The Ancient Wisdom of Trees
On Saturday afternoons in the fall millions of Americans are glued to their television sets watching college football. Then on Sunday, of course, it’s pro football. Back in the 1950s and early 60s, while football was certainly popular, baseball was America’s game. Basketball, too, has played a prominent role in sports entertainment. The truth of the matter is, Americans are addicted to competition, regardless of the venue—stadium, race track, boxing ring, arena, or wherever there is a contest between opposing teams or individuals.
Competition is part of America’s DNA. Americans love to compete, to test skills against an opponent, to score the highest grade in class, to run faster than anyone else or sell the most cars in a month. Our love of competition has certainly contributed to America’s success in science, technology and medicine, and has produced an economy that is the envy of the world.
As our country prepares to elect a new president and Congress in just a week’s time, I have been thinking about the place of competition in our country. There is little argument that competition has played a pivotal role in helping our country achieve greatness, but is it possible that there are times when competition needs to be put aside, when it can actually do more harm than good?
During my senior year in high school our football team was highly rated. A few sport’s writers even projected that our school might compete for a State Championship. We had several college prospects on the team, and there was a great deal of anticipation for the season.
But our team had a fatal flaw. There were four or five individuals, really excellent players, who had a hard time putting the team first. Instead of viewing competition as a way to make themselves and their teammates better, they competed for press clippings or to gain the favor of their sweetheart. As the season wore on, their lack of cooperation with the rest of the team created dissension and eventually the team lost games it should have won. In short, these individuals weren’t team players. Instead of reaching our potential, our team got knocked out in the first round of the playoffs.
What might have been an exceptional season turned into a disappointing one. We had too many players who were unwilling to put aside their own agendas and cooperate with the rest of the team.
If we’re not careful, competition, without cooperation, can blind us from reaching our ultimate goal. In order to achieve excellence, sometimes it is better to cooperate than to compete.
I read a fascinating book recently by Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree that helps illustrate this point in a remarkable way. Simard is a professor of forest ecology in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry. She has spent her entire life studying the Canadian forests. Her book is a mixture of scientific information coupled with stories of her childhood. She was raised by parents, grandparents and great grandparents who were loggers in the Canadian forests. She knows her subject well, both from an academic perspective, having spent years in research, as well as from personal experience, having spent her life observing how forests survive and thrive.
Simard has discovered that forests, especially trees, have much to teach human beings about cooperation. She writes that forests are made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to the earth. While I have always had a love for trees, I never thought of trees in such sentient terms before I read Simard’s book. Trees, according to Simard, can sense their surroundings, the other trees around them, the seedlings struggling to live beneath them, and mushrooms and other organic material that mutually cooperate with the trees, helping to sustain both.
When commercial logging companies cleared large expanses of forests and then planted new seedlings, Simard was curious as to why newly planted young trees often failed to thrive. She observed that, “The replanting was supposed to heal what we’d taken, and we were failing miserably” to create new forest growth. In the cleared forest, the seedlings often shed yellow needles because they were starving for something.
What the young trees were starving for was the nurture and care of “Mother Trees,” the largest and oldest of the trees in the forest. When the selected forest area had been cleared, all the trees had been taken. Through her years of forestry study, she became convinced that if “Mother Trees” are left standing in the otherwise cleared forest, they in turn could help nourish the saplings. The younger trees need the older trees to survive. The trees and vegetation actually cooperate with one another to sustain the forests.
Simard’s research revealed that trees organize into complex community structures that promote the fitness of the entire group. During different parts of the year trees form symbiotic relations with other species of trees and through these relationships are able to share resources and information to survive. Birch and fir trees work together, for example, in ways that allow both to thrive. In times of drought, older trees help young trees by passing them water through the root grafts, without which the younger trees would die. This cooperation is known to ecologists and environmental scientists as biodiversity.
As I read Simard’s book, I thought that America needs to learn from the world of nature that sometimes cooperation is more important than competition. My hope is that after this election our politicians will place competition on the back burner and cooperate with one another for the greater good. Our country is far more than the sum of its parts. Whatever political party controls the branches of government after the election, they would be wise to learn how forests not only survive, but thrive. After all, aren’t we all starving for something? There is much wisdom to be gleaned from the forests.
