Simard’s discovery documented forests her grandfather’s logging had degraded
Evidence
Simard’s grandfather was a horse logger in British Columbia who removed thousands of old-growth trees using horses and hand-built log flumes in the early 20th century. He died before Simard began her research. What makes the story haunting: the specific forests Simard studied — the Douglas-fir forests of British Columbia — were in significant part degraded by logging practices that her grandfather’s generation established. She was studying the consequences of his work. Her discovery of the mycorrhizal network and the mother tree was simultaneously a scientific breakthrough and a documentation of what had been destroyed. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 303
Categorization
- XREF: Feeds the implied father-harmed-then-protected backstory for Elara’s father; parallels Potter inheriting/bequeathing land. — connects to: Simard’s forest research was a reckoning with her own family’s logging — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive: The Complete…, 37
- QUESTION: Worth checking: did Simard identify specifically which forests her grandfather logged, or is this symbolic framing?