On trees, quantum physics and decolonising science
Over the weekend I listened to an interview with Suzanne Simard in the Emergence Magazine Podcast from 04 February 2025. It was a great reminder of how her work had moved me when I read “Finding the Mother Tree” during the first lock down.
Through her research and publications we have begun to understand and respect that trees communicate with each other, share knowledge and intelligence through their root networks but also exchange nutrients that help each other’s growth. And this can happen across different tree species.
Suzanne Simard’s discoveries fundamentally challenge white supremacy capitalist culture’s deep believes that are like brambles (if you don’t keep them in check all the time they can happily grow across and cover garages, sheds and walls and swallow them under a mess of thorny branches):
in particular scarcity culture, individualism and competitiveness as the only ways to relate and survive. From her book I got a renewed belief in cooperation, collectivism and spirituality and their place in everything. And a respect for the much older, indigenous knowledge systems – tree knowledge, salmon knowledge, bear knowledge – especially in colonised spaces that have separated spirituality out of rational, evidence based thinking (which is still valued as superior to any other form of knowledge in our white supremacy capitalist system).
“I imagined the flow of energy from the Mother Trees as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child. I knew that power in myself even before I’d uncovered these forest conversations. I’d felt the energy of the maple tree in my yard, flowing into me... sensing that magical, emergent phenomena when we work together, the synergy that reductionist science so often misses, leading us to mistakenly simplify our societies and ecosystems” (pp 287/288 in “Finding the Mother Tree”)
When I listened to the podcast I also suddenly realised, that Suzanne Simard essentially describes the Quantum View in this podcast and through her work: the way that diversity and connectivity, complexity and interconnectedness, competition, cooperation and support all exist at once are equally important. “Plants are attune to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. A balance that can also be achieved … in the complex society of ants. There’s grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals. We can find this in ourselves, in what we do alone, but also in what we enact together. Our own roots and systems interlace and tangle, grow into and away from one another and back again in a million of subtle moments” (p179/180 Finding the Mother Tree).
The other thing I was also reminded again when listening to her interview is how very cautiously and only towards the end of her book and the podcast she starts to name the system that has powerfully suppressed and destroyed the very knowledge that she is now famous for – aboriginal people have known about the intelligence of trees and the complexity of their place as a key partners in everyone’s survival for a very long time. She eventually acknowledges that she "stands on the shoulders of those scientific insights" that were ridiculed by "the coloniser" and then outlawed.
And maybe that’s where others need to pick up the baton from her – maybe her role was to uplift this ancient knowledge into scientifically validated and respected epistemology. And with her persistent searching and questioning (the destruction and destabilisation of acres and acres of forests for the benefit of the industry) while being ridiculed, threatened, discouraged, she kept going with humility and a growing conviction in the need to disrupt white supremacy science and colonial practice.
