Finding the Mother Tree
Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
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4.6 • 41 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
*WINNER of the 2021 Banff Mountain Book Prize in Mountain Environment and Natural History*
*WINNER of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature*
*WINNER of the 2022 BC and Yukon Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award*
*SHORTLISTED for the 2022 BC and Yukon Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Book Prize*
*SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Book Award*
A world-leading expert shares her amazing story of discovering the communication that exists between trees, and shares her own story of family and grief.
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar), and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
Now, in her first book, 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.
Simard describes up close—in revealing and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved; how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about their future; how they elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication: characteristics previously ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies. And, at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.Simard, born and raised in the rain forests of British Columbia, spent her days as a child cataloging the trees from the forest; she came to love and respect them and embarked on a journey of discovery and struggle. Her powerful story is one of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward. And it is a testament to how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology: it’s about understanding who we are and our place in the world.
In her book, as in her groundbreaking research, Simard proves the true connectedness of the Mother Tree to the forest, nurturing it in the profound ways that families and humansocieties nurture one another, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.
Customer Reviews
Engaging, enlightening, and hopeful.
Suzanne Simard engagingly and insightfully details her life experiences growing up amongst the forests of British Columbia, becoming one of the first female foresters in the province, and conducting perspective-changing research into forest ecology. Her play by play details of how she conceived, designed and executed her field experiments with her coworkers, and later students, are fascinating. It’s remarkable and comforting to witness scientific research at work. Our ideas and ideologies are only as strong as the evidence we collect to back them up. Simard doesn’t shy away from revealing how difficult and circuitous such journeys can be. From inadvertently breathing in unfiltered herbicide to accidentally inhaling radioactive wood powder, she gives us a candid look the stumbles and lessons she learned on her way to becoming a world respected scientist. She also allows the reader to peek into her family life and other key relationships that have shaped her identity, making this biography so much more than a book about how she has revealed the secrets of the forest community. It’s about how the connections we make as human beings are mirrored by the connections made by all living things in nature, even those that we have held to be inert and non-sentient.
Simard’s transformative Mother Tree research now allows us to witness, within the scientific model, what the indigenous inhabitants of North America have been passing on through their oral history for a thousand years. Knowledge that the trees talk to each other. And to the flowers and grasses and animals, too. Simard has succeeded in documenting and compartmentalizing ecological karma so that we can piece the puzzle back together again. I loved this book so much that after listening to the library audiobook, I bought the ebook so that I can re-read and highlight all my favourite parts. I’m sure I will want to re-read it and recommend it to friends and family. It’s one of my favourite reads of the year. It makes me feel hopeful on so many levels, as a woman, a mother, and a human being.