Hi Ya’ll,
I wanted to share with you this super interesting, thought-provoking, intriguing on competition vs., cooperation arguments and ultimately a deeper offering on the recognition of Forests as Wholes.
It is a wonderful wide ranging biopic in many ways on the Bioneering work of Dr. Suzanne Simard. Several years ago I had the honor of moderating a Bioneers panel with Suzanne and Sm’hayetsk Tsimshian forest ecologist Teresa Ryan, who is a Grad Student of hers and also quoted in this article.
It is a long article and worth the read & just for some teasers I ‘cherry-picked’ a few quotes and pasted then in below if you want to high grade a few stone skips over deeper waters.
I enjoy pondering notions that the key consequential competition that exists is at the edges of life vs., lifelessness writ large at the Universe scale. Mortality vs., immortality not of individuals but of unbroken diverse threaded-niches of populations since the first anaerobic archea made baby #1. Our (who knows if uniquely?) Life-laden Planet Water is a cooperative neg-entropic miracle competitively giving the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics a 3.8 billion year run for its abiotic money. To ‘win’ the competition against entropy life has naturally selected to intergenerationally cooperate across species with diverse niche skill sets overtime as evidenced by the ongoing myriad presence of life right now. IMHO
Against all odds the Gaianistic gamble is that Biotic Cooperation Trumps Abiotic Competition. Unless one species who thinks ‘he’ is the ‘house’ does not figure out how to cooperate & get ‘his’ shit together & quit the fossil foolery hedging bets for the death-siders of all-in extinction. Take your pick Commodity or Community? May the community Forest be with us, and us with them.
Yer Fluid Dru-Wid,
Brock