Minding the Earth, Mending the World by Susan Murphy

Author:Susan Murphy [Murphy, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023819
Publisher: Counterpoint

CHAPTER SEVEN

Earthed

We are the only protectors, and we are the thing that needs to be protected, and we are what it needs to be protected from.

Robert Hass

One time I was driving home with Aboriginal elder Uncle Max Harrison through his tribal Yuin country—forested, mountainous far south coast New South Wales—when he suddenly decided we should veer off the highway and up a track to the top of an escarpment to check some country that had been badly burned in a recent bushfire. He wanted to see how the mossy hanging swamps up there, the ones that filter the headwaters of all the little feeder creeks to the big rivers below, were recovering from the burn.

What we found was fascinating. Where the fire had blackened the heath and trees, the moss beneath was either barely moist to the touch or crumbly dry. Yet immediately uphill from there, above the fire line, we found the mosses verdant and bulging with water. How was it possible for all the water up there not to be draining freely down a slope to wet the scorched and desiccated area below?

Uncle Max explained: ‘Well you wouldn’t give great big gulps of water to some poor person suffering serious burns, would you? Those fellas up there, they’re holding it back, just giving little sips to these burnt fellas down here.’

It was an extraordinary moment of seeing right through the illusion of separable parts to the plain realisation of an inseparable forest community working—in fact, thinking—as a whole. Suddenly the mind of the forest was evident, visible in the way it impinged on every part of what we were seeing. Each one of these fellas—trees, mosses, birds, lizards, beetles, ants, waters, and also us humans—was suddenly clearly saying to the other: ‘I am also you.’

Forestry ecology is now beginning to catch up with indigenous understanding of the way plants interact to help each other survive. Darwinism has been crudely interpreted by an aggressively competitive era as individuals competing for resources at the expense of other individuals. The sharing of resources is invisible to the eye that sees only the workings of individual advantage. The ‘fitness’ in ‘the survival of the fittest’ referred as much to ‘good fit’ as it did to ‘most fit and healthy’.

‘Good fit’ is a fine way to understand elaborated community, or ecological niche. The most successful plant communities have a high diversity of species that coexist in intricate relationships of beneficial mutuality. Looking only at what can be detected above ground, we miss the vast, subtle benevolence of the below-ground neural network of the forest community. Subsoil fungi contribute massively to the subtle network by which forest members share carbon dioxide and nitrogen, by providing a maze of threadlike underground channels that connect the root systems of individual trees—particularly radiating out from the vast roots of the grand old ‘mother trees’ that are beginning the slow process of dying, allowing them to transfer their immense legacy of nutrients through the fungal network to young saplings coming up.

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