GREEN NEWS & VIEWS
A Deeper Understanding of Sustainability
Everything is energy, wanna vibe? Much of the interaction that occurs in a forest ecosystem occurs below the ground and, until recently, it wasn’t understood. About 30 some years ago researchers such as Suzanne Simard began to use new technologies to determine the exchange of resources that occurred underground. She discovered that the roots of trees interact with the mycelial fibers of fungi. They exchange information and resources. BY JUDITH POLICH I think we all know the word sustainability is overused and means different things to different people. Generally speaking, we like to be - lieve it’s possible to use less resources than those that can be naturally replenished. That is one way people think of sustainability. Howev- er, sustainability means far more than that. Sustainable practices are based on understanding that there are finite resources, and they take in the full cost of the resources we use and develop including their cli- mate cost. Unfortunately, in most situations the actual climate cost is not added to the cost of a product. Almost everything we use is derived from the natural world. Our posture with respect to the natural world is one of all take and almost no give. We could contrast our behavior with the practices of sharing and cooperation found in plant communities. These interactions are detailed in my book, “Why Can’t We Be More Like Trees”. The research described in this book tells us that in forest communities, trees don’t just function as individuals, they function as a total community with full awareness of the needs of their ecosystem. As we know, in addition to providing us with oxygen, trees photosynthesize and turn carbon into sugar. This sugar from trees and plants is the basis of all the food we eat, all the food other animals eat, the food the fungal community thrives on, and it feeds the forest community itself. Unless we learn to view things from an ecosystem or community perspective, we really don’t have much of a grasp of what sustainability means.
Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash She called this the wood-wide-web. Fungi, she found, provide trees with many minerals they would otherwise not be able to obtain, in- cluding nitrogen. They also provide water, medications, and informa- tion. They facilitate the sharing of food and resources between trees and between plants within a plant and forest community. In exchange for their services, the trees provide fungi with sugar — a significant amount of sugar. The sugar sustains the fungi, and the fungi sustains the trees. Thus, the entire forest community benefits. It is sustained due to a highly developed, complex reciprocal process. We really don’t think much about the depth of the interactions that bring us the food that ends up on our table, the products we consume, or even the pleasure we receive when we walk in a beautiful forest or natural space. We mostly just take it for granted. continued on page 72
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PATHWAYS—Spring 24—71
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