And what it means for saving forests
By Benjamin Alva Polley EBS COLUMNIST
On Feb. 27, 2026 (John Steinbeck’s birthday), a friend wrote to thank me for “helping set the record straight on wolves in Yellowstone” and then added a request: could I do the same for Richard Powers’ novel, “The Overstory,” and the much-debated idea that trees help one another through a “wood wide web” of fungi? It was a reminder that, in the age of viral science narratives, people want both enchantment and accuracy. The question is whether we have to choose.
The story that has captured the public imagination is a powerful one. In bestsellers like “The Overstory” and Suzanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree,” forests are portrayed as cooperative societies. Ancient “mother trees” nurture their young through underground fungal networks, sharing carbon and other nutrients, passing along biochemical warnings, perhaps even recognizing kin. It is a vision that replaces the old “nature red in tooth and claw” with a gentler picture of interdependence and reciprocity.
Scientists, however, have been pushing back. A major 2023 review in Nature Ecology & Evolution, led by Justine Karst at the University of Alberta, challenged some of the most sweeping claims. The researchers examined three pillars of the “wood-wide web” story.
First, they found that the idea of vast, universal fungal networks linking entire forests rests on surprisingly thin ground. Of the world’s roughly 73,300 tree species, mycorrhizal networks have been rigorously mapped in only two. That is hardly enough to justify talk of a global arboreal internet. Montana is home to 30 native tree species, and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has only about a dozen. Despite low diversity, the ecosystem is heavily forested, dominated by coniferous trees, with lodgepole pine accounting for roughly 80% of the forest canopy.
Second, while studies do show that carbon can move between trees through shared fungal partners, the amounts are often minuscule. In at least one experiment, less than 1% of a tree’s carbon budget appeared to come from neighbors—a nutritional drizzle, not a lifeline. For critics, this suggests we are mistaking a faint physiological curiosity for a robust support system.
Third, the charismatic notion of “mother trees” preferentially feeding their own offspring is, in the eyes of many researchers, more metaphor than fact. Claims that trees recognize their kin and deliberately direct resources their way slide quickly into what they call “plant personification,” the projection of human motives and emotions onto beings that do not share our nervous systems.
These scientists are not villains for discounting fascinating theories. Their concern is that beautiful stories, repeated often enough, harden into dogma. Overstated claims about cooperative forests can morph into misleading guidance for land managers, who might favor “letting nature be” when more active, evidence-based interventions are needed to help forests survive climate change, wildfire and invasive pests. In this view, tamping down hype is not anti-conservation; it is conservation done carefully.
And yet, the critics’ case is not the whole story either.
Simard and her supporters argue that what, in the lab, appears to be “anthropomorphism” is, in practice, a communication strategy. Words like “mother,” “talking,” and “sharing” are deliberate choices meant to bridge the gap between technical ecology and human feeling. You could say that trees exchange carbon through differential concentration gradients along mycorrhizal hyphae; or you could say that, in a dark soil world, trees are whispering. Only one of these phrases is likely to persuade a child or a voter that forests matter.
There is also the question of who is allowed to tell big, intuitive stories about nature.
Simard has described the backlash to her work as, at times, intensely personal, complete with letters imploring her university to rein her in. She has suggested that academic rivalry, sexism, and even corporate logging interests play a role in the ferocity of the response.
Let’s not forget that many scientific studies are funded by industry, which can influence the study in a certain way. Her work doesn’t just tweak a few hypotheses; it challenges an industry model built on clearcuts and monocultures by suggesting that relationships and diversity within forests have value that can’t be reduced to board-feet.
And while the scale and intent of underground sharing remain contested, few scientists deny that mycorrhizal connections exist or that nutrients do, in fact, move through them. The question is not whether forests are interconnected, but how much, how often, and in ways that matter for survival and reproduction. That is an open, evolving field of inquiry, and our tools and frameworks may still be catching up to the messy, subtle reality of life belowground.
It is also worth noting that Simard’s work resonates strongly with many Indigenous knowledge systems, which have long described forests as communities of relational beings rather than inert backdrops for human use. Western science is only beginning to grapple with the possibility that multiple ways of knowing: empirical, experiential and cultural approaches might all have something to contribute to how we care for the living world.
So where does that leave the curious reader, caught between a lyrical novel, a charismatic scientist, and a stern academic review? One option is to retreat to cynicism: if the “wood-wide web” is partly myth, we might be tempted to discard it entirely. Another is to surrender uncritically to the story we prefer, treating trees as stand-ins for our best selves and ignoring inconvenient data.
There is a third path. We can insist on rigorous science, on careful statistics, replication and sober language in the literature while also allowing a bit of magic and mystery into how we talk about the world in public. It is possible to say, “We don’t yet know how extensive these networks are,” and still feel awe at the fact that a fungus can knit together the roots of different species at all. It is possible to admit that “mother tree” is a metaphor and still let it change how we walk through a forest.
At a time of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, a slight bias toward empathy is not a bug; it may be a survival feature. If a more relational story about trees nudges us away from clearcuts and toward conservation, from treating forests as warehouses to seeing them as communities, that is not the worst kind of error to make.
We should keep asking hard questions about what is real beneath the forest floor. But in the meantime, as we wait for better maps of the underground, it might be wise to act as though the web is there, not because the myth is perfect, but because the cost of caring too much about forests is vanishingly small compared with the cost of not caring enough.
Benjamin Alva Polley is a place-based storyteller. His words have been published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Field & Stream, The Guardian, Men’s Journal, Outside, Popular Science, Sierra, and WWF, among other notable outlets, and are available on his website.
