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It’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”
The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a try: few people can speak about trees with quite as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she is a Canadian national treasure and global environmental icon. When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she describes once sprinting through the forest with a syringe filled with radioactive isotopes in each hand as she is chased by a grizzly bear.
That particular bit of (ultimately successful) research is what made Simard something of a celebrity, launching a thousand profile pieces and inspiring the character of Patricia in Richard Power’s 2018 Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Overstory. Tracing the movement of radioactive particles between trees, Simard’s findings suggested that individual trees were engaged in an ongoing exchange of information and resources with one another through mycorrhizal fungi networks. “Trees talk,” is how she put it in her TED talk. “Through back-and-forth conversations, they increase the resilience of the whole community.”
It was groundbreaking work, and intuitively satisfying for the general public – why shouldn’t the self-preservation instincts of plant life have a communal aspect, too? – but it set off intense criticism and scientific backlash. Simard was accused of anthropomorphising trees by implying that they noticed and perhaps even needed one another, and that they were governed not solely by evolutionary competition but also by important intergenerational kinship links. A period of academic difficulty and demoralisation followed.
Simard’s new book, When the Forest Breathes, finds her back among the trees, furthering her research while also considering her legacy. In Simard’s model, the largest, oldest “mother trees” act as arboreal matriarchs – “energetic keystones” responsible for “dispersing seed to the understory” and nurturing new life. In this book it’s apparent Simard is a kind of mother tree, too – a giant, deeply rooted figure with a critical role to play in connecting and supporting the next generation of forest ecologists. As she plants hundreds of thousands of trees across nine forests around the world in a venture she calls the Mother Tree Project, Simard writes of long days spent tending saplings and encouraging the efforts of the younger researchers by her side – including her two daughters, Hannah and Nava.
She also writes of her ties with Indigenous communities, and of the organising and activism she’s embraced after years of watching escalating logging outpace cautious scientific recommendations. “Science is not enough,” she has concluded. Hence the search for other avenues for advancing conservation and restoration work: among them, books like this one, which allow her to step outside the linguistic constraints of peer-reviewed research and provide an “interpretation” of her findings and the philosophy behind it. There is poetry in this work deep in the forest, and she doesn’t shy away from it.
This is the kind of book with a very, very long acknowledgments section. Others have helped Simard find her way on the singular path she’s followed, and one senses she’s writing When the Forest Breathes so that more may follow it too – or create their own paths. No mother tree tends the understory alone.
