﻿Imagine you’re walking through a forest.
I’m guessing you’re thinking of a collection of trees
but a forest is much more than what you see.
Underground there is this other world,
a world of infinite biological pathways
that connect trees and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism.
Mycorrhiza literally means “fungus root.”
They’re the mushrooms.
The mushrooms are fungal threads that form a mycelium
and where the fungal cells interact with the root cells,
there’s a trade of carbon for nutrients.
The web is so dense that
there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep.
That mycelium connects different individuals
not only of the same species but between species.
We have found that mother trees nurture their young.
A mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees.
Mother trees will send their excess carbon
through the mycorrhizal network to the understory seedlings.
They even reduce their own root competition
to make elbow room for their kids.
When mother trees are injured or dying,
they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.
We’ve used isotope tracing to trace carbon
moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk
into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighboring seedlings,
not only carbon but also defense signals.
Through back and forth conversations,
they increase the resilience of the whole community.
That’s because there are many hub trees
and many overlapping networks.
So trees talk.
But they’re also vulnerable,
not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles
that preferentially attack big old trees
but high-grade logging and clear-cut logging.
You see, you can take out one or two hub trees,
but there comes a tipping point.
Because hub trees are not unlike rivets in an airplane.
You can take out one or two and the plane still flies,
but you take out one too many,
or maybe that one holding on to the wings,
and the whole system collapses.
Massive disturbance at this scale is known to affect hydrological cycles, degrade wildlife habitat,
and emit greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere,
which creates more disturbance and more tree diebacks.
We need to save our old-growth forests.
These are the repositories of genes and mother trees and mycorrhizal networks.
We need to reestablish local involvement in our own forests.
When we do cut,
we need to save the mother trees and networks
so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees.
We need to regenerate our forests with a diversity of species
and genotypes and structures allowing natural regeneration.
We have to give Mother Nature the tools she needs
to use her intelligence to self-heal.
And we need to remember that forests aren’t competing with each other,
they’re supercooperators!