-Tabitha Lopes
A few months ago I saw a Ted talk with Canadian scientist, Suzanne Simard, who is on a mission to save our forests from commercial deforestation. Her work became groundbreaking when she discovered the communications network that exists between trees, plants and fungi. This immediately led me to realize how overlooked the complexity of society really is, and how society’s knowledge of trees is so limited. Michael Parrish Lee advocates for the livelihood of animals and food in his piece “Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other Life Forms in Lewis Carrol’s Alice Books”, and uses Actor Network Theory to tie everything together. I want to use the theories that Parrish Lee introduced but instead of applying them to animals and food, apply them to the complex networks that exist within our forest. By studying the full scope of a thing it becomes its own entity with a purpose outside our human-centric realm.
Suzanne Simard is a strong advocate that nature is not separate from humans, that rather, nature is a part of us and we are a part of it (Simard 1:00). She begins her Ted talk by saying, “Underground there is this whole other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate” (Simard 1:50). From a young age Suzanne was playing in the forests of Canada and became fascinated by the roots and soil that housed the forest. While she was in college, Science had just discovered, only in the laboratory, that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root, and she wanted to know if this could happen outside of the lab in the forests. Simard then conducted her own research and planted a Fur tree and a Birch tree, controlled both of their environments with a plastic bag, and injected a carbon isotope into one of their environments. Later she went on to measure the carbon levels in both trees. As expected, the tree that had carbon injected into its environment soaked it up through photosynthesis. In a groundbreaking discovery, she found that the other tree also contained carbon! The trees had sent carbon to each other, they were in conversation. Many people think of trees as competitors who compete for sunlight, but her research showed them more to be cooperators (Simard 6:22).
In reality, how trees are able to accomplish this transmission of nutrients goes beyond the trees themselves. They are just one actor within a much larger network. The pathways that make up this underground world are formed by fungi, also known as the Mycorrhizal networks (Durall, Simards). When most people think of fungus they think of a mushroom, but the majority of a fungus lives underground in the soil, where the fibers of the fungus wrap around and integrate themselves with the tree roots (National Forest Foundation). Within a forest, all of the threads and fibers created by fungi are called mycelium. “Mycelium composes what’s called a ‘mycorrhizal network,’ which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals” (NFF). Mycelium plays a distribution role. Without it none of the inter–tree communication would be possible.
Critical theory opens up this research to many different applications. For starters, this proves trees to be more intelligent than we originally thought. The deforestation of trees for commercial value can be compared to Parrish Lee’s argument that the food we eat is so much more than we think it to be. Parrish Lee argues that the foods we eat come from a larger network that we are an actor in, and that through consumption we are affecting, even dominating, the network. With the backdrop of Alice he states, “Carroll explores an interspecies model of identity in which humans and animals are each other’s co-creators and mediators, borrowing from, translating, feeding, and feeding off each other.” (Parrish Lee, pp.1538). Just like the underground network in the forest, the network doesn’t function if there is only a single actor. Without mycelium, trees wouldn’t get nutrients and without trees, mycelium wouldn’t get sugars (NFF). In the forest, there is a natural distribution of nutrients. What Parrish Lee’s argument affirms is that humans are dominating the network. Even if people aren’t aware of how they are acting within the larger whole, the animals and things that serve us rarely get as much out of the network as we do.
If we want to connect the networks that are happening in the forest to our society, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) is a good application. In ANT there are actors and networks. An actor, “is something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.” (Latour, pp.1462). The “networks” implicit in ANT are not to be thought of in the conventional sense. Latour himself states that his theory should not be metaphorized to a computer network (Latour, pp. 1458). To further understand the network aspect of ANT we first need to understand Latour’s desire to incorporate things into the realm of humans. Latour believes that we are in society with engineering and we need to recognize that things have become entangled in our lives. Parrish Lee talks about this entanglement with the example of food and animals. Simards research adds forests to the discourse. Human’s do not act alone. Therefore, “ANT is thus the claim that the only way to achieve this reinjection of things into our understanding of social fabrics is through a network-like ontology and social theory.” (Latour, pp.1459). Trees are an actor within the mycorrhizal network, so is carbon, sugar, and fungi. However, what ANT challenges is that humans are also a part of the mycorrhizal network, even if we don’t know it. To the forest, humans are things. We are things that need to become more aware of how our behaviors are affecting different networks. If we zoom out, we are all a part of the same network.
The closer I looked at Simards research, and the closer I looked at ANT, the more connections I saw. For example, Simards found that through the mycorrhizal network the forest was able to act as a single living organism, feeding nutrients to its weaker trees, and sending signals of danger through the mycelium (Simards 11:05). When her team mapped the transfer of nutrients in the forest they found that there are Hub Trees. Also called Mother trees, they are responsible for nurturing the forest life around them. This process helps seedlings survive by a 4x survival rate compared to a seedling outside the reach of a Hub tree (Simards 10:54). In her Ted talk she said, “through back and forth conversations [trees] increase the resilience of the whole community.” (Simards 13:03). This sounds a lot like Latour’s theory as it was based around the idea that “strength does not come from concentration, purity and unity, but from dissemination, heterogeneity and careful plaiting of weak ties” (Latour, pp. 1459). When Simards is talking about the dangerous habits of forestry she says, “We are continuing to plant one or two species and weed out the Aspens and Birches. These simplified forests lack complexity and are really vulnerable to infections and bugs.” (Simards 15:04). Diversified communities are more resilient.
If actor network theory is about accounting for everything that is a part of our lives then it should be easy to see how dangerous it is to write off a tree, or in Parrish Lee’s argument an animal, as just a thing, more specifically a thing of economic value. At the end of Latour’s essay “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Classifications”, he ends by saying, “ANT is a powerful tool to destroy spheres and domains, to regain the sense of heterogeneity, and to bring interobjectivity back into the center of attention.” (Latour, pp.1469). My goal was to use ANT not just to trace the communication throughout the forest, but to acknowledge the network. Through Simards and parallel research, it is evident that there are much more complex systems of living than we previously imagined.. Studying these systems is necessary to build an accurate picture of how our world, the ultimate network, comes together.
Works Cited
Durall, Daniel M. Simard, Suzanne W. “Mycorrhizal Networks: A Review of Their Extent, Function, and Importance.” Canadian Journal of Botany, vol. 82, no. 8, Aug. 2004, pp. 1140–65. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1139/b04-116.
Latour, Bruno. “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Third Edition. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. John Wiley and Sons, 2017, pp. 1458-1469.
Parrish Lee, Michael. “Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other Life Forms in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Third Edition. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. John Wiley and Sons, 2017, pp. 1529-1543.
Simard, Suzanne. “How trees talk to each other”. YouTube, uploaded by TED, Aug. 30, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs&t=34s
“Underground Networking: The Amazing Connections Beneath Your Feet”, National Forest Foundation, 2024. https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network
“Underground Networking: The Amazing Connections Beneath Your Feet”, National Forest Foundation, 2024. https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network
Sprockets and Springes 