As you may have gathered from my recent blogs, I have become more interested in forest ecology. Girvan Harrison, in Nature's Way, recommended the exercise of (regularly) spending 15 minutes in a forest environment to see what you might end up reflecting upon. I've done this before, and over the holidays I had a chance to formally do it again. This time, my reflections were quite different.

I went about 100 feet away from my in-law's house where a stip of forested land separates my in-law's property from their neighbor's property. This strip of land is about 2 acres wide and contains a ravine (about 30 feet deep) where a centrally running stream drains the highland areas above into an ocean harbour below. On this particular day their were extremely high winds (a fairly regular occurance in this ocean-exposed area) and lots of snow around so that visibility was low. It was not pleasant to look in the direction of the blowing snow because it pinged the exposed part of your eye. It was under these conditions that I ventured into a more sheltered forested ravine environment to commune with nature for 15 minutes.

I wasn't planning on formally communing with nature until I found a "meadow spruce" tree (a larger spruce tree with lots of large branches running up its body) with branches weighted down to the ground by a large volume of accumulated snow. In the ravine, underneath these boughs, constituted about as sheltered an area as I could find to spend my 15 minutes in the forest. My main revelation while spending time in my "found" shelter was the idea that a good reason to spend time in nature was to play and that camping down in this shelter was something I had often done to entertain myself as a youngster. For some reason we lose this sense of play and don't use this as a rationale for going out into a forested environment.

While there was an element of play in what I was doing, there was also the reality that blizzard-like conditions were going on around me with trees creaking and cracking all around. It was difficult to get into a meditative/relaxed state under these conditions so time did not pass as quickly as I thought it would. I spent about 10 minutes in the shelter and then headed back. I stopped to spend some time observing the tree's swaying in the extreme force of the wind and this is when I began to "get into" my nature experience. I became more receptive to the "way of the forest" and what it might teach me.

To set the scene, my father-in-law is into horse racing and has 5 horses. He has two main fields that he grows hay on which run down both sides of a long lane leading to his house. The forested ravine that I was in started on the edge of the right field. The wind was blowing accross the right field into the trees. I spent about 15 minutes observing wildly swaying trees just in from the treeline sheltered by a Large-Tooth Aspen tree (whose name refers to the deep furrowed bark on the tree). The swaying trees I was looking at were being directly exposed to the extreme fury of the wind.

It was from this vantage point that I began my reflections on how the economy might be like a forest. Like any business, a tree in the forest experiences regular cycles of good times (spring/summer) and bad times (fall/winter). During good times it grows and competes with other trees for sunlight. During bad times, it sheds its leaves and slows down metabolically. A tree can withstand normal cycles, however, extreme wind events are a mortal foe of trees (attested to by the creaking and cracking around me) and many of their adaptations can be seen as adaptations to the Wind Reaper. The manner in which a tree adapts to occassional extreme wind events might teach us something about how businesses might adapt to the extreme economic events now occuring.

Here are some of the adaptations I noticed. One adaptation is at the level of the forest structure where trees adjacent to the treeline appeared to be larger than trees located farther from the treeline. These larger maple trees formed a vanguard that diminished the strength of the wind that smaller maple trees absorbed. Perhaps emerging from this recession will require similiar vanguard industries that make it easier for smaller businesses to survive in their wake. Among the vanguard trees there was a further interesting adaptation which involved trees clustering together to fight as a unit rather than separately. By clustering I mean sharing the same root system and tree base but forming separate main trunks going up the tree. While one large vanguard tree can survive alone, there appeared to be more clustering at the treeline than farther in from the treeline. There seems to be more of an imperative to coorperate among those trees forming the vanguard.

At the level of the tree, they shed their load (dead leaves) during times when winds and weather becomes more extreme (fall/winter). They also have evolved to become very pliant - able to bend and move in all directions that the wind forces them to move in.

More analogies between a forest and an economy can be found, but the most striking observations that occurred to me during my commune with the forest were the wind adaptations related to the global structure of the forest (i.e., vanguard structure, more cooperation at the vanguard) and at the individual level (i.e., load reduction, pliancy). The economy is going through turbulent times and similiar adaptations might be required at the industry and business-level to withstand the onslaught. Of course, not all trees in the forest survive high wind events and weaker vanguard industries often perish first with downstream trees stepping in to take over the sunlight and nutrients left behind by the fallen vanguard.