“I struggled with anthropomorphisms”: On the Problem of Metaphors, Happiness, and Forests in <i>Finding the Mother Tree</i>

In a New York Times article on November 7, 2022, Gabriel Popkin quotes University of Alberta soil biologist Justine Karst’s concern that scientists “have become vectors for unsubstantiated claims.” More specifically, the article disputes recent claims from biology and forestry researchers that forests are not sites of competition between species and members of the same species, but, rather, that they are sites of cooperation and collaboration. This revised view of forests rests on analyses that suggest that mycorrhizal fungi in forest soils facilitate such a supportive environment. In a follow-up article in Nature Ecology and Evolution published in early 2023, Karst and collaborating scientists Melanie D. Jones and Jason D. Hoeksema further argue that research on mycorrhizal networks is now routinely subject to “positive citation bias” in spite of what they deem to be insufficient peer-reviewed evidence. Two well-known metaphors that have been gaining traction in recent years have been instrumental in the popularization of the positive citations with which these scientists are concerned. The first, connected to a 1997 article in the journal Nature, is that of the “wood-wide web,” a network systems metaphor that asserts that forests are interconnected in ways akin to the nodes that make up the Internet (Simard et al.). The second, popularized in the 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree: Understanding the Wisdom of the Forest, argues that older trees in forests function as parents—as mothers, specifically—to their offspring and to other junior specimens. Both metaphors are linked to the work of Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. Simard’s work has proven to be very successful at relaying complex scientific principles for lay audiences.1 This work is now, however, also proving to be controversial within scientific communities, as Karst, Jones, and Hoeksema demonstrate. An active debate exists about the extent to which the claims for interconnectedness and mutualism made by Simard can be backed by the scientific findings to date. What if this debate, which appears to be about soil and isotopes and carbon, is equally a literary debate about metaphors? As scholars trained in literary methods, we argue in this article that the dispute within scientific communities about the wood-wide web and mother tree may be at least as much about the choice of language that Simard and others make in conveying their research findings as it may be about the data. As scholars whose work intersects with literary studies and environmental humanities, we wish to intervene in order to detail the ways in which metaphors make a profound difference to how these scientific discussions might unfold. Our argument is not intended to oppose the use of metaphors. Such an opposition would, from a literary perspective, be absurd, given that language is inherently metaphorical. Rather, this argument analyzes the metaphors that Suzanne Simard uses in her book Finding the Mother Tree—particularly her metaphor of tree-as-mother—in order to examine these metaphors’ consequences. This argument then proceeds to worry these metaphors in order to assess the extent to which they are appropriate for generating the ecological understandings that Simard and others seek to share with popular audiences. We conclude by arguing for vigilance when making choices to convey complex scientific datasets through simplistic, if not anthropocentric, metaphors. In Finding the Mother Tree, Simard takes the reader on her journey of becoming a forest ecologist. Part memoir and part science writing, the book depicts key moments in Simard’s life, from her childhood outdoors, to her discovery of fungal networks that transfer nutrients among trees, through her battle with breast cancer, and to her creation of the Mother Tree Project. The book is replete with similes and metaphors that Simard uses to communicate complex scientific phenomena to the reader. Her research into the possibility of cooperation between fir and birch trees, for instance, dismantles “the prevailing wisdom” in forestry science and evolutionary biology “that trees only compete with one another to survive” (Simard 50). Much of the dramatic tension in the book stems from Simard’s struggle to convince the scientific community of the importance of her research. She presents the conflict between herself and the forestry community as a conflict between metaphors. Not only does Simard’s research challenge an established metaphor (that of competition), but it also provides a range of new ones that fit the findings of her research (organized around principles of cooperation). In doing so, she heralds a paradigm shift in scientific discourses about the relations between trees of different species in forest ecology. Besides the metaphor of cooperation, the similes Simard uses compare the fungal network to the human cardiovascular system (224), the Internet (225), and neural networks (228). But it is her use of the metaphor of the mother tree that provides the book with its title and drives much of the drama. It is this metaphor that we will analyze in detail. Simard is not breaking new ground in comparing trees to mothers since many cultures across the world use similar concepts. Simard notes that she is aware of how Indigenous people also see trees as people and admits to not grasping “Aboriginal knowledge fully” because such knowledge “comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from” the culture she grew up in (294). We are also aware that there is a substantial body of Indigenous nature writing that delves into the question of language and representation. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (2013) is one such recent and popular instance. In that book, which also mixes personal stories with science writing, Kimmerer uses anthropomorphic metaphors to talk about the natural world that include the language of motherhood. However, Kimmerer draws on Indigenous epistemology while Simard’s use of the anthropomorphic metaphor of the mother tree is, to quote Stella Sandford, “an expression of a primarily Western scheme of thought” (141). Sandford delineates two kinds of anthropomorphisms: one, which she terms “traditional” anthropomorphism, “projects a conception of the human onto animals and plants without the meaning of ‘the human’ or of any human traits and phenomena being put into question” while the other, which she calls “perspectivist,” “has as its basis the equivocation over ‘the human’” (149). Sandford associates the former kind with Simard’s and the latter with Kimmerer’s writing. We draw upon Sandford’s critique of anthropomorphism in Simard and extend her analysis by focusing on the transference of motherhood as a metaphor from the context of Simard’s family to her research work in our analysis below.2 Given the intimate and personal nature of Simard’s book, we would like to make it clear from the very outset, too, that our reading of Simard’s family dynamic is based on what she herself writes in the book. We do not intend to pass judgment or make inferences with regard to her personal life. 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