In November in Vancouver we started to learn a new vocabulary for types of weather. First there was a bomb cyclone, followed by a tornado that took down several of the old trees on UBC’s University Boulevard. A couple of weeks later, an atmospheric river flowed in from the Pacific and up over the Fraser Valley, the long, narrow stretch of farmland that extends east from Vancouver until it’s choked off in the mountains just before Hope. Images of the flooded farmland, breached dikes, and the landslides that blocked all major highways, cutting Vancouver off from the rest of North America, went viral worldwide. I could see roads that I had travelled along, small towns I had visited, all under water. Sumas Prairie, just outside Abbotsford, returned to its original status of Sumas Lake, before it had been drained a century before. The highways that we had driven on our trip to the Okanagan this summer were severed, bridges washed away, and long stretches of tarmac vanished under several feet of water. Sections of the road from Merritt to Spences Bridge, which we’d taken the summer before, keeping an eye out for mountain sheep, went missing, the river taking a series of monstrous bites out of each of its banks. And yet in Vancouver’s West End we were blissfully unaffected. Supply chain problems failed to fully materialise; there was a one-day shortage of eggs and milk at some stores, and gas stations rationed all cars to 30 litres a visit, more gas than we use in a month. We had relentless rain, true, but this was heavier but otherwise not much different from the weather we’d had in this wettest of all Pacific Northwest winters. The only sign of something more serious was a large, copper-coloured barge that broke free of its towline and was swept on to the rocks just off the seawall on English Bay. Something that you would always see on the horizon when crossing the Salish Sea, a tiny toy close to the horizon, had now pushed itself into our line of vision, become a monstrous structure the size of our own apartment block. As I write at the beginning of December the barge is still there still there, secured with rope, cordoned off by police tape, resisting the efforts of tugs to pull it free and performing a new role as a background for passing walkers’ and dog exercisers’ selfies.

Just at the same time as the atmosphere in river was heading our way, I began reading Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Simard’s work on the way that trees are interconnected, and cooperate rather than compete for resources in a forest, has been much talked about among friends in Vancouver this year. She’s now a professor of forest ecology at UBC, and the book weaves together her research and her life, moving from her family of origin in rural British Columbia to the family and new partnerships that she made in Vancouver and the United States. Simard’s early research showed that trees of different species pass carbon to each other through networks of fungi in the soil. She than moved to looking at how different species shared resources such as carbon, and how “mother trees” supported their own seedlings. The work has important implications, contradicting the orthodoxy of forestry policies that saw – and still see — the growth of trees in terms of competition for resources, and thus promoted monocultures rather than encouraging a more complex biodiversity that would show greater resilience in the face of disease or fire. 

Finding the Mother Tree isn’t an easy read: a non-specialist such as myself finds that the sections in which Simard describes her experimental methods in great detail break up the flow of storytelling. Simard’s own story is presented as a parallel narrative to the workings of the natural world she discovers: she celebrates the resilience of an extended family, loses a brother, marries a husband, divorces, survives breast cancer, and falls in love with a new female partner. The book concludes with an episode in which her eldest daughter, now an adult, enters the forest with her to assist in her research, taking her shovel to “lighten her burden” and gripping her hand on the way home. As with trees, and in particular with the mother tree passing on the requisites for continued life to her descendants, so with human beings. And yet somehow on the level of writing, for me, these stories didn’t quite integrate. It was as if the book pulled a reader in two different directions: an academic one, that demanded the burden of detailed explanation of experimental methods in order to establish credibility, and a personal one, in which family life was embedded in history. For this reader, at least, was a demanding, but necessary book.

Thinking of Simard’s work, I also wondered about the way in which nature, and in particular natural disaster, might serve as some kind of metaphor for the work I am doing in practicum. As a counsellor, I listen, I empathise, and I begin to move through a process of self-reflection with the people I am in conversation with, one that leads to insight, and then acceptance or change. Yet I wonder if I’m not also doing this in a larger, systemic, landscape, in which so much has been laid waste. So many of the problems of people who my profession encourages me to call clients are systemic, and have both material and discursive roots. Young adults in their thirties who haven’t followed a conventional path of property acquisition find themselves in a seemingly inescapable position of precarity, with the rise in housing prices meaning that they will always rent, and never live out a promised life script. Others, especially in later life, suffer greater marginalization. There is now no possibility of getting back “on script”, of gaining that autonomy in the market that the neoliberal self promises. The patch together their existence through a series of subsidies and benefits that they have to fight hard, and often with resilience, to retain. Like the forests reimagined as tree farms that Simard critiques, so the economy of which my clients are a part allows only certain types of growth to be legible as productive, and poisons all others.

There’s something further to cause concern. At the agency I work for, we serve as a safety net, providing free counselling for those who have no other support. And yet when we graduate the majority of us will go into private practice, charging in excess of $100 an hour, and cherry-picking clients, perhaps offering one pro bono “scholarship” or a sliding scale to clients on lower incomes. Most of us, I think, will retain a strong commitment to social justice: the counsellors in my own agency, for instance, have explicitly chosen to work with lower income clients, when they could gain greater income working in private practice. Yet we have spent a long time in training at considerable cost to ourselves, and, for many of my classmates, sacrifices. When we gain our Registered Clinical Counsellor status many of us will have to make use of the recognition that out professional status accords us under neoliberalism: an economy of care will propel us into career choices. I’m exempt from this, perhaps uniquely among my colleagues, simply because I’ve already completed the script through a work career, and now have enough to live comfortably on. In a sense, then, our professionalism and expertise, carefully and caringly acquired, also becomes part of a neoliberal economy. Some studies, I’m told, have shown that peer counsellors who emerge from a community and are given in situ training can be as effective as professional counsellors, and yet such counsellors are not accredited; their services cannot be claimed for, for instance, in health insurance plans. And so we, as professional counsellors part of a system that seems to have parallels with Simard’s forests. At worst, we come into communities as expert professional outsiders, or the economy of earning enough to live for ourselves means that we naturally attend more to those who can pay, enabling them to fulfil their life scripts and leaving others behind.

This blog is often a place in which I process thoughts. As I look back at what I’ve written, I’m aware the analogy between landscapes of natural extraction and of mental health care isn’t exact, and that the picture isn’t complete. I want to go back and rewrite it, to somehow express more deeply the desire to care and to make a better world that motivates so many of my classmates, to pay tribute to the people who I am now learning to call colleagues. And then, in a second moment, I’m aware that this is how my life has always been. I move forward, but I am always looking around and back, trying to work out where I am situated. And for the moment, at times I just need to be. I breathe, I enter a session, and I am there for the person in front of me. It is only after session that the surrounding landscape comes back into view, and that doubts return. Today it is sunny, but the Faser Valley is still under water. Tomorrow or the next day the rains will come back.