Journal of Ecohumanism January 2023 Volume: 2, No: 1, pp. 9 – 20 ISSN: 2752-6798 (Print) | ISSN 2752-6801 (Online) journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism Journal of Ecohumanism All rights reserved @ 2023 Transnational Press London Received: 7 November 2022 Accepted: 9 October 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33182/joe.v2i1.2861 Imagining More-Than-Human Care: From Multispecies Mothering to Caring Relations in Finding the Mother Tree Joshua Trey Barnett 1 Abstract In the Western imaginary, care has long been pictured as a distinctly human activity —an activity undertaken primarily by women—and the paradigmatic image of caregiving has been that of a mother tending to her child. Increasingly, though, both the matricentricity and the anthropocentricity of care are being scrutinized as scholars advocate for more egalitarian and, in a few cases, more ecological conceptions of care. Examples of more-than-human care have been sparse, however, which hampers our collective capacity to imagine care beyond the human. Thus, in this essay I look for imaginative resources in forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s (2021) New York Times bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest . This encounter reveals two connected concepts—multispecies mothering and caring relations—and opens onto an ecological ethic of care rooted in a commitment to care for caring relations, to sustain the conditions of possibility for the care that we all need to survive and flourish. Keywords: Ethics of Care; Mothering; Multispecies Studies; Suzanne Simard; Finding the Mother Tree Reading in the Forest Packing for a field trip to Cook Forest in October 2021, I tucked a single book into my knapsack for evening reading. Even before it was published in May, I had been eager to dig into Suzanne Simard’s (2021) Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. A forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, Simard came to scientific fame in 1997 after publishing an article in Nature demonstrating that trees belonging to different species—in the study, the relationship between paper birch (Betula papyrifera) and Douglas fir (Psuedotsuga menziesii) is examined—share carbon via underground fungal networks that link trees within forests (Simard et al., 1997). In large, bold lettering on the issue’s cover, Nature described Simard’s discovery as the “Wood-Wide Web.” As this catchy neologism suggests, Simard’s research invites us to rethink how we see forests. Rather than thinking of forests as collections of distinct individuals competing for scarce resources, her research suggests, we ought to think of them as assemblages of interconnected, interdependent beings. I was visiting Cook Forest to understand how people are caring for the ancient eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) for which, alongside the towering eastern white pines (Pinus strobus), the public park is known (see Cook, 1997). I was and remain curious about what forms ecological care assumes when one more-than-human species is imperiled by another. 1 Joshua Trey Barnett, Department of Communication Arts and Sciences and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA. E-mail: barnett@psu.edu