When the Forest Breathes Review by Susan Simard – Indiana Jones’ Trees Return | Science and nature books

IIt’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police car, being escorted out of a protest site at Ferry Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with Teal Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decided to give the arresting officer a piece of her mind — the way only a serious Canadian forest ecologist can. “It takes decades for clear-cut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to restore the erosive strength of the original stands,” she told him. “We don’t have decades until these forests recover from logging. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm by more than five degrees Celsius.”

The officer doesn’t move. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6 million views of Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a shot: Few people can talk about trees with as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she’s a Canadian national treasure and a global environmental icon. When she’s not being kept away from protests by authorities, she’s dodging the flames of wildfires in British Columbia’s Cariboo Mountains, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos Islands”), or pausing to learn about indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she described sprinting through the woods with a syringe full of radioactive isotopes in each hand while being chased by a grizzly bear.

It was this particular (ultimately successful) bit of research that made Simard something of a celebrity, launching thousands of personal essays and inspiring the character Patricia in Richard Bower’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. By tracking the movement of radioactive particles between trees, Simard’s findings indicated that individual trees were engaged in a continuous exchange of information and resources with each other through networks of mycorrhizal fungi. “Tree talk,” she put it in her TED talk. “Through cross-talk, they increase the resilience of the entire community.”

It was pioneering work, and intuitively satisfying to the general public – why shouldn’t the self-preservation instincts of plant life have a communal aspect too? – But it sparked severe criticism and violent scientific reactions. Simard has been accused of anthropomorphizing trees by implying that they noticed and perhaps needed each other, and that they were governed not only by evolutionary competition but also by important kinship ties between generations. A period of academic difficulty and frustration followed.

Simard’s new book, When the Forest Breathes, He finds her again among the trees, furthering her search while also considering her legacy. In Simard’s model, larger, older “mother trees” act as dendritic mothers—“energetic cornerstones” responsible for “dispersing seeds to the understory” and nurturing new life. In this book, it is clear that Simard is also a kind of mother tree—a giant, deeply rooted figure with a crucial 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 project she calls the “Mother Tree Project,” Simard writes about the long days she spent nurturing seedlings and encouraging the efforts of younger researchers alongside her—including her daughters, Hanna and Nava.

She also writes about her relationships with Indigenous communities, and about the organizing and activism she has embraced after years of watching logging surge beyond cautious scientific recommendations. She concluded that “knowledge is not enough.” Hence the search for other ways to enhance conservation and restoration work: among them books such as this one, which allow her to break out of the linguistic constraints of peer-reviewed research and provide an “interpretation” of her findings and the philosophy behind them. There’s poetry in this work deep in the woods, and she doesn’t shy away from it.

This is the kind of book that has a very long acknowledgments section. Others helped Simard find her own unique path, and one senses that she is writing “When the Forest Breathes.” So more can follow it too – or create their own paths. There is no mother tree that takes care of the understory alone.