Bursting the "mother tree" bubble
Why is the story of altruistic trees so attractive (and so hard for scientists to counteract)?
Last February I really disappointed my writing program classmates.
We’d gathered in poet David Beispiel’s living room in NE Portland for dinner, followed by a works-in-progress reading. There were about 15 of us, either clutching a 750-word piece printed out on paper (my generation) or on our phones (the younger set). I’d cobbled mine together at the last minute, trying to weave stories about graduate school, ideas about PhD student community, and a little plant biology into a cohesive fabric. I was too nervous to look up while I was reading, so it wasn’t until I sat down and took a few breaths that I registered everyone else’s faces.
They were frowning at me, eyebrows furrowed.
At first I figured they just saw through my crappy frankensteined story. But afterwards, as we chatted about each other’s readings while returning wineglasses to the kitchen counter and gathering raincoats, I understood. My classmates weren’t let down by my story of lounging in a naked hot spring with my professors (horrified, yes; discouraged, no). They were reacting to the science I’d included, where I’d described and debunked the “mother tree” story:
I would go on to do my PhD research on baker’s yeast, a unicellular fungus that is used by scientists around the world to ask basic questions about biology. At the same time that I was looking at pure yeast cultures, isolated on sterile petri plates, other scientists were studying the symbiotic connections between fungi and the roots of trees in the forest floor. These fungi connect the surface of plant roots to the surrounding soil, helping the plant find water and nitrogen in exchange for some sweet treats—the carbon the plant has captured through photosynthesis and turned into sugar.
And in a famous paper was more—trees can use the fine mesh of interconnected fungal cells in the soil not just as a source of water and nutrients, but as a conduit for communication and resource-sharing with each other. According to these researchers, big established trees don’t hoard resources—they share them, donate them, transfer them to trees that haven’t yet established themselves. A wonderful lesson to learn from forests!
Except that this particular lesson is more about what we want to hear than about how forest communities actually work. The traces of sugar that move from tree to tree could just as easily be stolen by the young upstarts than donated by the elders. There’s no evidence that the fungus that connects neighboring trees are actually serving as tree-internet, and it’s unclear why they would choose to do so. It turns out that the rules of evolution and natural selection can’t be ignored just to make a morality play out of our forests.
My classmates were really, really sad to hear that the story of older trees in a forest using a network of underground fungi to share nutrients with smaller trees, is, at least for now, just that—a story. They wanted to believe that trees are like a stereotypical giving mother (no, honey, serve yourself first; of course, I actually prefer burnt toast; here have my gloves, I’m not cold!). The scientist most responsible for promoting this story is Suzanne Simard, a Canadian forest ecologist who was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024.
While it remains possible that Dr. Simard’s claims are true, multiple experts in the field have been arguing that there is precious little data to support the idea, that some of these data have been misrepresented and overinterpreted, and that more research is needed to draw real conclusions that could help inform funding and policy decisions1. This kind of course-correction is a normal part of science, which often progresses through a “two steps forward, one step back” process. Lest you think those calling for caution are a minority, I’ll just mention that Justine Karst, an author of the first and most prominent critique of the mother tree story, was just elected President of the International Mycorrhiza Society (https://mycorrhizas.org/home/about-us/meet-the-executive/).
But this change in the scientific community hasn’t been reflected in popular understanding (as illustrated by the continued positive coverage that Dr. Simard gets in the popular press). While many, many articles in the public domain have tried to rectify the mother tree story2, other professional science communicators are digging in their heels3. And the public is, accordingly, not getting the message. In almost every Portland bookstore that I’ve entered, the books most commonly associated with the mother tree story (Suzanne Simard’s “The Mother Tree” and Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees”) are placed face-out and labeled as “staff picks”.
So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised at my classmate’s reaction when I burst their mother tree bubble. But I can’t stop thinking about it.
Why are we so invested in the story that stronger trees share resources with weaker trees, that the forest communicates warnings through a web of mycorrhiza, that the rule of the forest is sharing rather than competition? More generally, why are we turning to nature (and especially plants) to teach us lessons about morality and proper living?
My thoughts below, but first—what do you think? I would love your thoughts about this (please put them in the comments, or DM me!).
As for me, I’ve been wondering if the current obsession with the mother tree story might reflect a deep desire for ethical and moral guidance:
It’s nothing new for us to superimpose stories onto nature that are actually about humans (e.g. anthropomorphizing). It helps us make sense of nature and sense of ourselves at the same time. Another example is the lens of competition and domination through which we view much of plant and animal behavior. Whether we see competition or collaboration in natural beings can be a reflection of our own desires as much as a reflection of the actual plants or animals under study. The scientific community has been untangling the two, but it is exactly their interconnectedness that makes the mother tree story so powerful.
Perhaps there is something particular to these times, too. Maybe we are so attracted to the idea of trees sharing excess resources (instead of, I guess, building bunkers or riding a dong rocket into space) because capitalism has broken us so much that we are drawn to any story that promotes something else. We know that our current system of resource allocation is wrong, but what else is there? The mother tree story dovetails nicely with gendered expectations to give us an alternative.
Here’s my most uncertain take: I wonder if part of the equation is that many of us no longer get a sense of the sacred or of moral behavior from religious or governmental institutions. Stories about nature behaving in ways we admire tap into a yearning for the mystical and for the ethical, for guidelines that help us put our own egos and competitiveness into perspective. It’s reassuring to think that some part of creation behaves better than we do.
Discussion Section
Are there other times that we’ve turned to nature for moral guidance?
Do we do this with animals, or is it just plants?
If you want any of the papers below, let me know! I’ll get them to you.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36782032/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37149889/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37735061/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38152158/
This is just a smattering of the articles out there: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/23/mother-trees-and-socialist-forests-is-the-wood-wide-web-a-fantasy, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/science/trees-fungi-talking.html, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-idea-that-trees-talk-to-cooperate-is-misleading/, https://undark.org/2023/05/25/where-the-wood-wide-web-narrative-went-wrong/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/14/trees-fungi-share-messages-resources/, https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/05/18/Detangling-Debate-Wood-Wide-Web/
For some examples of a back and forth between scientists and the popular scientific press, see the links under “Lab News” at https://karstlab.ualberta.ca
I couldn’t help but think of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree when reading this. I was commissioned to create a stage script from it a few years back—the project fell through but I do remember the icky feeling that book gave me. Its message of love = basically killing oneself in sacrifice rubbed me wrong. And of course the Tree in that story is ‘she,’ the human, ‘he’ but that’s a whole ‘nother thing too, ain’t it.
I'm having the same, sad initial reaction as your writing group. But I think you're on to it with your ending, "I wonder if part of the equation is that many of us no longer get a sense of the sacred or of moral behavior from religious or governmental institutions. Stories about nature behaving in ways we admire tap into a yearning for the mystical and for the ethical, for guidelines that help us put our own egos and competitiveness into perspective. It’s reassuring to think that some part of creation behaves better than we do."
Something like..."Yes, let's be more like trees! Let's help each other!" A yearning for collaboration and co-creation. I feel that.