The Forest That Shares

The trees figured it out first.

Suzanne Simard has spent three decades documenting what happens underground in forests, and the findings remain stubbornly difficult to absorb: trees don't compete the way our models assume they should. They share. Specifically, they share carbon, water, phosphorus, and nitrogen through mycorrhizal fungal networks — the so-called "wood wide web" — with a preference for their own kin, but also with strangers, with dying neighbors, with the whole tangled community of roots and fungi that connects a forest floor.

The absurdity compounds quickly. A mother tree — Simard's term, not a metaphor she's walking back — recognizes her own seedlings and routes them extra resources. Trees under pest attack signal through the network; nearby trees preemptively ramp up their chemical defenses. When a tree dies, it releases a pulse of carbon into the system — a last gift to whatever survives it.

We spent centuries constructing economic frameworks, social hierarchies, and philosophical arguments around the premise that competition is the engine of life — that the individual fights for its own survival, that cooperation is either strategy or sentimentality. Meanwhile, beneath every forest we've ever walked through, the trees were running something that looks like a welfare state. No central authority. No contracts. Just fungal threads and chemical signals and the slow, patient logic of a system tested across geological time.

Simard's work keeps meeting resistance partly because the findings challenge something that feels structural to biology — and to self-conception. What does it mean that the "individual" tree is already a collective? The visible trunk is partnered, below ground, with fungal networks spanning hectares. The boundary of the organism turns out to be negotiable. The self is partly a story we tell when we can't see the roots.

This is the part worth sitting with: we kept looking for meaning in the heroic individual organism — the fittest survivor, the winning competitor — and the actual machinery of forest survival was running cooperative infrastructure the whole time. The trees weren't paying attention to our theories. They were busy sharing.

There's something clarifying in the scale of it. A tree, like you, is a pattern maintaining coherence through constant exchange with everything around it — not a sealed, sovereign unit. The fungus knew this before the tree. We're catching up, standing on the forest floor, noticing the ground has been alive in ways we didn't think to look for.

Simard's research suggests that mother trees — the oldest, most connected nodes in a forest network — function as hubs. Cut them down and the network degrades. The forest doesn't just lose a tree; it loses infrastructure. The practical implication is blunt: old-growth forests aren't carbon sinks or lumber inventory. They're networks with topology, with nodes that matter more than others, with fragility in specific places. Clear-cut the hubs and something is lost that decades can't restore.

The stranger implication is the one that won't let go. The forest is a mind in some loose, extended sense — not conscious (probably), but a distributed information-processing system with memory, signaling, and adaptive response. It learns. It maintains coherence across a vast, decentralized structure with no executive function.

It's been doing this since before animals had eyes.

The universe keeps building the same things in different materials: networks, distributed processing, cooperative resource sharing, nodes and edges and signals propagating through a medium. We built the internet and thought we'd invented something. The forest nodded, very slowly, from somewhere around 450 million BC, and kept doing what it was doing.

Terror and wonder are the same sensation with different soundtracks. Stare at a forest floor long enough and you'll feel both.

i · sources

• Suzanne Simard on the Wood Wide Web, Connectedness, and Avatar — New Scientist, 2024