ANCESTRAL WISDOM · SCIENCE MEETS SPIRIT · UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY
Last reviewed and updated September 28, 2026
The forest was practicing Ubuntu long before we had words for it. Science is still learning how.
In 1997, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard showed that trees can share carbon through fungal threads underground, a finding that echoed what African philosophy had always taught: no tree thrives alone. The mycorrhizal networks beneath our feet — the Wood Wide Web — reveal the biology of Ubuntu itself. This is the story of what the forest already knew.
What Mycorrhizal Networks Reveal About Ubuntu and Community
In 1997, a forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard published a paper in Nature that changed how scientists thought about trees. Labeling paper birch and Douglas fir with two different carbon isotopes in a British Columbia forest, she and her colleagues traced carbon moving between the trees underground, mostly through fungal threads, with the shaded firs coming out ahead.
Not through the open soil, but through a living network of fungal threads woven beneath their roots.
The scientific world was startled. Forest ecologists had spent decades studying trees as individual competitors, each fighting for light, water, and nutrients. What Simard found was something else entirely. The forest was not a collection of solitary survivors locked in competition. It was a community — cooperative, communicating, and interdependent at its very roots.
Scientists soon had a name for this underground architecture: the mycorrhizal network. Journalists gave it a more evocative one: the Wood Wide Web.
Ubuntu philosophy had another name for it. They called it the way things have always been.
The Invisible Architecture Beneath the Forest Floor
Mycorrhizae literally means “fungus root.” When the thin threads of soil fungi — called hyphae — weave themselves around and into the roots of trees, an ancient partnership forms. The tree provides the fungus with sugars produced through photosynthesis. The fungus, in return, extends the tree’s reach far beyond what its own roots could access — pulling in water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other minerals from deep in the soil. But the network does not stop at two. Through branching threads, a single fungal network can link many trees at once, creating a living communication and resource-sharing system that operates entirely out of sight. Research continues to reveal the remarkable adaptive intelligence of such fungal networks — as experiments with Phanerochaete velutina have demonstrated how fungi actively navigate toward nutrient-rich areas, adapting their growth through a form of distributed cognition that challenges our assumptions about where intelligence lives.
Through this network, trees do not merely survive alongside each other. They are bound to each other. Carbon flows from trees with surplus to trees in shade or stress. Indeed, certain tree species have evolved remarkable carbon-capturing anatomy — researchers recently identified a unique wood type called ‘midwood’ in tulip trees that dramatically enhances their ability to store carbon, adding a new dimension to what we know about forests as climate allies. In one greenhouse experiment, when young Douglas firs were stripped of their needles, the ponderosa pines beside them raised their own defensive enzymes, and the signal traveled mainly through the fungal threads. Researchers are still working out how much of this happens in a mature forest, and how often.
Indeed, what scientists are only beginning to measure and map, the forest has been doing for longer than we have had names for it — and researchers are finding kindred intelligence elsewhere in the living world, down to the ocean depths, where whales communicate across vast distances in patterns scientists are only now learning to decode.
The Mother Tree and the Miracle of Giving
At the center of every mycorrhizal network stands what Simard calls a hub tree — or, as she named them in her 2021 memoir, mother trees. These are the oldest and largest trees in the forest: the ones whose root systems have woven deepest into the network, who are connected to the most neighbors, and who have spent the longest time building relationships underground.
Mother trees do something that no theory of competition predicted. Carbon moves outward from them, toward the struggling seedlings in their network. In Simard’s account, told in her memoir, trees can recognize their kin: her team reported mother trees directing more resources to their own seedlings than to unrelated ones — not hoarding those resources for themselves, but investing them in the next generation. This is the part of the story other scientists have questioned most.
In a 2015 greenhouse experiment, Simard’s team stripped the needles from young Douglas fir seedlings. Carbon from the injured seedlings traveled through the fungal threads into the ponderosa pine beside them, and the pines’ defenses rose. Simard reads it as a warning passed along, and a share of what the injured tree still had. Our elders would call it inheritance.
Scientists are still arguing about how far this goes. A 2023 review by Justine Karst and colleagues in Nature Ecology & Evolution found that claims about common mycorrhizal networks in forests have been overstated through positive citation bias — that the evidence for how widespread these networks are, and for trees preferentially feeding their kin, is thinner than the popular story suggests. Other researchers, led by Tamir Klein, push back firmly, holding that belowground carbon transfer between trees is well documented. What few dispute is that carbon can move between trees through fungi. What remains open is how much of it looks like choosing.
We keep the dispute in view rather than resolving it, because Ubuntu does not require the forest to agree with it. The philosophy was never waiting on a forest ecologist for permission.
The forest does not ask what species you are before it feeds you. It asks only whether you are part of the network.
The mycorrhizal network also crosses species. Douglas fir and birch, cedar and alder — trees that Western botany cataloged as separate and competing — are, in fact, deeply intertwined underground. Simard’s 1997 study traced carbon moving from birch to shaded fir in summer; in her memoir she describes the flow turning back once the birch drops its leaves and the fir is still green.
Not competition alone. Interdependence, too, woven deep into the soil.
While Western ecology is still mapping the full extent of this underground communion, African traditions have been describing its human equivalent for thousands of years — understanding that no being thrives alone, and that the strength of the community is the condition for the survival of each of its members.
Every gift is a thread in the network. Help us keep life flowing toward the families who need it most.
What the Elders Already Knew About the Network
Long before Suzanne Simard placed her isotopes in the soil of a British Columbia forest, African tradition had already mapped the invisible network. Not in scientific terms — but in the deep structural logic of how communities were organized, how forests were honored, and how human beings were understood to exist not as separate individuals but as nodes in a living web of relationship.
The mycorrhizal network did not reveal a new truth. It offered a new image for an ancient one that African philosophy had been naming, celebrating, and building communities around for millennia.
African Frameworks of the Communal Web
Ubuntu (Bantu/Nguni, Southern Africa) — Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
The foundational Ubuntu teaching — a person is a person through other people — is the mycorrhizal network expressed in human terms. The Kenyan theologian John Mbiti gave the idea one of its best-known forms in African Religions and Philosophy (Heinemann, 1969): “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” No person is complete in isolation. Each individual exists in relationship to the community, drawing life from it and feeding life back into it. The community is the soil in which personhood grows. Cut yourself off from the network, and like a tree whose fungal threads have been severed, you begin to diminish — no matter how strong you appear above ground.
Yoruba (Nigeria) — Sacred Groves and the Living Forest
The Yoruba have long recognized the forest as sacred living community. Osun-Osogbo, the sacred grove on the banks of the Osun River in Nigeria, is, in UNESCO’s words, one of the last remnants of primary high forest in southern Nigeria — a World Heritage Site kept alive by community devotion. For the Yoruba, the forest is not scenery. It is a living elder — home to the orisha, the divine forces, whose relationships with one another mirror the relationships within human community.
Mijikenda (Kenya) — The Kaya Forests
On Kenya’s coast, from the sixteenth century, the Mijikenda peoples built fortified villages called kayas within the forest. The villages were left by the 1940s; the forests were not. UNESCO records more than thirty surviving kayas, ten of them inscribed together as a World Heritage Site in 2008, now regarded as the abodes of ancestors and maintained by councils of elders. Rules on who may enter and what may be taken have kept these groves standing along some 200 kilometers of coastline.
Akan (Ghana/Ivory Coast) — Sacred Groves and the Ancestors Who Dwell There
In Akan tradition, forests are not wilderness. As the Ghanaian scholar Samuel Awuah-Nyamekye documents, sacred groves are held to be the dwelling place of the gods, the ancestors and other spirit beings, protected by community taboos passed down across generations. They are ecosystems of relationship as much as they are ecosystems of biology.
Bantu Traditions — Vital Force and the Communal Flow
Across Bantu-speaking traditions, the concept of ntu — the vital force that flows through all living beings — describes a reality for which mycorrhizal science now offers a biological image. Vital force is not contained within an individual. It flows between beings in relationship, strengthened by community and weakened by isolation.
Zulu and Xhosa (Southern Africa) — Ikhaya, Rootedness, and the Homeplace
In isiZulu and isiXhosa, ikhaya is home — the family home, the root place, the lineage to which one belongs. It carries the same understanding as the mother tree. A person is not a free-floating individual. They are rooted in a specific lineage, a specific place, a specific set of relationships that ground them in the network of the living and the ancestral.
Dogon (Mali) — Elders, Ritual, and the Living Cliff
Along the Bandiagara cliffs, the Dogon have kept what UNESCO calls “a system of thinking linked to traditional religion.” It lives on in masks, feasts and ceremonies honoring the ancestors, with the Hogon, a village priest, at its spiritual center. Wisdom held by elders and carried through shared ritual echoes the mother tree’s role as the hub of the forest network.
The Language the Forest Was Already Speaking
Indeed, what mycorrhizal science is beginning to suggest — that life is deeply communal, that resources can flow toward need rather than accumulating at the top, that the elders hold and distribute what the young require, that the network is what makes individual survival possible — African philosophy has not only described but organized entire civilizations around.
The forest never needed science to tell it how to be Ubuntu. It has been practicing Ubuntu since before the first human being stood beneath its canopy.
In practice, the ceremonies that honored the forest, the sacred groves maintained across generations, the practices of communal sharing and elder reverence — these were not mythology in opposition to nature. They were alignment with it. Among the Igbo, a single sacred Ogirisi tree marks the boundary between worlds, a living threshold our ancestors tended together. African traditions understood, at the level of lived practice, what mycorrhizal science is only now documenting: that isolation is the exception, not the norm, in a living world built on connection.
The elders did not need a laboratory to tell them what the soil already knew. They were listening.
Becoming the Network
If even part of what the forest shows us holds, then no tree in a healthy forest is truly alone, and no person in a living Ubuntu community is either. The network is not only a metaphor for what community could be. It is a living image of what community is — what it has always been — operating beneath the surface of the ground we walk on.
That is where ecology and the elders meet.
Every time you show up for a neighbor, you are threading a mycorrhizal connection. Every time an elder in your community shares what she has gathered over a lifetime, she is doing what the mother tree does — passing her store to the next generation. Every time you refuse to let someone in your circle suffer alone, you are doing what the forest has long done: routing life toward need, because the health of the whole depends on it.
Show up for your community — not when it is convenient, but consistently. The mycorrhizal network functions because the threads are always present. Ubuntu is the same: presence is the infrastructure.
Honor your elders as mother trees — the hub nodes of your network who hold accumulated wisdom, resources, and connection. Their knowledge is not nostalgia. It is the carbon of the community, meant to flow.
Extend your network deliberately — reach toward those at the edges of the community, the shaded seedlings who need connection most. The mycorrhizal network thrives not by concentrating resources at the center but by extending care to the periphery.
Protect your sacred groves — the gathering spaces, the communal practices, the ceremonies, the physical and digital places where community breathes together. These are not optional. They are the soil in which the network lives.
The forest has been practicing Ubuntu since before the first human word.
It does not compete for what it needs. It shares what it has.
It passes on what its elders carry.
It does not let its young struggle alone in the dark.
It routes life toward need and need toward life.
This is what the forest already knew. This is Ubuntu.
The scientists did not invent a new truth when they found the Wood Wide Web. They found a new way of seeing what African philosophy has always held: that we are not separate. That life flows between us. That the community is the condition for survival, and Ubuntu is not an ideal we are reaching toward. It is the way we were always meant to live.
The Forest Remembers. The Village Remembers. The Work Continues.
In Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, Ubuntu Village walks alongside communities regrowing their own networks, including solar power and clean cookstoves for families in Uganda. When you give, you become part of the web.
Know someone growing without a network right now? Send this to them, and let them know they are not alone.
Sources & Research
Mycorrhizal Networks & Forest Science
- – Simard, S.W., Perry, D.A., Jones, M.D. et al. (1997). Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field. Nature, 388, 579–582.
- – Song, Y.Y., Simard, S.W., Carroll, A., Mohn, W.W. & Zeng, R.S. (2015). Defoliation of interior Douglas-fir elicits carbon transfer and stress signalling to ponderosa pine neighbors through ectomycorrhizal networks. Scientific Reports, 5, 8495.
- – Karst, J., Jones, M.D. & Hoeksema, J.D. (2023). Positive citation bias and overinterpreted results lead to misinformation on common mycorrhizal networks in forests. Nature Ecology & Evolution.
- – Klein, T., Rog, I., Livne-Luzon, S., van der Heijden, M.G.A. & Körner, C. (2023). Belowground carbon transfer across mycorrhizal networks among trees: Facts, not fantasy. Open Research Europe, 3.
- – Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
African Philosophy & Forest Traditions
- – Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann, 1969.
- – Awuah-Nyamekye, Samuel (2009). Salvaging Nature: The Akan Religio-Cultural Perspective. Worldviews, 13(3), 251–282.
- – UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove · Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests · Cliff of Bandiagara (Land of the Dogons)
Science Meets Spirit · Part 3 of 19 · Full Series Guide →
Related Reading
- ‣ The Universe Has Always Known What Ubuntu Knew: Quantum Entanglement
- ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory: What Your Body Remembers
- ‣ Mirror Neurons, Communal Healing & the African Science of Showing Up
- ‣ The Body Keeps the Ancestors: What Science Is Learning About Inherited Memory
Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.
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