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Finding the Mother Tree

Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest

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Finding the Mother Tree

Written by: Suzanne Simard
Narrated by: Suzanne Simard
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A dazzling scientific detective story from the ecologist who first discovered the hidden language of trees

No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard. Now she shares the secrets of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their cooperation, healing capacity, memory, wisdom and sentience.

Raised in the forests of British Columbia, where her family has lived for generations, Professor Simard did not set out to be a scientist. She was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest.

Though her ground-breaking findings were initially dismissed and even ridiculed, they are now firmly supported by the data. As her remarkable journey shows us, science is not a realm apart from ordinary life, but deeply connected with our humanity.

In Finding the Mother Tree, she reveals how the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for our existence - offers profound lessons about resilience and kinship, and must be preserved before it's too late.

© Suzanne Simard 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Biological Sciences Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science

Critic Reviews

A scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series... Just as she disinters earthy mushrooms and the finest of filaments, so she lays bare the human heart with moving simplicity... It is her gallant mission in the book and in her life - and one essential to combating the climate crisis - to make science more humanly engaged (Kate Kellaway)
Finding the Mother Tree is the kind of story we need to be telling, a new way of communicating that the world desperately needs to hear... A reminder to listen to our wilder selves, and to remember, with humility, how little we know of the complexities of the natural world (Tiffany Francis-Baker)
This book is a testament to Simard's skill as a science communicator. Her research is clearly defined, the steps of her experiments articulated, her astonishing results explained and the implications laid bare: We ignore the complexity of forests at our peril (Jonathan C. Slaght)
A masterwork of planetary significance
[Simard] is an intellectual force... Simard's results are so revolutionary and controversial that they have quickly worked their way into social theory, urban planning, culture and art... We have a lot of rethinking to do about the economic and political models that, since Darwin, have been taken to be natural (Kate Brown)
Finding the Mother Tree has come at a crucial moment... With biodiversity on a knife edge, the need to appreciate and understand the complexity and brilliance of the natural world could not be more important (Rosie Boycott)
Vivid and inspiring... a radical new understanding of plants (Eugenia Bone)
Speaking with Simard felt like coming to the headwaters of a vast system of ideas, both innovative and ancient... To read Finding the Mother Tree is to imagine the view from a 250-foot redwood. The recognition that we're all connected is one of the great gifts of the memoir
[Suzanne Simard] forever transformed our views of the world and the interconnectivity of our environment. Finding the Mother Tree is not only a deeply beautiful memoir about one woman's impactful life, it's also a call to action to protect, understand and connect with the natural world (Amy Adams)
A vivid and compelling memoir of [Simard's] lifelong quest to prove that the forest is more than just a collection of trees
All stars
Most relevant
I had already heard the authors podcast years before i got my hands on this book. from other comments and reviews, i had also gone through the ted talk videos before starting the book. This book is not about what I already knew, but it's how a person, who came from a family of lumber jacks, decided to study trees and come to this beautiful conclusion about mother trees. It's her journey, her experiments, the challenges, the family, the mistakes, the recovery and then progress. For someone who is trying it set it all up, it would be great as a reference book, but i was struggling with the visualization. I still continued to read because after every few pages i would be informed an amazing fact about the trees helping each other, caring for young ones, supporting with their wisdom and showing the proof through the experiment. The last chapter had me in tears because the author had rightly questioned that how western science looks at everything from an independent microscopic element and then builds the whole. Whereas the old age indigenous knowledge looks at everything as a whole and how it is interconnected and supported. What i liked was that there is hope for our earth if humans can mend their ways, because mother nature is also resilient to adapt and heal.

Trees have agency, and they live in a society

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the emotional journey of the author taught about her resilience and passion resilience and passion. it truly represents the importance of studying the intricate relationship between social and ecological systems.

passion and resilience

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