Suzanne Simard on the language of trees and telling her own story
"Science is such a human construct. It comes from our hearts, and our brains, and our experiences.
And I wanted to tell the whole story of where it came from, and not just be a blurb in the midst of a sea of other findings."
Dr. Suzanne Simard joined us to talk about her book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, which picks up where her popular TED Talk, "How trees talk to each other", left off. She explains the astonishing science of how trees communicate with one another -- but she also gives us a view into the hard work, dirty hands, and heartbreak of a life spent living in and studying forests.
These are some of the books and authors that inspire Dr. Simard:
- The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed by John Vaillant contains "great storytelling [...] and really did a great job of conveying the danger of the [forestry] business."
- Nancy J. Turner, author of The Earth's Blanket, "has written extensively on ethnobotany of plants and what it means to the different first nations and how they use them."
- In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer "[writes] beautifully about how she and her nation relate to plants"
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Dr. Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
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