Biomimicry, Interdependence
What the world wide web can learn from the wood wide web about how sustainable, interdependent, life-giving systems work


Illustration by Josh Kramer.

"The wood wide web is ancient, but it’s new to us. We owe much of our knowledge to Suzanne Simard, a Canadian ecologist who has spent her career revealing the cooperative nature of forests. In field experiments beginning in the 1980s, Simard traced the ways roots and symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi commingled beneath the surface of the soil in the old-growth forests of British Columbia. Enmeshed in a fungal embrace, she discovered, trees communicate, sending chemical warning signals to one another and passing sugar, water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus between species. Wild forests operate, Simard wrote, as 'an intelligent system, perceptive and responsive.'

"...The wood wide web has been a powerhouse metaphor for popularizing the mutualistic relationships of healthy forests. But like a struggling forest, the (world wide) web is no longer healthy. It has been wounded and depleted in the pursuit of profit. Going online today is not an invigorating walk through a green woodland—it’s rush-hour traffic alongside a freeway median of diseased trees, littered with the detritus of late capitalism. If we want to repair this damage, we must look to the wisdom of the forest and listen to ecologists like Simard when they tell us just how sustainable, interdependent, life-giving systems work." - Claire L. Evans

Article: The Word for Web is Forest