communicate with one another. Please don’t think that I am saying that they “talk” to each other. They are not all Ents out of the Lord of the Rings, but they do communicate.
Suzanne Simard, the Canadian professor of forest ecology, has demonstrated that the roots of trees combine symbiotically with fungal threads that stretch from tree to tree, even between species of trees, and that through this web of threads, trees communicate with each other, and more than that, they can share carbon and water with one another. Her TED talk on this topic is well worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch . . . 4.5 million people are probably not wrong.
A lot of pseudo-science has tried to appropriate Simard’s legitimate research the way a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than for illumination. So, you have to be careful here when you are reading environmental science.
There have been best-selling books published that take Simard’s legitimate research and combine it with their over active imagination and probably some Ouija board sessions, claiming that trees have souls and that plants feel pain and follow the stars. Let’s not be sentimental or mushy about this. There is serious science here.
But the part of this that is both surprising and very important is that trees are communicating to both ask for and share resources and to warn one another about dangerous illness or insects. Again, don’t try to make them people. They are not talking in that way, but they are chemically communicating in ways that knit the forest together, defying our assumptions about the universal natural value of greed and self interest.
Forests are resources for people, of course. We use wood to build houses and to make furniture. And because different kinds of wood have different properties that make them more or less valuable in building houses or making furniture, we have tended to manage our forests in a way that gives us the quickest return on investment, what the lumber industry calculates in board feet taken from an acre of woods. For most of human history we have done this by clear cutting forests although, as in the Brazilian rain forest right now, an especially crazy president is simply burning forests down to use the land for grazing and agriculture.
But in the United States and Canada, where so much of our forests have been clear cut, the timber industry wants to come back in and plant new trees to eventually replace the ones they had taken. But here is where Suzanne Simard’s research has been especially helpful: they discover that the saplings planted in a clear-cut forest, even though they are no long competing for sunlight and water, are actually weaker and more subject to diseases than the saplings growing up in an old growth forest.
This is counter intuitive. Saplings carefully planted where they get full sun and lots water should be in much better shape. They don’t have to compete with big old trees for resources. But it turns out that it doesn’t work that way.
At the risk of sounding a little too much like Avatar, she demonstrated that the older, healthier trees, sent nourishment to the weaker saplings. The floor of the forest is a network of communication between plants that will both inform and nurture one another, even at the expense of their own needs. The stronger, healthier trees work to nurture the weaker, younger trees in ways that fly in the face of our assumptions about competition in nature. The forest eco system is quite complex. Competition does exist there, but it would not be entirely mistaken to characterize a forest as a kind of socialist society in which those with the greatest resources support those that are in the greatest need.
We have assumed that trees were naturally competing for sunlight, nutrients, and water, but it turns out to be more complicated than that and, in fact, there is what amounts to a kind of practical altruism within the forest community.
Thank you for bearing with me up to this point, I know that I am punching above my weight class here, but stick with me: When Darwin was working out his theory of evolution based on survival of the most adaptive, the natural selection of the strongest and most healthy specimens in nature, economists were well ahead of him describing human economic culture in about the same way.
We have tended to accept that competition for resources is what has made humans stronger and smarter and that is why we are here and our ape like ancestors are not.
In fact, if you Google Adam Smith and Charles Darwin you will find a number of scholars who will tell you, way more than you want to know, about how dependent Darwin was on the writing of the economist, Adam Smith. We have accepted, almost uncritically, the assumption that humans, plants, and animals all evolve in a ferocious competition for resources and that survival depends on being the bully on the playground the way a Wall Street economist will take a Darwinian approach to capitalism . . . where the strongest and the most adaptive survive.
Without throwing any shade on either Smith or Darwin, I think that Suzanne Simard’s work asks us to at least make room for a certain degree of “both/and.” There is ferocious competition for resources both in economics and in evolution but there is also, just beneath the leaves covering the forest floor, a socialist network that says that we are all stronger and healthier when we work together.
In fact, Ferris Jabr, with the New York Times, illustrates this “both/and” dichotomy in a piece he wrote on Simard by talking about the quarter million-acre forest in northeast Wisconsin managed by the Menominee tribe. To you and me, it would look like unspoiled old growth forest, but it is actually carefully managed for harvesting usable wood. But they protect the healthiest trees, allowing them to grow for up to 200 years as a kind of grandmother tree to the younger part of the forest.
They harvest the trees that are the least healthy, and even still, over the past century and a half, they have harvested more than 2 billion board feet of lumber from a forest that has that much still standing. This makes it one of the most financially profitable lumber operations in North America while managing the forest in the most sustainable way imaginable.
If this forest were clear cut, there would be a huge amount of money to be made immediately, but you would be destroying a socialist commune that is literally a cash cow over the generations. All the while, the forest is sequestering harmful carbon in the ground, manufacturing breathable air in its canopy, and holding soil in place while naturally cleaning and storing water.
What we see in clear cut forests, what we are seeing in the burning of the Amazon, is a real history illustration of the old parable about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is not that capitalism is always evil or that socialism never works, it is that careful, intelligent management, combining the two ways of understanding the world, makes both systems work better.
We get into this conservative-liberal debate in which we liberals think that conservatives want to roll back every environmental regulation until there isn’t any breathable air or drinkable water left on earth, and conservatives think that liberals want to hold up all economic progress until the earth looks like one giant jungle, denuded of all human life.
There is, however, a both/and way of letting capitalism inspire progress through competition while preserving our economic engine through sustainable management of our forests and all other natural resources.
Liberals want to live in houses and have nice furniture too, we just don’t want to clear cut the globe in a way that will keep our children and grandchildren from having houses and furniture. By limiting the amount of fish we take out of the ocean, we can make certain that there will always be fish to catch in coming generations. By managing our rivers and aquifers, by protecting our air, we not only are preserving our environment, we are preserving our markets to make them safe for capitalism. Sadly, however, in our partisan nation, it seems like the trees are communicating with one another better than Republicans and Democrats are communicating.
Yes, from a spiritual perspective, from a purely ethical consideration, I believe that our rich nation should have a living wage as an income floor for everyone.
I believe that healthcare is a human right that should not be denied to anyone. And I believe that education costs should be such that the children of the poor have a fair shot at a good education so that the economic classes in America don’t become set in cement.
But, for capitalists, do you know what is good for business? Having customers who have enough money to buy stuff from you. You know what is good for employers? Having employees who are healthy enough to come to work. Do you know what is good for the tech and economic industries? Having employees with enough education to put their dreams and aspirations onto paper or in the laboratory where you can make two or three or four working vaccines within a year of the appearance of a novel coronavirus. These miracles don’t happen by accident.
When the stronger trees feed and nurture the weaker trees, the whole forest gets stronger. People are, in the end, not much different than the trees. Forgive the gender specific quote, but the truth is, we are our brother’s keeper.
