and they work to fend off the timber company aiming
to clear-cut this forest. Half a dozen young men and
women had greeted me on the newly blasted road
and ushered me over huge logs and deep ravines to
this wizened tree. They spoke excitedly of seeing
screech owls and of marbled murrelets nesting in
the canopy of the cedars, and pointed to specklebelly
lichens draping the smooth bark of amabilis firs.
Those birds and lichens, and many other at-risk
species, live in a community of more than 325 plants,
algae, mosses, and mammals, and untold numbers
of fungi and microbes, in the Fairy Creek watershed.
Without these trees, the defenders knew no
cubs would be born, no lichens would capture the
mountain mist, and no old-growth fungi would
link the matriarchs with their offspring. Huddled
inside the den, the defenders worried about the
impending fall rains and quietly hoped for early
snow to delay the felling.I GREW UP IN THE FORESTS of British Columbia. My
uncles and grandfather logged with horses, cutting
down trees so selectively you had to hunt to see
where they’d taken one. Grandpa taught me about
the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how
my family was knit into it.
I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. I studied
forestry and took jobs in the Canadian Forest Service
and lumber industry. Soon I was working alongside
the powerful people in charge of the commercial
harvest. But I found the extent of the clear-cutting
alarming, and I felt conflicted by my part in it. On
top of that, the spraying and hacking of the aspens
and birches to make way for the more commercially
valuable planted pines and firs were astounding.
It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless
industrial machine.
So I went back to school, and I studied forest sci-
ence. Researchers had just discovered that one pine
seedling root could transmit carbon to another
pine seedling root—but this was in the laboratory.
I wondered, Could this happen in real forests?
I thought, yes, that trees in real forests might also
share information belowground. This was contro-
versial, and some people thought I was crazy, and I
had a really hard time getting research funding. ButEXPLORE | THE BIG IDEA
This multigenerational grove
had survived millennia of climatic
variation. Its experiences were
encoded in trees’ seeds and rings,
and the information passed
from tree to tree through
belowground fungal networks.16 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC