The Hidden Internet Beneath the Forest Floor

In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard planted seedlings in a British Columbia forest and covered some with shade cloth. What she discovered stunned the scientific community. Beneath the soil, an enormous fungal network — now called the "wood wide web" — connected the roots of trees across entire forests. Mother trees were sending carbon and nutrients through these underground threads to younger, shaded seedlings struggling to survive. The forest was not a collection of competitors. It was a community, quietly sustaining its weakest members through an invisible architecture no one had imagined.

Simard had stumbled onto something the psalmist already knew.

"O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures." The poet looks at the teeming sea, the creatures great and small, and sees not randomness but design — a world held together by the generous hand of the Almighty. Every living thing waits on God, who opens His hand and fills them with good things.

We walk through forests without noticing the ten thousand connections underfoot. We breathe without thanking the plankton producing half our oxygen. Creation is saturated with a wisdom we barely glimpse. And the proper response, the psalmist insists, is not analysis but doxology: "I will sing to the Lord as long as I live." When you finally see how deeply everything is held together, the only honest reply is praise.