When the Forest Breathes
with Suzanne Simard
Hosted by Sara Everts
“A masterclass on the inner workings of forests—a lush glimpse at the symphonic mutualisms and intergenerational cascades that sustain life at every scale. Simard, one of the boundary-pushing scientists of our time, is also a resplendent storyteller. Through her, new threads of connection between Indigenous knowledge and Western science are formed. The experiments and ideas in When the Forest Breathes are quietly revolutionary. This is science as an act of love for the world.”
Join us for an unforgettable evening with Suzanne Simard, the trailblazing scientist who pioneered the once-radical—and now broadly accepted—concept of sophisticated communication between trees.
Her new book, When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, blends rigorous science and neglected Indigenous wisdom in service of a powerful vision for the future of our forests.
With her bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard advanced a revelatory new paradigm for the profound intelligence of trees and their relationships with each other. Now, with When the Forest Breathes, she examines the forces that threaten forest ecosystems and, with years of research at her back, offers a pragmatic and hopeful vision for a responsible relationship with the forests that sustain us.
Raised in a family of loggers committed to sensible forest stewardship, Simard has watched timber companies ignore the complexity of nature’s self-regulation and Indigenous communities’ finely honed knowledge of the natural world. Plundering the forests for profit, they leave in their wake heightened risk of wildfire, drought, water crises, and endangerment of plant and animal life.
But Simard’s research, which recognizes forests as complex, adaptive systems, has the potential to reverse this pattern. Here, in accessible and impassioned prose, she shares the findings of one of the most ambitious climate research projects ever conceived. In her native British Columbia, Simard and her colleagues study innovative logging patterns that reflect an array of attempts at conservation, plant a mixture of tree species to identify the combinations most resilient to the stresses wrought by climate change, and introduce trees from other climates to increase the adaptivity of the forest. Simard also opens our eyes to the sophisticated knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples, who have stewarded the forests and waters for centuries. Their wisdom offers a valuable bridge from the past, a set of principles grounded in respect for the land.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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