The Trees Are Speaking

Biologist Teresa Ryan has seen a lot of clear-cuts and loaded logging trucks. But this trucker was hauling logs down the mountain outside the remote logging outpost of Woss, British Columbia, cut from trees so large the tractor trailer could carry only a few.

“It’s so sad. I just feel heartbreak, like a piece of me just went down the mountain,” said Ryan, whose traditional name is Sm’hayetsk, as the logging truck roared past her. “The ancestors are there. We actually used to put our people in the trees,” she said, speaking of traditional burial practices of the Gitlan of the Tsimshian Nation.

Ryan explained that her ancestors put the remains of their people in bentwood boxes and hoisted them into trees, into the life of the forest. So when she said the ancestors were in those trees, just cut from the mountain where they had lived for centuries, she meant it literally.

Ryan is an Indigenous knowledge and natural science lecturer in the Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. I had joined her and Suzanne Simard, an eminent forest ecologist and professor in the same department at UBC, in these woods for a week of fieldwork.

It took 12,000 years to make this [soil], and we have lost it in a snap of a finger.”

Ryan and Simard had gone out on this logging road to find their crew. But right now, that was out the window. They had to go see the clear-cut those logs had come from. Ryan jumped in Simard’s battered field truck, and I squeezed into the back seat with their clipboards, batteries, and gear for sampling and measuring trees. Simard bucked the truck up steep, rugged slopes to reach the top of the cut and killed the engine. We got out and looked around at the cutover land, bare and baking in the July sun. A grapple skidder awaited the next day’s haul of logs, and sawdust lay fresh over the ground.

“This kind of machinery is devastating to the forest floor,” Simard said, eyeing the carved-up ground, rutted and scraped to mineral soil. “And we are left with that. There is no carbon left, it’s gone, and it’s never coming back. It took 12,000 years to make this, and we have lost it in a snap of a finger.” The air smelled sharply of ground-up fir needles.

“You can’t stop it, these trees are already down,” Ryan said, assessing the stumps, slash, and logging debris. “It was coming straight at me,” she said of the logging truck. “All I could see was big logs. They were so huge.” This cut was not exceptional; as we walked to the top of the cutover hilltop and took in the landscape around us, we saw logging roads tracing through a maimed landscape into the far distance, mangy with clear-cuts so large they covered entire mountainsides.

“It’s a tree hearse,” Simard said of the logging truck, as we walked back to her truck. “We are down to the last drops. It’s a fucking graveyard out here. These are some big trees. They were,” she said, correcting herself. “There is nothing we can do. I know we can’t save every tree. But we have to do a better job. We are going to need wood, but it should not be the old-growth. That was all cedar. It just makes me feel sick. And the fact we have seen it, day after day after day, all over the country, I’m sure those trees are a thousand years old. People grow so numb to it, we all are.”

Ryan gathered a scarred piece of wood from the ground as we walked back to the truck. “We’ve got to burn this, to honor the spirits. Honor the ancestors,” she said. As we headed down the mountain, a distant rumble filled the air. “Here comes another,” Simard said, yanking the wheel to pull over to get out of the way of the log truck. After it passed, as we descended the mountain, ravens were circling and calling.

“Stop,” Ryan said. “Stop right now.” Simard jerked the truck to a halt, and the ravens’ calls filled the still air. “They are crying, their home is being taken,” said Ryan, who is of the Raven Clan. “Their nest trees are being destroyed. That is the mom. That is the baby. She’s in shock.”

We just sat for a minute, quiet. Then Simard started back down the logging road, jouncing over the ruts. “It’s so disrespectful to the mountain, it puts the mountain to shame. Our shame,” Simard said, gathering speed past a numbered sign for the logging road. It was riddled with bullet holes. We made the long, bouncing drive down to the valley bottom, where we hoped to rendezvous with their crew, in silence.

Called the Mother Tree crew, this was a team of researchers Simard had assembled in 2015 for a research project creating a time sequence of the amount of carbon stored in these clear-cuts—in the first pass, the second pass, every time the loggers came back. They wanted to learn, through analysis of the soil and its layers, the toll taken by each cut, compared to the original soil baseline condition.

“It shifts down, and down and down, they will come back and plant it, and it will come back to that pale green, impoverished condition, a second-growth stand, with no variety in the canopy,” Simard explained. It was soil that started her career, and now soil that had made her internationally famous, as the author of the bestseller Finding the Mother Tree, which tells the story not only of Simard’s scientific work but also her struggle to overcome skepticism of her findings.

Simard’s lab explores the role of mycorrhizal fungi in connecting trees, one to the other, sharing nutrients and communication, all around hubs of the largest trees she dubs “Mother Trees.” When her work was published in the journal Nature and popularized by the press as the “Wood Wide Web,” likening the networks to the internet, Simard was suddenly an internationally famous scientist.

Simard, who had labored in obscurity and hostility from industry and even her own colleagues, was a sensation, with millions of views on her TED Talks and a crush of media attention. She bore the attention stoically, doing interview after interview for the sake of the forest—which, even as her notoriety grew, was still being cut down.

Protests during the summer of 2021 against one logging operation, near Fairy Creek at the south end of Vancouver Island, sparked the largest civil disobedience in modern Canadian history, with more than a thousand arrests of protestors trying to blockade the logging roads.

They dug trenches in the dirt logging roads cut into the sides of remote mountains. Locked themselves to concrete blocks, and erected platforms in the middle of logging roads they then locked themselves to. They camped in the canopy of towering firs. They hiked miles to the leading edge of the cut, where the loggers were dropped off by helicopter for their daily work—amid protesters leaping from the understory blowing air horns. They wrote peace signs on the cut stumps with fresh sawdust, scooped from scarred ground next to gas cans left by the loggers for the next day’s cutting.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, backed by the courts, hauled away the protestors. The logging continued—but the provincial government of British Columbia was beginning to talk about deferring logging in some areas, with the effect of spurring even more logging. “They are cutting it faster and faster,” Ryan said. “They’ve got to get it quick before it’s locked up forever, they are cutting hill after hill. It’s apocalyptic.”

Simard bumped over more logging roads until we saw the crew’s work trucks. We parked and headed into the forest. We hopped from piece to piece of downed logs over inky-black mud in a fructifying bog at the edge of the road, following a faint trace of the crew’s path. In here, the light was soft, the ground even softer, and it was cool, even on this blazing July day.

Fallen logs were crumbling back into the earth, where they started as seedlings centuries ago. The logs were soft to the touch and furry with moss. Lush lichen grew over them, leafy as lettuce. The sunlight diffused through needles of hemlock and fir, and long shafts of gold, late-afternoon summer sunlight found canopy gaps and gilded the forest floor. Far above, a breeze was stirring green branches across the blue of the sky. Simard had found her research crew, measuring giants in this old-growth stand. It was day’s end and time to wrap up. When they had gathered their equipment, we headed back to camp.

Mak’wala (the traditional name of Rande Cook) gathered us nightly in a circle after a camp dinner to reflect on the work underway. He is an artist and hereditary chief for the Ma’amtagila, one of the 18 tribes of the Kwakwaka’wakw whose territory reaches from northern Vancouver Island southeast to the middle of the island and includes smaller islands and inlets of Smith Sound, Queen Charlotte Strait, and Johnstone Strait.

In 2022, Cook had invited Simard and other scientists, artists, filmmakers, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and writers including myself to the second annual Tree of Life Project, for a weeklong exploration of the old-growth forests in Kwakwaka’wakw territories. Founded by Cook as the Awi’nakola Tree of Life Foundation, he partnered with Simard from the start. He saw parallels between his people’s understanding of the connections between all living things and her work focusing on healing damaged forests. The goal on this trip was to share both new and ancient ways of understanding the land, and to directly experience together the impact of industrial logging on the land, water, and Native cultures.

“Right now this is really about the next 100 years,” Cook said in camp that first night. “That 100 years doesn’t belong to us. In a very short amount of time, the amount of damage we are doing is irreversible.” It was time, he said, for a societal shift from devastation to regeneration.

Simard’s goals were in alignment with Cook’s: to use Indigenous, scientific, and artistic knowledge to understand and heal the forest. In her Mother Tree Project based at UBC, Simard and her team were assessing the biological and ecological status of clear-cuts, comparing their soils with what they found in intact old-growth forests, to get a sense of a baseline condition. They were like arboreal ambulance chasers, trying to stay one step ahead of the logging crews, searching out the last of the unprotected old-growth in these lush river valley bottoms, hurrying to learn what they could of what intact old-growth forests look like and how they function before they are gone.

This land is hardly a forest at all anymore; it is a manufacturing plant for timber products.”

“We are trying to find old-growth in these ravaged landscapes; all we find are rare patches, scraps perched on cliffs,” Simard said as we drove to the day’s research site—the places the day-trippers and vacationers to Vancouver Island rarely see. “We will never know what we have lost. We are at a point in history where we can never understand what we once had. But there are still clues—what seeds are buried in the ground, what soils—that is what we are doing, trying to reconstruct what is there, so we can heal these landscapes.”

This is the Vancouver Island off the main highway, with its beauty strip hiding the views of the cutover slopes and valleys. We were in a hub of logging roads, logging signs, clear-cuts, loading areas, and equipment yards. This land is hardly a forest at all anymore; it is a manufacturing plant for timber products, with remnant old-growth stands amid a sea of industrial tree farms on their third cutting.

It is the nature of her work that Simard has to drive through active logging areas to access her research plots. As we drove on, dust boiling behind us, the caravan of research trucks and the Tree of Life crew ground to a halt: There was a chain across the road. “Active Logging Area” read the sign on the chain. We smelled it before we saw it: the unmistakable odor of ground-up, freshly cut trees.

“Those are old-growth trees,” Simard said, glancing at logs piled by the side of the road, on the other side of the chain. She swung out of the truck to talk to the logging crew, to explain she needed them to let her and the rest of the crew pass. After a brief conversation Simard returned, dropped the cable to the ground, and the procession of vehicles drove through. We regrouped by the piles of logs heaped by the road to be taken away for milling. The cuts were fresh, weeping sap. The bark was still fragrant, the wood moist to the touch.

“I’m just numb,” said Cook. Logged on his people’s unceded territory—a 500,000-acre swath of Vancouver Island. This displacement of his people from their lands, of the trees from their land, of the wildlife from their forest, continues the legacy of settler colonialism, Cook said.

“Nothing has changed since the beginning,” he said. “Those policies are designed for these actions to happen, and for us to say something, we are the criminals, we are the disrupters. We are so conditioned by society to say, This is okay, we support this. I need an extension on my nice home. Why do you guys get in the way, why are you so disruptive?”

Cook said he formed the Awi’nakola Tree of Life Foundation out of desperation and as a matter of cultural survival. “We are watching our own traditional territory be wiped out, demolished; we are down to the last 2.7% of old-growth, we have got to get it all, it’s sick to me. I think more and more it’s like a panic, that we are getting closer and closer to having nothing.”

But he wonders, “Who are we without our forests? How can we carry on if we don’t have this connection to this land that’s at my absolute core? It’s severing our tie. Culture is not a performance, it’s connection. That is how it is in our culture. We can’t just sing and live disconnected in order for there to be new songs, for it to be a living culture.”

We kept going, to get into the uncut forest, to lay out some sample plots and dig. Simard led the way, walking right over the ridge on the opposite side of the road from the heaped old-growth logs into the trackless deep forest beyond. The steepness of the slope to the valley floor did not slow her. She was headed with her sampling crew to a place the maps showed should have what she called “the white rhino of the forest”: enormous, untouched old-growth forest, reigning supreme for centuries deep in the heart of the Tsitika valley. Unprotected yet still uncut.

We made our way across downed logs over streams, through bogs, the islands of forest floor in between the muck carpeted with sphagnum moss. The coolness coming off the Tsitika River reached us before we found the trees. Even on this hot mid-July day, it was so cool in the shade of giant hemlocks and Douglas firs we kept our coats on. But the sun found us too, aglow through gaps in the canopy where bigleaf and vine maple surged into the light. A goldfinch spangled in the sun, a brilliant yellow flash amid the river’s sparkling blue.

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Excerpted from The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches From the Salmon Forests by Lynda V. Mapes with permission from the University of Washington Press.