INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's
leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and
their connections to one another and to other living things in the
forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery
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 of
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 writes--in
inspiring, illuminating, 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 the future; elicit warnings and mount
defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication,
characteristics 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 writes of her own life, born
and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia,
of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and
how she came to love and respect them—embarking on a journey of
discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she
writes of her own journey--of love and loss, of observation and change,
of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific
inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about
understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of
her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree
that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human
societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.
