Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has published more than 170 articles on forest science and plant intelligence, but she is best known for her theory of the “Mother Tree”—a phenomenon that suggests forests are sustained in large part by central, large trees that share nutrients with younger saplings through networks of mycorrhiza fungi. Facing an uncertain future for themselves, Mother Trees pass their life force to their offspring to help them prepare for changes ahead. In this way, nature has given us a model for cooperative survival.
We often say it is up to the new generation to save the planet, but there’s a determined fortitude in our elders. I’m thinking of my own mother, who fights for the earth not for the sake of her own future, but for our collective “obligation to endure,” as Rachel Carson, the modern mother of the environmental movement, once said. “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself,” she wrote. It is in our basic interest—and perhaps our very nature—to care for a future ecology.
I used to marvel at my mother’s muscular biceps and broad shoulders, which she credited to climbing trees behind her New Jersey subdivision.
When she was growing up, her family would pile into their Buick for the long trek back to Crowley, Louisiana to spend the summer with relatives. Decades later, my teenage summer treks were made in reverse—visiting Mom in New York, working in a law firm mailroom and scarfing down hotdogs from the Greek vendor at her West 96th Street corner.
My mother channeled her passion for outdoors into school reform, helping New York City Outward Bound to integrate adventure-based learning into public schools. She’s led camping trips on islands in New York Harbor and hiked the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. In retirement, her passion for open skies fuels her climate activism. Trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, she speaks frequently to her local council in Marin County, California, where she lives now.
As age and mortality start to claim her contemporaries, my mother tenaciously persists. Almost eighty-three, she has begun contemplating her own epilogue and what it means to leave the work unfinished.
In December 2023, Mom broke her shoulder ice skating with my family. The open fracture required surgery to implant a metal plate on her right humerus, which came loose within weeks and required another surgery. In the process, the doctors discovered possible blood lymphoma.
"As age and mortality start to claim her contemporaries, my mother tenaciously persists. Almost eighty-three, she has begun contemplating her own epilogue and what it means to leave the work unfinished."
Shortly before her accident, I had begun work on a book about Louisiana and climate change. That summer of 2023, temperature records were breaking in Beijing, Kuwait, Iraq, and Algeria. The world felt like it would never cool. In mid-July, Texas regulators reported that pipeline operators were venting hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic methane and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) because of heat-related pressure. Explosions erupted in Louisiana at a Marathon Petroleum Refinery and at Dow’s petrochemical operations. The average temperature for July in Louisiana was the highest ever, which was followed by record highs in August, September, and October. An unthinkable drought in subtropical New Orleans lit a marshland fire that smoldered for weeks. Its early morning “super fog” caused a 168-car pile-up on Interstate 55 that killed seven people on October 23. By New Year’s Eve, we had seen the hottest year ever recorded in modern times.
As my mother fought to recover from her own ailments, I was hunched over my laptop with the curtains pulled, and I started experiencing panic attacks. One morning, I woke up in crippling pain, due to a pinched nerve in my shoulder that left me unable to sit or work for weeks. It felt akin to an impalement.
We go from believing we can change the world, to hoping we can protect our own bodies. And then, we realize that sometimes the only thing we can control is our intention for the day.
Even out on the West Coast, Mom still reads the New York Times every day, sometimes well into night. Deep in the opinion section, she shakes her head in dismay.
When I started fighting with my writer’s anxiety about climate anxiety, she told me, “Get mad.” Temperatures were smashing records and Canadian wildfires were smoking out U.S. cities. “Let your anger carry you.”
I began to search for ways to process what was happening to our planet. Researchers on the matter suggest we begin with breaking what they called the “spiral of silence.” According to a 2016 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, about a third of Americans never talk about global warming. “People concerned about the climate avoid voicing their worry because they rarely hear others discussing the topic, and thus the spiral continues,” wrote Yale’s Angus McLean.
[Read this: 5 Reasons to Plant a Tree]
It occurred to me that speaking our fears aloud is not merely a therapeutic way to combat paralysis around the topic, but necessary to ensure knowledge is passed on. Simard’s Mother Trees have been doing this for millennia. She found that trees who have survived difficult times actually transfer their “wisdom” to younger saplings. Sensing threats, they synchronize carbon transfers to the next generation.
My mother is a unique force: a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania, Harvard doctorate, and among other things, an effusive traveler. She has a gift for connecting with strangers: cab drivers, doormen, grocery clerks, newspaper vendors. Her longevity and perpetual motion seem to reinforce a virtuous cycle. When I would call her from college, overwhelmed by assignments, her question and message was consistent: have you made your bed? Small things lead to big things. One foot in front of the other.
Six weeks after my injury, I finally climbed back into my desk chair to resume my research on my home state.
Louisiana’s famous “laissez-faire” attitude has historically extended to its stance on protecting the environment, where short-term economic gain is too often prioritized over the long-term health of the state’s abundant natural resources. Coastal lands and forests—once full of old growth timber, fisheries, and migratory waterfowl that darkened the skies—have been sacrificed for the money that can be extracted from them. When immigrants came to Louisiana, they often made their fortune, or at least their livelihood, from the bounty of the land: the Croatian oyster harvesters, the Post-Reconstruction lumber barons, Cajun and Vietnamese fishermen, cotton and sugar cane plantations, oil and gas roustabouts.
My own grandfather arrived in Baton Rouge aboard a steamer from New York to work for Standard Oil in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. He boarded the SSG Stewart in June and arrived in Louisiana three weeks later. “The land of the Kingfish,” my grandfather recalls in his papers.
"It occurred to me that speaking our fears aloud is not merely a therapeutic way to combat paralysis around the topic, but necessary to ensure knowledge is passed on."
My grandparents were married by the time Huey Long was shot by Dr. Carl Weiss’s 32-caliber pistol. They lived and entertained off campus on Lover’s Lane, then considered the countryside. They loved Baton Rouge so much that, when my grandfather rose through the company ranks and was reassigned to New York headquarters, my grandmother cried. Neither wanted to leave. He described it as “wrenching.”
“Baton Rouge was as pleasant a place to live as anywhere in the world,” he wrote. “It was small enough (at around 35,000) so that you knew everyone from the governor on down… where you could walk down the main drag on Second Street on any day, and you would know practically everyone you passed.”
Louisiana’s capital city has since grown, in heavy industry and suburban sprawl. When I lived in Spanish Town and worked for The Advocate in the early 2000s, the odor of burned engine grease from the nearby refineries often drifted over the neighborhood. I never knew the Baton Rouge my grandparents did, but my grandmother’s nostalgia for Louisiana won her the concession to return after my grandfather’s retirement from New York. Instead of the wholly changed Red Stick, they settled in rural Crowley, where she could enjoy the companionship of her cousins, screened porches, and a large kitchen of rocking chairs and languid conversations. Their presence there brought my mom to Louisiana in those summers and ultimately planted me here to do this work.
By then, the industry that brought so many families to the shores of the Mississippi River was gaining a darker reputation, one marked by the devastation of much of Louisiana’s coastal marshes by way of poor waste disposal, canals, and subsidence. The once high-flying promise of oil has left behind idled workers and struggling communities. Oil revenues from royalties and severance taxes account for less than 8% of the state budget, compared to as much as 50% in the 1970s. Layoffs are more common, and sudden, due to fluctuations in global energy prices. Accidents and spills threaten not just the workers, but also the communities nearby. And sometimes, there is a smell on the highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans coming from over the tree line, where gas flares from Shell Norco light up the southern horizon.
[Read this: In Defense of the “Trash Tree”]
Rationales for delaying climate action here often hinge on promises of new technologies to magically remove greenhouse gases or deliver emission free energy. Sixty years ago, at the very beginning of the age of climate activism, Carson challenged this thinking. “It is a disservice to humanity to hold out the hope that the solution will come suddenly, in a master single master stroke.” She said, as my mother says, that the solution comes slowly. “One step at a time.”
"We all do our best to endure. But our chances for success are greatly enhanced by the mother trees in our midst."
When I started writing again, I began with an editorial about finding hope in precarious places. My panic attacks subsided, and my sleep began improving. By May, my mother was on the mend. The lymphoma turned out to be a false positive. She was renewing her environmental activism and planning trips. I traveled to meet her last summer in New York City, where we made a hopeful jaunt to her old neighborhood on West 96th Street to see if the Greek hotdog vendor was still there. “He was such a nice man,” she said. “He used to loan me money for the New York Times.” When we emerged up the stairs at 96th Street and Central Park West, he was gone. He would have to be in his eighties now. We saw, instead, a larger truck operation in his old spot.
There are few like my mom still left. But her resilience stands as a powerful model for addressing the extended challenges we continue to face. I returned to my work in New Orleans and left her to the backend of her trip up to Northampton for her sixtieth college reunion. We all do our best to endure. But our chances for success are greatly enhanced by the mother trees in our midst.
