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.
Finding the Mother Tree - Suzanne Simard
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£9.99