What Trees Can Teach us About Good Neighborhoods

There is a paradigm shift going on in the realm of forestry. For years there had been a consensus among ecologists that all trees were independent operators, each tree an island unto itself, the forest a place of limited, scarce resources where trees competed with each other. Trees were seen as “disconnected loners, competing for water, nutrients and sunlight, with the winners shading out the losers and sucking them dry.”

But that’s beginning to change. When ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered underground connectivity between trees in her field experiments, scientists began to see the…