Wood Wide Web

Robert Frost begins his poem Birches:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

I loved to climb trees as a kid.  I’d climb as high as I could until the branch bent under weight, threatening to break and throw me back down to earth.  

Did you know that trees can actually move resources and share them with struggling, weaker or dying trees; even trees of different species thanks to a common fungi?  

When Birch tree saplings were “weeded out” of reseeded forests that had been clear cut, a curious thing happened.  The Douglas Fir saplings that were being replanted, deteriorated and then died prematurely.   

Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard began to ask the question, why?  She came to believe that these Birch trees weren’t “competing” with the Douglas Firs for the soils precious nutrients, but quite the opposite; that somehow they were helping not hindering the firs, so she decided to investigate.

It turns out that that a common fungi that had previously been considered harmful to plants was actually existing in a subtle mutualism.  These so-called ‘mycorrhizal’ were weaving themselves into the plants roots and thereby creating this underground system which allowed the saplings to join together in an ‘underground social network’.  

The beautiful thing is that these fungi didn’t just connect Birches to Birches or Firs to Firs.  They formed a non-hierarchical network that connected plants of different species which allowed Birches to share their nutrients with Douglas Firs.  When the Birches were “weeded out” of the sapling forest, the Douglas Firs weren’t getting enough photosynthetic carbon and began to die off quickly.

Instead of seeing the forest as plants being in competition with each other, we now see it as producing a collaborative intelligence that Simard calls ‘forest wisdom’ and others refer to as the Wood Wide Web.

I learned all this today as I was reading, Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane.  When I read it, I wondered almost out loud; are our human communities destined to be only a competitive system that highlight the vast inequalities between the rich and the poor?  Or is it possible that a human community can be more like the forest; a subtle mutualism?

What is the Church which exists for God’s mission in the world?  A subtle mutualism that shares its resources across boundaries of every kind.  What is the ‘forest wisdom’ of the church?  How might we, who follow in the way of Jesus learn from the mutualism of the forest in order to share the resources we have with those have less, those who need more?

In a time of Corona crisis, the Church needs to lead in the way of Jesus. 

So….next time you climb a tree, remember what’s going on underground!

And before you reduce me to a label of one kind or another, hear the Word of God from Acts 2:44-45 and tell me that you don’t see the Wood Wide Web…..the underground social network…..forest wisdom……subtle mutualism……all for the sake of sustaining each other.

"All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their                 possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."

The Word of Lord.  Thanks be to God!