Seekers of Unity Reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to celebrate ten thousand subscribers. Join us: https://facebook.com/seekersofunityhttps://instagram.com/seekersofunityhttps://www.twitter.com/seekersofUhttps://www.seekersofunity.com Thank you to our beloved Patrons: Mendel, Jared, Tim, Mystic Experiment, MM, Lenny, Justin, Joshua, Jorge, Wayne, Jason, Caroline, Yaakov, Daniel, Wodenborn, Steve, Collin, Justin, Mariana, Vic, Shaw, Carlos, Nico, Isaac, Frederick, David, Ben, Rodney, Charley, Jonathan, Chelsea, Curly Joe and Adam. Join them in supporting us: patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seekers paypal: https://paypal.com/paypalme/seekersofu

TED Radio Hour September 10, 2021 (podcasts.google.com)
Listen Again: The Gratitude Chain: A.J. Jacobs
• 53 min

Link to podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDI5OC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbA/episode/OTU1ZTNhOWQtNWEzMy00YTE1LWE1NzMtODNhYWM5MjRmOGYw?hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwjVrv3Sk_ryAhV7CjQIHXPDAMIQieUEegQIBhAF&ep=6

Original broadcast date: February 19, 2021. When A.J. Jacobs set out to thank everyone who made his morning cup of coffee, he realized the chain of thank-yous was endless. This hour, Jacobs shares ideas on gratitude—and how to make it count.

(Contributed by Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.)

Festival of Faiths SACRED WISDOM: Pathways to Nonviolence – FESTIVAL of FAITHS 2016 Week Passes available: http://www.FestivalofFaiths.org/ Louisville, KY · May 17 – 21 A FIVE-DAY FESTIVAL of music, poetry, film, art and dialogue with internationally renowned spiritual leaders, thinkers and practitioners. The 2016 Festival of Faiths will explore how different spiritual traditions, teachers and practitioners address violence, heal our wounds and teach active commitment to nurturing peace in ourselves and in the world. “The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence – it is unshakeable.”- Thomas Merton Join the Conversation. Join the Movement. #SACREDWISDOM Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the world’s leading experts on Islamic science and spirituality, and Swami Atmarupananda, renowned teacher of Hinduism, will talk about Compassion as being intrinsic to who we really are — the true Self, the “image of God” which is free of all alienation. And that is wisdom itself, love itself, discovered in inner silence — the still point that unites us to both God and the universe. http://www.festivaloffaiths.org

by Astro Butterfly (astrobutterfly.com

One of my readers asked yesterday if it’s truly possible to learn astrology in 10 weeks. They suggested that in order to become a great astrologer, one should read at least 100 charts. In other words, you need a considerable amount of time to become a great astrologer.

This is what I answered:

That’s right, if you want to become a great astrologer, you should read at least 100 charts. Anyone who wants to become top 1% of their profession, has to dedicate a considerable amount of time and resources to get there. Getting to 1%, achieving true mastery is Saturn’s work – pretty much a lifetime journey.

HOWEVER. You can still help people with astrology even if you’re not yet in the top 1% (or top 10%, or even top 30%). You can help people with astrology as long as 1) you know more astrology than them and 2) you use the right consulting frameworks to present the information in a way that is empowering.

Chances are, even if you’re what you consider an “astrology beginner” you can still help most people learn more about themselves, and navigate through life with the help of astrology.

But this very valid question got me thinking about what are the contributing factors that can speed up (or slow down) the learning process.

Upon reflection, I’ve come up with 4 factors that can predict your success as an astrologer, and whether or not you can learn to give basic readings in 10 weeks:

1. You have an “astrologer” profile, i.e. you have certain skills and talents that make it easier to connect with, and understand a multi-layered topic like astrology
2. You have life experience. To help other people with astrology (and to do pretty much any counselling work) you need to graduate from Saturn’s “school of hard knocks” – which means you’ve had your 1st Saturn return, i.e. you’re at least 29 years old
3. You are a high-speed learner, i.e. you pick up new topics quickly. Not all of us are blessed with high-caliber learning skills, but if you are, then you definitely have an advantage, in the sense that you can learn astrology (and any other topic) much faster
4. You have the right astrology frameworks. You could learn astrology all by yourself, but you’ll probably need decades of trial and error. As with anything else you learn, the quality of structured frameworks makes a big difference.

From all these factors, factor 4) frameworks, is the #1 deal-breaker. There are still many astrology enthusiasts who believe that they can learn astrology by themselves. And if astrology is something “just for fun” of course, there’s no need to study it formally.

But learning astrology without tools and frameworks is like learning a new language without a dictionary. With 3000 students and years of experience of producing astrology courses and educational experiences, we are proud to have come up with an excellent framework to learn astrology and read natal charts in the Astro Butterfly Wings chart reading certification program.

Of course, 4) “astrology frameworks” is not enough. If you want to learn how to read charts in 10 weeks, you’ll need at least one of the other 3 factors 1) an astrologer profile, or 2) life experience, or 3) learning skills.

If you have more than 1, even better, but 1 is the minimum.

So you’ll need either a) an astrologer profile, OR b) life experience, OR c) learning skills.

Let’s talk a little bit about these 4 factors:

1) You have an astrologer profile. If you’re not an advanced astrology student yet, you may not even know whether you have an astrologer profile. The good news is that there are high chances that your interest in astrology is also backed up by some in-built astrologer “genes”.

People with no astrology markers in their charts are usually those people who don’t ‘believe’ in astrology anyway. Some of the ‘astrology signatures’ in the chart are a prominent Uranus, Jupiter or Chiron, or an above average number of planets in Air or Water signs. Of course, these are just some examples.

2) Life experience matters – the more, the better. Of course, age is just a number, and someone who has been through a lot by the age of 20 may have more life experience than someone who is 50, but has never ventured outside their comfort zone.

However, astrologically speaking, the Saturn return (which happens at the age of 29) is a pretty good indicator of whether we have ‘enough’ life experience to consult other people.

People with lots of life experience tend to have more sympathy, and they just ‘know’ what to say, and even more importantly, what NOT to say.

Of course, there are excellent astrologers who haven’t turned 29 yet, so this is definitely not a deal breaker – but it helps!

3) Learning skills – there are people who just learn faster than others. We’ve seen people who don’t have any astrological signatures in their chart and haven’t had their Saturn return, yet become excellent astrologers because they have the ability to learn pretty much anything. This is you if you quickly grasp new concepts, have good analysis/synthesis skills and are open to feedback.

4) Astrology frameworks – frameworks make it easier to put “2 and 2” together and see the big picture. Astrology is a very complex topic, so it’s not enough to learn what Venus in Gemini, or what Mars in the 2nd house means. You need frameworks to put all these different elements of the chart into context – so that you learn how to read charts holistically.

“Frameworks” doesn’t only mean educational material – it means the entire learning experience. When you have access to a teacher, when you’re part of a group of people studying the same topic at the same time – learning skyrockets. We’ve seen it again and again, and that’s why we only run this chart-reading program live.

If you have any of 1) astrology profile, or 2) life experience, or 3) learning skills, and you’re looking for a quality 4) framework, then we invite you to join the Astro Butterfly Wings Certification Program (make sure you click on the link that best describes your astrology starting point, Beginner or Intermediate/Advanced).

Astro Butterfly Wings BEGINNERS Group

Astro Butterfly Wings INTERMEDIATE and ADVANCED Group

Closer To Truth How to imagine the experience of eternal life? Would we sense ourselves? How would we feel? Whom would we know? What would we do? What would God do? Living forever seems so absurd, yet eternal life is the promise of almost every religion. But if we cannot even imagine what eternal life will be, how can we have hope in its reality? Free access to Closer to Truth’s library of 5,000 videos: http://bit.ly/376lkKN Watch more interviews on life after death: https://bit.ly/2K7iYG0 Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and a prominent Islamic philosopher. Register for free at CTT.com for subscriber-only exclusives: http://bit.ly/2GXmFsP Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

Marcel Grossmann (left) and Michele Besso (right), university friends of Albert Einstein (centre), both made important contributions to general relativity. Credit: Grossmann, Einstein: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich/Bildarchiv; Besso: Besso Family/AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michele Angelo Besso (Riesbach, 25 May 1873 – Geneva, 15 March 1955) was a Swiss/Italian engineer.^[1]

Besso was born in Riesbach from a family of Italian Jewish (Sephardi) descent. He was a close friend of Albert Einstein during his years at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich,^[2] today the ETH Zurich, and then at the patent office in Bern, where Einstein helped him to get a job.^[3] Besso is credited with introducing Einstein to the works of Ernst Mach, the sceptical critic of physics who influenced Einstein’s approach to the discipline.^[4] Einstein called Besso “the best sounding board in Europe” for scientific ideas.^[5] In Einstein’s original paper on Special Relativity, he ended the paper stating, “In conclusion, let me note that my friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work on the problem here discussed, and that I am indebted to him for many a valuable suggestion.”^[6]

Besso died in Geneva, aged 81. In a letter of condolence to the Besso family, Albert Einstein wrote “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.”^[7] Einstein died one month and 3 days after his friend, on 18 April 1955.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Besso

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Émilie du Châtelet
Portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Born	17 December 1706 Paris, Kingdom of France
Died	10 September 1749 (aged 42) Lunéville, Kingdom of France
Nationality	French
Known for	Translation of Newton’s Principia into French, natural philosophy which combines Newtonian physics with Leibnizian metaphysics, and advocacy of Newtonian physics
Spouse(s)	Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont​​(m. 1725)​
Partner(s)	Voltaire (1733–1749)
Children	Françoise Gabriel PaulineLouis Marie FlorentVictor-EspritStanislas-Adélaïde du Châtelet
Scientific career
Fields	Natural philosophyMathematicsPhysics
Influences	Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Willem ‘s Gravesande
Signature

Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (French pronunciation: [emili dy ʃɑtlɛ] (listen); 17 December 1706–10 September 1749) was a French natural philosopher and mathematician during the early 1730s until her death due to complications during childbirth in 1749. Her most recognized achievement is her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton‘s 1687 book Principia containing basic laws of physics. The translation, published posthumously in 1756, is still considered the standard French translation today. Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object.

Her philosophical magnum opus, Institutions de Physique (Paris, 1740, first edition), or Foundations of Physics, circulated widely, generated heated debates, and was republished and translated into several other languages within two years of its original publication. She participated in the famous vis viva debate, concerning the best way to measure the force of a body and the best means of thinking about conservation principles. Posthumously, her ideas were heavily represented in the most famous text of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, first published shortly after du Châtelet’s death. Numerous biographies, books and plays have been written about her life and work in the two centuries since her death. In the early 21st century, her life and ideas have generated renewed interest.

Émilie du Châtelet had, over many years, a relationship with the writer and philosopher Voltaire.

Contribution to philosophy

In addition to producing famous translations of works by authors such as Bernard Mandeville and Isaac Newton, Du Châtelet wrote a number of significant philosophical essays, letters and books that were well known in her time.

Because of her well-known collaboration and romantic involvement with Voltaire, which spanned much of her adult life, for generations Du Châtelet has been known as mistress and collaborator to her much better known intellectual companion. Her accomplishments and achievements have often been subsumed under his, and as a result, even today she is often mentioned only within the context of Voltaire’s life and work during the period of the early French Enlightenment. The ideals of her works spread from the ideals of individual empowerment to issues of the social contract.

Recently, however, professional philosophers and historians^{[citation needed]} have transformed the reception of Du Châtelet. Historical evidence indicates that Du Châtelet’s work had a very significant influence on the philosophical and scientific conversations of the 1730s and 1740s – in fact, she was famous and respected by the greatest thinkers of her time.

Du Châtelet corresponded with renowned mathematicians such as Johann II Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler, early developers of calculus. She was also tutored by Bernoulli’s prodigy students, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Alexis Claude Clairaut. Frederick the Great of Prussia, who re-founded the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, was her great admirer, and corresponded with both Voltaire and Du Châtelet regularly. He introduced Du Châtelet to Leibniz’s philosophy by sending her the works of Christian Wolff, and Du Châtelet sent him a copy of her Institutions.

Her works were published and republished in Paris, London, and Amsterdam; they were translated into German and Italian; and, they were discussed in the most important scholarly journals of the era, including the Memoires des Trévoux, the Journal des Sçavans, the Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen, and others. Perhaps most intriguingly, many of her ideas were represented in various sections of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, and some of the articles in the Encyclopédie are a direct copy of her work (this is an active area of current academic research – the latest research can be found at Project Vox, a Duke University research initiative).

Biography

Early life

Émilie du Châtelet was born on 17 December 1706 in Paris, the only girl amongst six children. Three brothers lived to adulthood: René-Alexandre (b. 1698), Charles-Auguste (b. 1701), and Elisabeth-Théodore (b. 1710). Her eldest brother, René-Alexandre, died in 1720, and the next brother, Charles-Auguste, died in 1731. However, her younger brother, Elisabeth-Théodore, lived to a successful old age, becoming an abbot and eventually a bishop. Two other brothers died very young.^[1] Du Châtelet also had an illegitimate half-sister, Michelle, who was born of her father and Anne Bellinzani, an intelligent woman who was interested in astronomy and married to an important Parisian official.^[2]

Her father was Louis Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil, a member of the lesser nobility. At the time of Du Châtelet’s birth, her father held the position of the Principal Secretary and Introducer of Ambassadors to King Louis XIV. He held a weekly salon on Thursdays, to which well-respected writers and scientists were invited. Her mother was Gabrielle Anne de Froullay, Baronne de Breteuil.^[3]

Early education

Du Châtelet’s education has been the subject of much speculation, but nothing is known with certainty.^[4]

Among their acquaintances was Fontenelle, the perpetual secretary of the French Académie des Sciences. Du Châtelet’s father Louis-Nicolas, recognizing her early brilliance, arranged for Fontenelle to visit and talk about astronomy with her when she was 10 years old.^[5] Du Châtelet’s mother, Gabrielle-Anne de Froulay, was brought up in a convent, at the time the predominant educational institution available to French girls and women.^[5] While some sources believe her mother did not approve of her intelligent daughter, or of her husband’s encouragement of Émilie’s intellectual curiosity,^[5] there are also other indications that her mother not only approved of Du Châtelet’s early education, but actually encouraged her to vigorously question stated fact.^[6]

In either case, such encouragement would have been seen as unusual for parents of their time and status. When she was small, her father arranged training for her in physical activities such as fencing and riding, and as she grew older, he brought tutors to the house for her.^[5] As a result, by the age of twelve she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German; she was later to publish translations into French of Greek and Latin plays and philosophy. She received education in mathematics, literature, and science.

Du Châtelet also liked to dance, was a passable performer on the harpsichord, sang opera, and was an amateur actress. As a teenager, short of money for books, she used her mathematical skills to devise highly successful strategies for gambling.^[5]

Marriage

On 12 June 1725, she married the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet-Lomont.^{[7][note 1]} Her marriage conferred the title of Marquise du Chastellet.^{[note 2]} Like many marriages among the nobility, theirs was arranged. As a wedding gift, the husband was made governor of Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy by his father; the recently married couple moved there at the end of September 1725. Du Châtelet was eighteen at the time, her husband thirty-four.

Children

The Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet and Émilie du Châtelet had three children: Françoise-Gabrielle-Pauline (30 June 1726 – 1754, married in 1743 to Alfonso Carafa, Duca di Montenero), Louis Marie Florent (born 20 November 1727), and Victor-Esprit (born 11 April 1733).^[8] Victor-Esprit died as an infant in late summer 1734, likely the last Sunday in August.^[9] On 4 September 1749 Émilie du Châtelet gave birth to Stanislas-Adélaïde du Châtelet (daughter of Jean François de Saint-Lambert). She died as an infant in Lunéville on 6 May 1751.^[10]

Resumption of studies

In 1733, aged 26, Du Châtelet resumed her mathematical studies. Initially, she was tutored in algebra and calculus by Moreau de Maupertuis, a member of the Academy of Sciences; although mathematics was not his forte, he had received a solid education from Johann Bernoulli, who also taught Leonhard Euler. However by 1735 Du Châtelet had turned for her mathematical training to Alexis Clairaut, a mathematical prodigy known best for Clairaut’s equation and Clairaut’s theorem. Du Châtelet resourcefully sought some of France’s best tutors and scholars to mentor her in mathematics. On one occasion at the Café Gradot, a place where men frequently gathered for intellectual discussion, she was politely ejected when she attempted to join one of her teachers. Undeterred, she simply had some men’s clothing made for herself and strolled back in.^[11]

Relationship with Voltaire

In the frontispiece to Voltaire‘s book on Newton’s philosophy, du Châtelet appears as Voltaire’s muse, reflecting Newton’s heavenly insights down to Voltaire.

Du Châtelet may have met Voltaire in her childhood at one of her father’s salons; Voltaire himself dates their meeting to 1729, when he returned from his exile in London. However, their friendship developed from May 1733 when she re-entered society after the birth of her third child.^[4]

Du Châtelet invited Voltaire to live at her country house at Cirey in Haute-Marne, northeastern France, and he became her long-time companion. There she studied physics and mathematics and published scientific articles and translations. To judge from Voltaire’s letters to friends and their commentaries on each other’s work, they lived together with great mutual liking and respect. As a literary rather than scientific person, Voltaire implicitly acknowledged her contributions to his 1738 Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, where the chapters on optics show strong similarities with her own Essai sur l’optique. She was able to contribute further to the campaign by a laudatory review in the Journal des savants.^[12]

Sharing a passion for science, Voltaire and Du Châtelet collaborated scientifically. They set up a laboratory in Du Châtelet’s home. In a healthy competition, they both entered the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire, since Du Châtelet disagreed with Voltaire’s essay. Although neither of them won, both essays received honourable mention and were published.^[13] She thus became the first woman to have a scientific paper published by the Academy.^[14]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89milie_du_Ch%C3%A2telet

Harvard Divinity School On May 1, 2003, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the world’s leading experts on Islamic science and spirituality, delivered the 2003-04 Dudleian Lecture. Professor Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University and the author of numerous books, most recently The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity.

Suzanne Simard

Last Updated

September 9, 2021

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who has proven, beyond doubt, that trees communicate with each other — that a forest is a single organism wired for wisdom and care. Simard found that the processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror the maps of the human brain that we’re also just now drawing. All of this turns out to be catching up with intelligence long held in aboriginal science. She calls the mature hub trees in a forest “Mother Trees” — parenting, eldering, in a mode of mutuality and reciprocity, modeling what we also know to be true of genuinely flourishing human ecosystems.

Image by Annalise Neil, © All Rights Reserved.

Guest

Suzanne Simard is Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. You can connect with her ongoing work at mothertreeproject.org. Her book is called, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

Transcript

Krista Tippett, host: She is the forest ecologist who has proven beyond doubt that trees communicate with each other, that a forest is a single organism, “wired,” Suzanne Simard says, “for wisdom” and for what it is hard to call anything other than care. She has shifted her field of science on its axis and was an inspiration for the central character in Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory.

But it’s the understory of a forest that Suzanne Simard brought into the light. Modern forestry had applied a logic of human societies and what our eyes could see, assumed that trees compete with each other for light and soil, and thus tore out mature trees to plant marketable young species alone and set apart. Suzanne Simard began her rigorous, groundbreaking research with three types of coexistent species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar.

What she helped the world see next is resonant intelligence about more than trees. The processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror the maps of the human brain that we’re also just now drawing. All of this turns out to be validating — catching up with — intelligence long held in Aboriginal science. Suzanne Simard calls the mature hub trees in a forest “mother trees” — parenting; eldering in a mode of mutuality and reciprocity; modeling what we also know to be true of genuinely flourishing human ecosystems.

[music: Zoë Keating: “Seven League Boots”]

Suzanne Simard:The most powerful parts of our social systems can be the elder that has aged and is guiding younger people or guiding their culture. And yet, they can be almost invisible in the hierarchy of our social system. In forests, the same thing; the belowground world is a perfect example of that. These bacteria, the fungi, the archaea, they’re the ones that are cycling the carbon, decomposing things, cycling nitrogen, filtering water, building soil, soil structure. And yet —

Tippett:The caregivers of the forest.

Simard:They are. They’re the fundamental foundation of the forest. They’re the legacy of the forest that helps move it forward.

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[music: Zoë Keating: “Seven League Boots”]

Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her TED talks have captivated millions, and now she’s released her book, Finding the Mother Tree.

You like to say that you grew up — you grew up in British Columbia. You like to say you grew up “in a province of old-growth forests.” And I just wonder, as you speak that and you feel in your body that presence, that old-growth forest, as you were a child growing up in it, what did that mean? How did you experience it then?

Simard:Well, it was all I knew. Of course, we would go away from the old-growth forests, and then I would think, “Oh, I’ve got to get back,” because it’s in my blood and bones and DNA. You know, my ancestors for many generations lived in these inland rainforests, and it’s just the way we were. And so I guess when I went away, so into the drier areas, for example, where there’s grasslands, I thought they were beautiful, too, but I always wanted to get back and felt so much at home when I was among the big, old trees.

Tippett:And there is this moment you describe with your grandfather, when you had this glimpse of what you say — call a “palette of roots and soil.” And you saw that this was the foundation of the forest. And it seems to me that, in some ways, you ended up pursuing that glimpse in what you did later as a scientist.

Simard:Yeah — you know, who I was, how I grew up, being among the trees, and of course, as a child, spending a lot of time on the forest floor, [laughs] because that’s where you are, you’re small — and building forts with my brother and sister, and rafts that we would take on the lake, it was just — the roots and the connection in the forest was just one of us. We just knew it that way.

And then, of course, when I did become a scientist, and I — a forest scientist, eventually, and I embarked on — well, I started out with an undergraduate degree, thinking I wanted to be just a forester, because I loved — I loved forestry, and my grandfather was a horse logger. And I loved what he did, and I wanted to be part of that. But what I entered into was a much different worldview and way of treating the forest, which was really not about caring for the forest, it was more about exploiting the forest.

Tippett:Right. It’s so interesting, too, because one of the things that you started to really pay attention to and illuminate are the fungi and mycorrhizae, which probably is — is this what you saw with your grandfather there, when you were young? It’s what you were looking at without having a name for?

Simard:I mean, I was aware of mushrooms in the forest, [laughs] especially when — everybody, we see these, and they’re so magical and mystical and colorful, and it’s a special part of the forest. But I didn’t really understand, as a child, what they did in the forest. I just knew they were a part of the forest, an integral part of the forest.

Tippett:And it’s fascinating, as I also learned from you, that this kind of Darwinian approach to forest management only focused on fungi that are pathogens. And that is a reality, but not — what you saw is this fungus root — that under a single footstep, there could be hundreds of [laughs] kilometers of, how do you say, mycelium?

Simard:Mycelium.

Tippett:Mycelium. It was so much more complex, again, than the thing growing aboveground that our eyes could perceive.

Simard:Yeah, so you’re right, foresters were very much focused on the pathogens, because they kill trees. And there was huge efforts to get them — to reduce that mortality due to pathogens, and these kind of crazy forest practices where, if there was this one pathogen, Armillaria ostoyae, the practice was to pull the stumps out of the soil — literally take these huge machines and rip these stumps out of the soil so the roots were exposed, killing the pathogens, which just is a really good example of the extent that we would go to in order to create these so-called productive environments for trees to grow and for stands to be fully — what we call “fully stocked” with fast-growing crop trees.

Tippett:You also came to — so there’s this web of vitality that we hadn’t been able to understand. And you also — you use the language of conversation, of the trees talking to each other. And I loved — there’s a moment in the book, Finding the Mother Tree, where you tell the story of the first time — and you’re using this language, but I want you to open this up for us — that you first “listened to” a fir tree, that you heard it with a Geiger counter. So what were you hearing?

Simard:Yeah, so we’d done this experiment where we grew these 80 triplicates of birch, fir, and cedar. And just building on the story, that birch was considered, and still is, a competitor in forests, a weed, even though it’s a natural part of succession. After disturbances, birch and aspen and cottonwoods, they come back, right, and they’re like the healing process of a disturbed forest. But foresters viewed them as unnecessary competitors and had launched an all-out war on trying to get rid of these deciduous trees. And that war is still going on to this very day, creating policies and practices that support that.

And what I wanted to know was whether they really were competitors with Douglas fir and cedar or if they had a more sophisticated relationship. So I did this preliminary work, and I discovered — I knew that Douglas fir and paper birch shared these mycorrhizal fungi, these species in common, and actually, potentially linked them together. And I was building on earlier research done in the UK in the laboratory, where David Reed and his colleagues had found that pines grown in little clear plastic root boxes in the lab, that when they were connected — they could be connected by a mycorrhizal fungus, and that when he labeled one seedling with radioactive CO₂, he could trace it going to another one.

So I kind of used that same approach. I thought, does this happen in real forests? And so yeah, so what I did is I — to find out if this network existed and whether or not — what was it doing? Was it facilitating any kind of relationship between paper birch and Douglas fir? And so I labeled paper birch with radioactive carbon dioxide. That means I put a plastic bag over the shoot, and I injected radioactive CO₂, and I let the birch photosynthesize for a couple of hours, taking up that radioactive CO₂.

Tippett:Just a couple of hours?

Simard:Just a couple of hours.

Tippett:That’s all it took.

Simard:That’s all it took. And then with the Douglas fir, I labeled it with a different isotope, a stable isotope that doesn’t decay over time; it’s not radioactive. So then I could distinguish if these carbon molecules were going back and forth between these two species. And so I did — I labeled it for two hours, as well, put a plastic bag over Douglas fir, injected the C-13, CO₂, and then came back six days later with my Geiger counter.

And the first thing was: did the labeling work? Was I able to label the paper birch with the radioactivity? So I held the Geiger counter up to it, and sure enough, it just went wild. It was crackling like crazy. It had worked, right? I had totally made this paper birch hot. And so then I went over to the Douglas fir, and I held the Geiger counter up to it, and there was a faint crackle. And that’s when I knew. I knew that they were sharing carbon, which was mind-blowing.

[music: “Cornicob” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with the groundbreaking forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

[music: “Cornicob” by Blue Dot Sessions]

All the way through the book — and this is the discipline of science, right — you raise a question, and then you pursue it. And so your question here was: how were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating? And it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon, so that the language in which they were conversing, as you found, is in carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and chemicals and hormones.

In 1997, you publish this Nature article, which — well, first of all it was rejected. And you went back and rewrote it, and I get the feeling that you did not expect that they would put it on the cover. [laughs] They put it on the cover, correct?

Simard:They did, yes.

Tippett:And that it would catapult you into visibility — and not surprisingly, because you were saying things people hadn’t said before in this way, and you were a woman in a male-dominated field and — fields, probably; forestry as well as science. And you — there’d been a lot of resistance. But you published this work, and — did you use the language of “wood-wide web” or did someone else, or did Nature say that?

Simard:That was Nature.

Tippett:[laughs] Nature said.

Simard:Yeah, they put that on the front cover, with a picture of these diverse forests with all these different tree species.

Tippett:Do you like that little shorthand?

Simard:I do. I mean, I think the “wood” part is quite utilitarian, but it’s catchy. And it’s become almost like a meme now, and — which has been highly effective in helping people think about the forest in a different way. And it was also at the same time that we — people had just discovered the worldwide web, right? 1992, right? [laughs] So it was — yeah, it was actually — it was great.

Tippett:So what they were picking up on was this imagery of the forest having nodes and links, right, like the internet. And that’s in there. I also feel like what you are describing is something more alive, [laughs] more — well, it was more biological than the internet, right? I mean, you were talking about these nodes that are hub trees that you call mother trees, and that the forest is not just wired, but wired for wisdom and care.

Simard:And actually, when the Nature paper was published, we didn’t know what the pattern of the network looked like belowground. That, actually, that work came quite a bit later. And I’ll explain why. Eventually, in — about ten years later, I was getting really worn down by the reviews of my work and also just the state of the science. We were — scientists were just kind of wringing their hands over whether this network existed, because you can’t see it very well with your own eyes. It’s belowground. These fungal mycelium are — some of them are invisible to the eye.

And then there was just a lot of distrust about this communication going on or this collaboration, because we were so heavily steeped in the idea that trees only compete. And so there was a great handwringing over whether or not this actually helped the plants or helped the fungi. And so I got a grad student, Kevin Beiler, and we decided to map what that network looked like. What emerged out of that mapping, these hubs and nodes and links and mother trees, which [laughs] has got a story unto itself.

Tippett:Well, say some more. Say some more.

Simard:Yeah, so when we did this — so I felt like, we’ve got to move this field forward or it’s going to die. [laughs] It’s going to mired in having to prove the same things over and over again. And so I picked a forest that is a Douglas fir forest, an interior Douglas fir forest in British Columbia. These are drier forests that are what we call “uneven aged,” in forestry language. That means that you have big, old trees, but you have lots of young trees, too. They grow up underneath the shade in a canopy of the old trees. It’s kind of a self-regenerating forest. And so it’s got multiple ages.

And so just to give context: so in this forest, we estimated about 100 species of fungi, in these little patches of forest, that were mycorrhizal fungi. We looked at two sister species of one fungal species, Rhizopogon. So we looked at a tiny, tiny fraction. And what we found [laughs] was that every tree was connected to every other tree by these two sister species of this one species alone. Can you imagine if we’d mapped all 100? It would’ve been like, incredible.

Tippett:[laughs] Right. Right.

Simard:So every tree is linked to every other tree. All the little trees — the seedlings, the saplings are all linked into the networks that these old trees had established through their lifetime, and that the biggest, oldest trees were the hubs of the network. They were the nuclei. They were what everything else was linked into. And they were linked to each other, these other, smaller nodes, as well. But the biggest linkers were these big, old trees.

And that’s kind of — it makes sense, because the big old trees have big root systems. They’ve got many points of contact. And they have great big photosynthetic crowns that basically transmit energy into the ground that feeds the network. And so the interpretation was that these seedlings, the seedlings, the young regeneration had regenerated within the network of the old trees. So basically, they germinated, their little root systems developed, linked into the network of the old trees within a month or two, and they started to get subsidies directly from the old trees: carbon and nitrogen — and water, which we found out later — and they also benefited from just this vast mycelium that was just, like, like an iceberg, right? [laughs] It was huge. And so they were — immediately had a head start and could survive in this otherwise fairly dark forest, where photosynthetic rates were really, really low, with their tiny little needles. There’s no way they could’ve survived without these subsidies.

Tippett:Right. Well, and it’s so interesting, too, because you were — you were becoming a mother yourself, in these years of your research. I mean, you — let’s be clear. You had to be so rigorous in your science, right, to be taken seriously. So you don’t make these — you don’t use these metaphors lightly or carelessly.

Simard:No; not at all.

Tippett:And at the same time, some of the qualities that you describe, some of the things that these mother trees do, absolutely mirror the intelligence that human beings possess in mothering, parenting, and eldering, right: passing wisdom on, sending warning signals, aiding others through sickness and distress, delivering nutrients. [laughs]

Simard:Yes. No, you’ve hit on exactly kind of the struggle, as a young scientist trying to establish their credibility in this very competitive and critical field [laughs] and using the language that was only accepted at the time. If you didn’t do that, you would be tossed to the dogs. [laughs] And I never even considered, as a 30-year-old, or as I was developing my creds, of ever using language like mother trees or communication. I knew I would get tossed to the dogs. And so it was with a great deal of trepidation, to use this language, and I am getting a lot of backlash over it, especially since the book has been published, but —

Tippett:Oh, you are, again, now — still?

Simard:Yes, I am. But to me, we’re at the point where we have to — I feel, you know — I felt it was really important. We’ve got to move beyond this, right? We’ve got to embrace our place in nature as one with nature and that these trees, they evolved long before we did, and these networks — for example, the biological neural networks which we’ve found, they exist throughout nature. These patterns exist throughout nature, because they’re efficient at moving stuff around, at communication, and they’re resilient. And they’re meant to help us be reproductive societies.

Tippett:Well, right. And as you say, we are of nature. We’re not separate. And also, it feels important to me that — and I don’t see people pointing this out, when they talk about your work — that the larger context, one of the larger contexts of this is that there is, within the field of evolutionary biology, our generation of science and humanity is growing up and complicating and deepening that idea. But evolutionary biology in its many fields has been tempering and complicating and qualifying this idea that competition alone is the primary engine of evolution, and that a human superpower is cooperation; that that leads to flourishing groups and the flourishing of our species. And the language you used, of the qualities of the forest, of reciprocity and mutuality, are also qualities of high-functioning humans. And that’s a scientific observation in our generation.

Simard:Yes. Social systems, human social systems — you know, ecosystems, they’re built fundamentally in similar ways. They’re what scientists are now calling complex adaptive systems. And that complexity has a pattern, and that pattern is highly evolved. And then how that system works, like through these networks, whether you’re in a human social network or a fungal network in the forest, it’s evolved to, basically, to propagate species, [laughs] which I don’t disagree with Darwinianism in that way, in that, yes, species want to survive and reproduce, but the way they do it is much more sophisticated than we’ve thought about or that we’ve developed our science based on. But even now, it’s becoming more mainstream, known, that endosymbiosis has been highly important in collaboration and cooperation.

Tippett:That was — I think — was that the term that Lynn Margulis initially coined — the endosymbiosis? So describe what that is.

Simard:Yeah, so that’s — in the evolution of eukaryotic cells — and prokaryotic cells, as well — what we’ve discovered now, or scientists have discovered, is that it really — that evolution involved the engulfing of one organism of another, and that led to the development of organelles like mitochondria. Now we know that it’s not just the evolution of a species by itself. And so that endosymbiosis means it’s a symbiosis. They live together, that’s what symbiosis means. “Endo-” means, like, the engulfing and creating the eukaryotic cell with a nucleus and ribosomes and all the other organelles that are really an evolution of this collaboration, this cooperation, and even in the human genome, as we’ve discovered that, that we are full of DNA that is from other organisms — viruses and bacteria, and … So now it’s actually accepted that this is, you know, this has been fundamental to evolution. But it did take a long time, and I think Lynn Margulis took a lot of heat [laughs] for her ideas.

Tippett:She did. Like you, she was ridiculed for a long time. And I — you know, it seems to me that — just as we’re speaking, it seems to me the kind of catchphrase, the soundbite of Darwinianism has been survival of the fittest. But what you have been looking at in the forest and what I feel like more of our attention, including scientific attention, is going towards now is: what is the nature of vitality and flourishing, not mere survival?

Simard:That’s such a great point, you know. I mean, a fit organism puts on biomass, right? They grow. They flourish. They don’t just merely survive. And I’m really glad that you brought that up, because when we manage ecosystems — when I look at forestry practices or agriculture practices or fishing, it’s like we manage them just to survive. We don’t manage them to flourish. We push them to the brink of collapse, right — take as much as we possibly can. And I think, yeah, I think we need to step away and look at how all interrelated the science is with this management and what shape we’re in right now, the trajectory that we’re on. These things are all connected together.

[music: “Bivly” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:After a short break, more with Suzanne Simard.

[music: “Bivly” by Blue Dot Sessions]

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.  Today I’m with the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her research has shown that a forest is a single living organism, and this is transforming our scientific and cultural understanding of trees. She was an inspiration for the scientist at the center of Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory. But a conversation with her also sheds light on the vitality of the living system that is a human family or society. Her book is called Finding the Mother Tree.

One of the things you saw, have seen in the forest, is that the chemicals that are being transmitted are identical to our neurotransmitters; that these processes that we’ve only recently been able to map in the human brain, it sounds like it’s the same process, or it’s a kindred process to that.

Simard:They have similarities it is hard to ignore. [laughs] So yeah, I mean, when I did my studies with my students, we were — we were looking at carbon and nitrogen and water and how it’s moving between plants, and then looking at the stoichiometry of these chemicals, these elements moving together. And I realized the stoichiometry was the same as glutamate — you know, of carbon and nitrogen. And I’m just like, Oh. You know? [laughs] It’s glutamate that’s moving through these; or is it?

Tippett:And say what glutamate is.

Simard:Glutamate is an amino acid. It’s got carbon and nitrogen in it, and it happens to also be one of our neurotransmitters.

Tippett:Yeah, so it’s essential in our bodies, as well.

Simard:Yes. And so I — you know how, as scientists, they have their scales that they work at? I do cross scales, but I don’t really cross into the scale of what the molecules are. I go from the forest down to these — to networks, but I have to rely on other scientists to do that more molecular, detailed, biochemical work. And so other people had discovered that glutamate was one of the main amino acids that actually moves through networks.

Tippett:Yeah, it’s fascinating. And — and — something that you also, along the way, realized is that this way of seeing and redefining what feels like discovery to us and is being discovered and kind of named, in terms of scientific — in scientific vocabulary, is actually, in some ways, you could say that it’s modern science joining, meeting intelligence that has been there in traditional societies and Aboriginal societies. So there have been humans who understood; didn’t have this particular language. But that’s also a conversation you’ve been having kind of around the edges of your own research. Is that correct?

Simard:It is. You know, I’ve had such great fortune to, in the last decade, to work with Aboriginal scientists and Aboriginal people. I got a postdoc, Dr. Teresa Ryan, who is a salmon fishery scientist, and I’d been struggling so much in this Western science sphere, with my colleagues and publishing my work and fighting to get the interpretations accepted of collaboration and wholeness of the ecosystems. And I just started talking to her, and she’s like, “Well, our worldview is that we are part of these ecosystems; that we are all connected together, we can’t be separated from each other, and that yeah, collaboration is all part of it; that the world is an entwined place.” And she even showed me this oral history and writings by a man, subiyay, Bruce Miller of the Skokomish Nation, and he had written about these fungal networks in the soil — and that was before these discoveries — and how his people had known about these networks and how it kept the forest strong for millennia. And I’m like, oh my God, we’ve been so narrowly focused on reductionist science, pulling things apart and then trying to understand them, that we lost our way to actually see these as whole systems.

And so I felt so, suddenly, accepted, you know? I felt like, I belong again. I don’t feel like I’m going to get — my science is going to be …

Now I need to get on track with really moving it forward and not fighting, you know, fighting the criticism. I need to just move forward. And yeah, that was such a blessing for me. It’s just opened up my whole world. And now I’m working a lot with Aboriginal people and just opening up how do we work together, and viewing — you know, Western science is really just the little sister to Aboriginal science, which has been going on for millennia.

Tippett:[laughs] Right — for so much longer. There was someplace, also, you’d been talking about some of your newer work near the end of the book, about understanding the connection between fish and rivers and inland forests and that that’s also a connection that has long been made in these other bodies of intelligence and practice.

Simard:Yeah. So I’m working with the Heiltsuk Nation, which is in the Mid-Coast region of British Columbia. And the Heiltsuk have a large, large territory. They’re actually a combination of many nations — but that’s another story. But so we work with the Heiltsuk Nation in going to a number of watersheds that had different salmon runs. And this is a long, long story, [laughs] but basically what we were after is, we wanted to understand the role of salmon in forest productivity, and building on work of the Aboriginal people who knew about these connections between salmon, trees, and themselves, and also some earlier Western science that had made discoveries that salmon nitrogen was inside of trees and plants and insects. And so we wanted to know what was the pathway —

Tippett:So amazing.

Simard:Yeah, it is absolutely amazing. [laughs] So we were embarking on what is the pathway? How does the salmon get into these trees? And so that’s — yeah, we’ve been unraveling that story.

Tippett:Yeah, that’s amazing. Something that you often have been fascinated and amazed by is also the self-healing properties of the forest and that these are regenerative systems. In your book, you really do also — like the best books, I think, you’re telling multiple stories together; and so the story of the science unfolding, the understanding unfolding, and also what you were living through as a human being. And you did have cancer. And the way I think of this is not anthropomorphizing, but actually applying — letting different kinds of intelligence be in a reciprocal relationship, right? So you experienced — you know, somewhere you said about yourself, you started to understand that we are made for recovery and that there were echoes there with the regenerative system that is a forest that you were studying and living in. Can you say a little bit about that?

Simard:Yeah, that was an incredible learning moment for me, in a very personal and visceral way. I mean, I was — I got breast cancer. It wasn’t great. It had spread to my lymph nodes. You know, I was facing death. And I had to really embrace all that I could to survive. My kids were 10 and 12 at the time, or 12 and 14. And I needed to be there for them, and I was worried that I might not be. And I had to do anything I could. And I learned — you know, I actually learned from my doctors, I learned from my friends, all the other women going through chemo, my family. And we all — you know, we came together as a — [laughs] as a system, really, as a group that, you know, we were helping each other.

Just as an example, my — I call them my BFFs, my “breastless friends forever” — we all lost our breasts. And we all went through chemo together; it was really, really hard. And the way we supported each other by just being there, always. And still, today, almost ten years later, these are some of my best friends, and we’re constantly in contact. And it’s like the network, right? It’s a reinforcing, resilient network. It’s regenerative. It helps you be happy and healthy. And you know, in the forest, that’s how forests regenerate, as we talked about, how seedlings establish within the network of this collaborative system; you know, the old trees, they’re nurturing them and bringing them up. And this is exactly how our own social systems work and what keeps us healthy and alive and productive and happy, too.

[music: “This Is For Our Sins” by Andy Othling]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with the groundbreaking forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

[music: “This Is For Our Sins” by Andy Othling]

I’m fascinated with the language of ecosystem and just — you know, it’s about — that word is about 100 years old in our vocabulary, and strangely, I think it takes about a century for some really tectonic shift in understanding to start to penetrate. I mean, just like Einstein completely reframed the nature of time, but we’re still living in this clockwork world, because [laughs] we haven’t caught up yet. And it does feel to me like ecosystem is a total reframing, and we’re just catching up in all these ways we’ve been talking about and learning about the ecosystem in our bodies and, as you said, with new, cutting-edge scientific tools, seeing the ecosystem in something like a forest.

I just want to read something you wrote, just this incredible passage from your book:“We can think of an ecosystem of wolves, caribou, trees and fungi creating biodiversity just as an orchestra of woodwind, brass, percussion and string musicians assemble into a symphony. Or how our brains, composed of neurons, axons and neurotransmitters, produce thought and compassion. Or the way brothers and sisters join to overcome a trauma like illness or death — the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”

I kept thinking, when I was reading you, about a conversation I was in a few years ago with a bunch of people who were in their 20s. And there was a breakout group, and the title of it was “Communal Scaling.” Communal scaling would be about vulnerabilities and resilience getting interconnected. It would mean that everything wouldn’t just get bigger and bigger. There would be things that got smaller, there would be things that died, and their learnings would be incorporated into the ongoing vitality. In some ways I look back at that, and I think about how the intelligence and the vision in that conversation was — is very much reflected in what you’ve learned about how forest ecosystems work.

Simard:Yeah. I mean, forests are really dynamic places, just like our own societies. And it does involve death, it involves pulling back, it involves learning, or redirecting your resources, sometimes, to learn something new — so it’s not always about growth. It’s not always about becoming bigger and better in a traditional or a visible way that we might measure as wealth, for example, or power. You know, the most powerful parts of our social systems can be the elder that has aged and is guiding younger people, or guiding their culture. And yet, they can be almost invisible in the hierarchy of our social system.

In forests, the same thing. The belowground world is like a perfect example of that. We don’t see it, we don’t necessarily, unless you’re looking belowground. And here it’s doing all the fundamental work, right? These bacteria, the fungi, the archaea, they’re the ones that are cycling the carbon, decomposing things, cycling nitrogen, filtering water, building soil, soil structure. And yet —

Tippett:The caregivers of the forest.

Simard:They are. They’re the fundamental foundation of the forest. They’re the legacy of the forest that helps move it forward.

Tippett:There’s this very quiet — there are these quiet sentences that I just want to put back — from you again: “There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature, its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity.”

Simard:Yeah. You know, species, they don’t live in isolation. It is a world of give-and-take. It is a relationship of silent agreements between species. We all need each other, to create these healthy systems. You know, it — yeah, I can’t emphasize that enough, that the community, the ecosystem is a complex place. And it’s about working together. It’s not just about the parts. They are more than the sum of the parts.

Tippett:Yeah, and there’s a way that that just lands, at least in some of us, as common sense, which is also fascinating, because given how much [laughs] rigorous work you had to do to be able to formulate those ideas inside the field.

Simard:Yeah, I mean, maybe we’ll look back on this period and go, what were we thinking? [laughs] But it’s pervasive, right? Like agriculture — look at agriculture. It’s going through transformations away from industrial, high-input agriculture to more regenerative agriculture. And some systems are almost irretrievable, now that we’ve hammered them so hard with this kind of thinking; like, for example, the crash of our salmon populations. We need to really regenerate these systems and change our thinking so that they can be healthy again.

Tippett:I want to ask you a couple of less serious questions, just things I’m really curious about, but I suspect they might be related to this. So in the book, you have a lot of wonderful photographs, starting with photographs when you were a child with your family, and all the way through. Something that you do in here, and I just think there must be a reason for it, is — you know, often when you have a picture, when we show photographs, we’ll name the ages of children, right? So here’s the first one in the book, I think. It’s your siblings and your mother, and you say, “Kelly, 3; Robyn, 7; and mom, Ellen June, 29. I’m 5.” And then all the way through the book, you name the ages of all the adults, right? So it’s not just the 5-year-old, it’s the 89-year-old. And there’s something — it just — it made me sit up and think about the generations in a different way. And anyway, is there a reason that you did that?

Simard:Well, I wanted to tell the story of how my life was so essential to the questions I asked in my science. And I wanted to tell that story in a way that people could understand and follow; make it simple and so you could trace what was happening. I wanted people to realize that this scientific endeavor was really a life lived. And it wasn’t just my life, it was generations that came before me and the generations that come after me; we’re all linked together. And I felt that that might help people to see that line, if you want to call it a line — it’s not really a line, it’s kind of a cycle. But yeah, I felt like it was a good touchpoint, a touchstone for people to really grasp the development of the story.

Tippett:A word that you use a lot in your writing and when you’re talking about the work you’re doing is “humus.” You say it that way, right?

Simard:Yes.

Tippett:At some point in the last couple of years — I think it was after I read Andrea Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt. I don’t know if you read that.

Simard:I haven’t.

Tippett:But it’s really about the trajectory of, you know, going from natural philosophy, where science saw itself as — it was multidisciplinary and connected to all kinds of other disciplines that we don’t consider to be science now. And anyway, that language of humus, and I started thinking how interesting it was that the root of “humus” and “human” and also “humor” — [laughs] how those three words are so — and there was this line of Henry David Thoreau, in Walden: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould” — which is, I guess, another way to talk about humus — “myself?” I don’t know. I’ve never had anybody to talk to about that with. But … [laughs]

Simard:No, I mean, that’s really brilliant of you. Those root words are, you know — [laughs] it’s connected together. The humus is the foundation of the forest. It’s where the decay happens. It’s where the nutrients are. It’s where most of the carbon in the soil is. It’s an absolutely fundamental part of the being of the forest. And humor, [laughs] for example, is — that is also our, what makes us fundamentally happy and interesting people and gives us — makes us relax and enjoy our lives; happiness; to be human. [laughs] And I love that you’ve made that linkage together. That is brilliant. I love it.

Tippett:[laughs] Oh, OK. Well, thank you. I’m happy to discuss it with someone.

I mean, if I ask you, through this life, this professional life, but also a human life that you’ve spent in the forest, with the forest — not just with the forest, but that as your passionate focus, how would you talk about how that has shaped and evolved, and maybe right now, today, continues to evolve your understanding of what it means to be human?

Simard:Yeah. I think that we all kind of struggle with that, right? That’s kind of our life’s work, is to understand, what is it to be human? What is the meaning of my life? And we go through these changes, these dramatic changes at different points in our life, and I think, as a child, I didn’t really think about it that much, other than that I just loved — [laughs] I just loved this place that was my home, which was the forest. And then I went through all of these incredible journeys of — and not always fun, right — like a lot of difficulty, a lot of frustration and second-guessing myself and — and yet, out of it, I’ve grown into a more whole person, myself. And maybe I’m back to where I was as a kid, right — like, to enjoy, just be happy with this whole life that I have.

Tippett:And you have such a good cheer, I would say both in spite of and because of what you see — the intelligence of nature, the innate intelligence we have the capacity to possess. You’ve said the forest is wired for wisdom, which is such an intriguing idea. I mean, do you — and I know, I mean, there you are in British Columbia, and we’re speaking — we’re speaking in a time in which fires and the consequences of living the way we’ve been living are really coming home, are intensifying. But I feel like you hold onto all the complexity; you also hold onto this capacity for regeneration and self-healing that you’ve seen. And you said forests are wired for wisdom, and I feel like you also think we are, although it’s not necessarily the destination. I don’t know.

Simard:Yeah. You know, I’ve learned through my work, in studying how systems work, that they are regenerative systems. You know, they’re built that way. They’ve evolved that way — that the old help the young, that the large helps the small, and it’s reciprocal, and that this network, this system, will grow. And out of it emerges incredible stuff, like the ability to sequester carbon in our ecosystems, for example; the productivity of a beautiful cathedral forest; the sense of wonder and health and vitality and health you get — that we get when we interact with that incredible place. You know, even in our own societies, look at what we’ve achieved, and look at the joy we’ve developed, listening to the symphony, watching our children grow. It’s just full of joy.

And we’re built for that. And that’s what gives me incredible hope, and honestly, hope is the only way to go, right? And it’s also — that hope is based on understanding. It’s an understanding that our ecosystems are meant to heal themselves, and yes, there are tipping points, and yes, we do — if we don’t make changes, they can collapse, but they can also go the other direction. The system will respond, if we make those choices, and it will rebuild and re-self-organize again in a way that is going to be healthy for maybe even the human population, the human society, right? I think it’s all there. We have all the tools. We have all the fundamental building blocks. We just need to make the right — make good decisions.

Tippett:We have to re-self-organize, as well. [laughs]

Simard:We do.

Tippett:We have to get regenerative, too. [laughs]

Simard:We do. We have to [laughs] re-self-organize. But we’re doing it. We see it. There’s hope everywhere.

[music: “Lakal” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:Suzanne Simard is Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. You can connect with her ongoing work at mothertreeproject.org. Her book is called Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

[music: “Lakal” by Blue Dot Sessions]

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Jhaleh Akhavan, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Ben Katt, Gautam Srikishan, Lillie Benowitz, April Adamson, Ashley Her, and Matt Martinez.

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

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The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of themEmbodiment. Photo by Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

Joe Gough is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Sussex in the UK.

Edited bySally Davies

30 August 2021 (aeon.co)

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Someone’s probably told you before that something you thought, felt or feared was ‘all in your mind’. I’m here to tell you something else: there’s no such thing as the mind and nothing is mental. I call this the ‘no mind thesis’. The no-mind thesis is entirely compatible with the idea that people are conscious, and that they think, feel, believe, desire and so on. What it’s not compatible with is the notion that being conscious, thinking, feeling, believing, desiring and so on are mental, part of the mind, or done by the mind.

The no-mind thesis doesn’t mean that people are ‘merely bodies’. Instead, it means that, when faced with a whole person, we shouldn’t think that they can be divided into a ‘mind’ and a ‘body’, or that their properties can be neatly carved up between the ‘mental’ and the ‘non-mental’. It’s notable that Homeric Greek lacks terms that can be consistently translated as ‘mind’ and ‘body’. In Homer, we find a view of people as a coherent collection of communicating parts – ‘the spirit inside my breast drives me’; ‘my legs and arms are willing’. A similar view of human beings, as a big bundle of overlapping, intelligent systems in near-constant communication, is increasingly defended in cognitive science and biology.

The terms mind and mental are used in so many ways and have such a chequered history that they carry more baggage than meaning. Ideas of the mind and the mental are simultaneously ambiguous and misleading, especially in various important areas of science and medicine. When people talk of ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’, the no-mind thesis doesn’t deny that they’re talking about something – on the contrary, they’re often talking about too many things at once. Sometimes, when speaking of ‘the mind’, people really mean agency; other times, cognition; still others, consciousness; some uses of ‘mental’ really mean psychiatric; others psychological; others still immaterial; and yet others, something else.

This conceptual blurriness is fatal to the usefulness of the idea of ‘the mind’. To be fair, many concepts build bridges: they exhibit a specific, generally harmless kind of ambiguity called polysemy, with slightly different meanings in different contexts. The flexibility and elasticity of polysemy binds disparate areas of research and practice together, priming people to recognise their similarities and interrelatedness. For example, if a computer scientist talks about ‘computation’, they normally mean something slightly different than an engineer, a cognitive scientist or someone chatting with a friend means. The overarching concept of computation links all these conversations together, helping us to spot the commonalities between them.

The problem is that making links like this isn’t always a good idea. Sometimes it spurs creative interactions between different areas of expertise, and offers helpful analogies that would otherwise be hard to spot. But other instances of polysemy lead to harmful conflations and damaging analogies. They make people talk past each other, or become invested in defending or attacking certain concepts rather than identifying their shared goals. This can cement misunderstandings and stigma.

You’ve got to give it to mind and mental: they’re among the most polysemous concepts going around. Lawyers talk of ‘mental’ capacity, psychiatrists talk of ‘mental illness’, cognitive scientists claim to study ‘the mind’, as do psychologists, and as do some philosophers; many people talk of a ‘mind-body problem’, and many people wonder whether it’s OK to eat animals depending on whether they ‘have a mind’. These are only a few of many more examples. In each case, mind and mental mean something different: sometimes subtly different, sometimes not-so-subtly.

In such high-stakes domains, it’s vital to be clear. Many people are all too ready to believe that the problems of the ‘mentally ill’ are ‘all in their mind’. I’ve never heard anyone doubt that a heart problem can lead to problems outside the heart, but I’ve regularly had to explain to friends and family that ‘mental’ illnesses can have physiological effects outside ‘the mind’. Why do people so often find one more mysterious and apparently surprising than the other? It’s because many of the bridges built by mind and mental are bridges that it’s time to burn, once and for all.

The psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and ‘antipsychiatrist’ Thomas Szasz argued that there was no such thing as mental illness. He believed that mental illnesses were ‘problems of living’, things that made it hard to live well because they were bound up with personal conflicts, bad habits and moral faults. Therefore, mental illness was the sufferer’s own personal responsibility. As a consequence, Szasz claimed that psychiatry should be abolished as a medical discipline, since it had nothing to treat. If a person’s symptoms had a physiological basis, then they were physical disorders of the brain rather than ‘mental’ ones. And if the symptoms had no physiological basis, Szasz claimed, then they didn’t amount to a true ‘illness’.

This argument relied heavily on the idea that mental illnesses are categorically distinct from ‘physiological’ ones. It’s an instance of how the dualistic connotations of mind, associated with certain metaphysical theories of the mental, can be imported inappropriately into psychiatry. Yet many mental illnesses have physiological causes and effects, and even those with no clear physiological cause often warrant medical intervention, because the people suffering from such conditions still deserve medical help.

In contrast with Szasz, I believe that mental illnesses are mental only in that they are psychiatric. Ordinary understandings of the mind, and what is and isn’t part of it, have nothing to do with it. Perception is generally considered to be mental, a part of the mind – yet, while medicine considers deafness and blindness to be disorders of perception, it doesn’t class them as mental illnesses. Why? The answer is obvious: because psychiatrists generally aren’t the best doctors to treat deafness and blindness (if they need treatment, which many Deaf people in particular would reject).

When people talk about ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’ in psychiatry, my first thought is always ‘What exactly do they mean?’ – which precise meaning of mind and mental are they drawing on, which other area are they trying to appeal to, which bridge are they trying to get me to cross? A ‘mental’ illness is just an illness that psychiatry is equipped to deal with. That’s determined as much by practical considerations about the skills psychiatrists have to offer, as it is by theoretical or philosophical factors. But this pragmatic approach hides itself behind appeals to ‘mental illness’. In many contexts, the term mental tends to bring along inappropriate and stigmatising connotations – showing that the wrong bridges have been built.

Convincing others that your pain is not ‘mental’ might be how you defended the reality of your condition

Imagine that you suffer from long-term, chronic pain. You go to the latest in a series of doctors: by this point, and especially if you are a member of a marginalised group (a woman or person of colour, say), doctors might have dismissed or disbelieved you; they might have assumed you were exaggerating your pain, or perhaps that you were a hypochondriac. After some tests, and some questions, you’re eventually told that your chronic pain is a mental illness, and referred to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, you are told, will not prescribe drugs or surgery, but will instead prescribe psychotherapy, also known as ‘talk therapy’, and occasionally, ‘mental therapy’.

You might, quite reasonably, think that this doctor disbelieves you too. You know there is really something wrong, and that your pain is real, but the doctor is here telling you that your illness is mental, and in need of mental treatment. Perhaps they think that you have a delusion, or that you’re lying because of some kind of personality disorder? Convincing friends, family and colleagues – not to mention medical professionals – that your pain is not ‘mental’ might well be how you have defended the reality of your condition. Indeed, The Guardian recently published a series of articles investigating chronic pain, one of which was headlined: ‘Sufferers of Chronic Pain Have Long Been Told It’s All in Their Head. We Now Know That’s Wrong’. In other mainstream pieces on the topic, being referred to a psychiatrist is seen as tantamount to being disbelieved, dismissed or called a hypochondriac. Some advocates appear to argue that fibromyalgia (a condition that causes chronic pain) should not be considered a psychiatric condition because it is ‘real’ and not ‘imagined’.

It’s understandable that you might be annoyed for your condition to be branded a ‘mental illness’. But what about your doctor – what did they want you to take away from that interaction? It might well be that they absolutely believed that you were in severe, involuntary pain, caused by heightened sensitisation of the peripheral nervous system as a result of ‘rewiring’. Pain that results from rewiring of the nervous system is known as ‘nociplastic pain’, recently recognised as a highly medically significant category of pain. They don’t necessarily think you’re lying or delusional. In invoking ‘mental illness’, what they might have meant is only that it might be best treated by talk therapy, and best managed and understood by a psychiatrist.

Despite your legitimate annoyance, your doctor might also be correct. The term mental in the phrase ‘mental illness’ just means psychiatric. Your doctor might know that psychiatrists and psychiatric researchers continue to play an important part in the recognition and study of nociplastic pain. They might be optimistic about the effectiveness of talk therapy, because they know it’s effective at alleviating many of the symptoms of fibromyalgia and chronic pain, perhaps even to reduce the pain itself. They might also have read a recent review that found that talk therapy can be effective as a means of intervening on the immune system – indeed, as effective at reducing the inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis as common medications.

So you and your doctor might actually agree about the nature of your condition – and yet, you are left feeling understandably let down by your referral to a psychiatrist. Something has gone very wrong here. The problem, I think, is the idea that psychiatry deals with ‘mental illnesses’, disorders of the mind. Indeed, it’s common wisdom that mental illnesses are disorders of the mind, and that psychiatry treats mental illnesses. If you look in dictionaries, textbooks or diagnostic classifications, this is the characterisation of psychiatry and its domain that you’ll find. The key problem is that mind and mental come with associations that are wildly inappropriate when characterising a medical discipline – ‘mental’ can, after all, be contrasted with ‘real’, ‘biological’, and ‘physical’.

What we have is a problem of miscommunication, stemming from the messiness of the ideas of the mind and the mental. The terms mind and mental can be used many ways and can carry many different meanings, sometimes implying a lack of reality, sometimes indicating a relationship to psychiatry – and sometimes meaning something else entirely.

Depression and schizophrenia are no more ‘all in the mind’ than chronic pain

Imagine, instead, that your doctor told you that you had a ‘psychiatric’ illness, but stressed that psychiatric illness is not ‘mental’ in any important sense. Imagine if they told you that you might be prescribed ‘talk therapy’, but emphasised that many conditions that are not ‘in the mind’ are amenable to talk therapy, which can affect almost all of the ‘plastic’, malleable parts of a human being. Imagine, even more optimistically, that people did not generally infer that categorising an illness as psychiatric made it automatically mental, or think that because a condition can be affected by ‘mental’ states such as one’s beliefs or expectations, that it was therefore non-biological or non-physical or ‘all in the mind’.

Not bringing in ideas of the mind and the mental makes for much easier communication. You might go away from such a conversation with your doctor feeling like you’d been believed, and that psychiatry could help you. Yet your doctor has not actually done anything differently; beyond assuaging your concern that your illness isn’t taken seriously, the course of action is otherwise exactly the same. While chronic pain might be psychiatric, it’s not imaginary or non-biological – and the terms mind and mental blur all these things together. The problems of the mind and the mental are not confined to the treatment of chronic pain. It adds to the stigma surrounding other psychiatric illnesses to describe them as ‘mental’ too: depression and schizophrenia are no more ‘all in the mind’ than chronic pain.

As well as reinforcing the stigma around mental illness, the messiness of mental also fuels misguided arguments for radical reforms to (and even the abolition of) psychiatry as a medical discipline. At the other extreme from Szasz’s antipsychiatry views, many people argue for a merger of psychiatry and neurology. This relies on certain philosophical ‘theories of mind’, popular in cognitive science: some people think that the mind is the brain; others think that the mind is the software that runs on the brain, the way that Windows runs on my laptop. This argument relies on the notion that, because psychiatry deals with ‘mental’ illness, it should defer to philosophical views of the ‘mind’ popular in cognitive science. The issue is that the ‘mental’ in mental illness just means psychiatric, which is not what these philosophers and scientists are talking about.

As a result, we should be suspicious of appeals to the mind and the mental in psychiatry. Psychiatric patients certainly don’t need the burden of any extra stigma, and understanding psychiatric conditions is difficult enough without the constant risk of conflation and miscommunication. Without a reason to retain them, we should eject the concepts of ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’ from psychiatry. And not just there: the concepts are wreaking havoc in cognitive science and psychology too.

Just as psychiatry is meant to be the branch of medicine dealing with mental illnesses, so cognitive science and psychology are supposedly the sciences concerned with the study of the mind. However, psychology and cognitive science do not study quite the same thing. Disciplines such as personality psychometrics are historically a core part of psychology, but only dubiously part of cognitive science at all. Conversely, cognitive science has inherited broader interests in self-organisation, information processing and adaptive behaviour from some of its predecessors, especially cybernetics. The domains of psychology and cognitive science also do not line up with the domain of psychiatry. Perception remains firmly within the domain of psychology and cognitive science, but blindness and deafness are not psychiatric illnesses (again, even if/when they are illnesses at all).

The domains of psychology and cognitive science also include capacities that you probably don’t mean to invoke when you talk about ‘the mind’ in normal life. For example, there are cognitive models that cover the way organisms survive via homeostasis (maintaining stable internal parameters in the body such as heart-rate and blood temperature) and allostasis (adjusting those parameters and behaviour depending on the context).

There are also ways of mapping immunity in cognitive terms. In the 1960s and ’70s, the work of the US psychologist Robert Ader uncovered a surprising feature of the immune system. He trained rats to avoid a harmless sweetener by administering it alongside a sickness-inducing chemical called cyclophosphamide. When testing that the training had worked, by administering just the sweetener, the rats began to die. The more sweetener, the faster they died. This was a mystery. It turned out that cyclophosphamide is an ‘immunosuppressant’, a chemical that turns off the immune system. The immune system had ‘learned’ to turn off in response to the sweetener alone, and this left the rats vulnerable to normally harmless pathogens in their environment, which killed them. In other words, Ader discovered that the immune system is amenable to classic Pavlovian conditioning.

Should we count the immune system as ‘mental’ because it’s psychological and cognitive?

This led to the creation of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’, an area that involves, among other things, psychologists who study the immune system. Later research uncovered many more exciting facts about the ‘wiring’ and signals that link the immune system and the brain. The immune system responds in complex ways to stress and trauma – an imbalance in the immune system is associated with several trauma-related psychiatric illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder (both of which are often linked to trauma). The immune system also plays important roles in controlling social behaviour. For example, some scientists believe depression could sometimes be a side-effect of your immune system reducing your social motivation in order to minimise the risk of spreading disease; the idea is that your immune system has been triggered into possessing an erroneous ‘belief’ that you are infectious.

Sticking to the construal of cognitive science and psychology as studying ‘the mind’ creates a misleading impression of what these disciplines are up to, and raises potentially pointless questions such as whether we should count the immune system and its capacities as ‘mental’ because it’s psychological and cognitive. Once again, the bridges built by mind and mental have proved unhelpful. Psychoneuroimmunology has had a hard time gaining widespread acceptance, especially among immunologists. In large part, this is because it is widely counted as a form of ‘mind-body medicine’, a term that applies to as much chicanery and overblown self-help as it does to legitimate medical research. The bridges built between a kind of sloppy holism, con artistry and psychoneuroimmunology owe much to mind and mental, and have done little to help the disciplines they supposedly serve.

It’s much better, instead, to talk of psychology as the study of the psychological, and cognitive science as the study of the cognitive. This might seem circular, but it only reflects the fact these disciplines are in charge of discovering their domains, and that we simply don’t know enough yet to say exactly what those domains should be in totally independent terms. No-one has any trouble describing physics as studying the physical, and the idea that it’s the study of fundamental laws of motion and contact has long since been abandoned.

When we see the concepts of mind and mental doing such harm, we have good reason to get rid of them. Rather than talk about ‘minds’ and ‘the mental’, we would be better off discussing the more precise and helpful concepts relevant to what we’re doing. The good news is that they already exist for the most part, and work perfectly well once their connections with mind and mental are broken. Psychology has psychological, cognitive science cognitive, and psychiatry psychiatric. Outside these areas, there are many, many more – consciousness, imagination, responsibility, agency, thought, memory, to name but a few. Feminist work on relational autonomy and the relational self, and historical precursors such as Homer provide promising avenues for developing conceptions of people that don’t call on the notion of mind – notions according to which people are coherent wholes, not because they have some unifying inner core, but because of the way they, their relationships and their environments conjoin.

The conclusion is that there is no such thing as a mind, and nothing is mental – even though you and I both think, feel, believe, desire and dream. Whenever you come across the terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ – especially when they bear a lot of argumentative weight – you should wonder what they actually mean, and ask yourself what equivocations are hiding below the surface.

To read more about ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.

Philosophy of mindMetaphysicsPsychiatry and psychotherapy