Humanity is facing extinction on multiple fronts: climate apocalypse, plague, AI, nuclear war — the list goes on. Yet, we dither, reduced to paralysis. The problem is, our way of viewing the world is antiquated, outdated, increasingly toxic, like a piece of fish rotting, forgotten in your refrigerator long ago. Maybe, before humankind checks out and hands over the world to insects, we should update our operating system.
To that end, I was encouraged to read about Suzanne Simard’s new discoveries revealing the wisdom of the forest; her work dovetailed with a new paradigm I wrote about years ago, offering us all hope. Both explore underground networks of rhizomes, whether literal or metaphorical.
Back in the 1990s, while getting my counseling degree at Antioch New England Graduate School, I fell in love with the work of pioneering social worker Lynn Hoffman. I was drawn to her because she scorned abstract psychological theories, preferring to discuss human creativity and the art of bonding with others.
Hoffman spurned conventional thinking rooted in hierarchies and sociological systems. Instead, she promoted neighborly ways of being — something we desperately need today in a nation so polarized that, some say, we are on the verge of civil war.
She rejected the conventional metaphor that family therapy was either a top-down hierarchy, like the structure of a tree, or the gears of a tightly meshed machine. She sought a more flexible, interactive model based on patterns in nature.
She found what she was looking for in the work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who had proposed “rhizome” as a new metaphor based on the complex branching stem of fungi we now call mycelium. Because mycelia have no center, they are neither a rigid system derived from technology nor a tree that grows from top to bottom by predictable branching.
Here’s a more formal definition by Professor Katina Rogers:
“The rhizome model is a contrast to the traditional model of thought, which is often structured like a tree… In the rhizome model, there is no single point of origin or fixed center, but instead, a multitude of entry and exit points. The rhizome is not a unified whole, but a network of interconnections and flows that can be constantly reconfigured.”
For Hoffman, the rhizome was more than a metaphor for family therapy; it was an exciting new paradigm for society. By moving beyond hierarchical and mechanical models “to a pulsing aliveness,” it represented the future.
Hoffman foresaw the gradual breakdown of conventional politics in a major shift away from the system metaphor, “with its emphasis on symmetry, order and a return to the same, to the rhizome with its more messy and horizontal plane of endless relations.”
Hoffman predicted that the 21st Century would become known as the Rhizome Century. And if she is proved right, what a wonderful world it would be, as envisioned by Peggy Sax, Hoffman’s collaborator:
In the future, what counts as an ethical response will require an entirely different focus of attention. It will mean starting on the grassroots level to listen and learn from our neighbors, rather than dictating or deferring to what the experts say: to grow our “attentiveness to and curiosity about what it might mean within a locally and historically situated life — to live an interconnected life with a sense of purpose and meaning.”
A good bit of what Hoffman and her collaborators prophesied is now being confirmed by the innovative work of Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard, mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
In Simard’s groundbreaking book, “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” she made the mind-blowing discovery that forest ecosystems are connected by underground mycorrhizal networks of fungi that function like the neural networks in the human brain. They act as a communication and resource-sharing system for the entire forest ecosystem.
These networks allow trees to communicate, share resources like carbon and water, send warning signals about threats like insects and support one another. Her research shows that trees, particularly older ones known as “mother trees,” play a crucial role in supporting younger saplings by providing the resources they need to survive.
John Buttrick, in last week’s Concord Monitor, offers the human equivalent of Simard’s wisdom of the forest. The solution is pretty simple: institute a functioning democracy. Over time, our democracy has shrunk into an empty husk of what it once was. Our two-party system of government has devolved into a will for power: a slugfest, a battle to beat the other side by any means necessary.
Buttrick reminds us that, like the wisdom of the forest, democracy derives its strength not from achieving dominance, but from equality.
“All of the rest of us, rich or poor, needy or successful, join the political realm when we advocate for the well-being of others. For example, healthcare, public education and poverty are all enmeshed in politics. As servants in a democracy we are obligated to create and operate a political system that is designed to meet these and other needs.”