This SDG will be based on the book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard, published in 2021. The book is based on 30 years of research by the author and others. Reading this book will profoundly change the way one thinks about trees and forests.

The author contends that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground fungal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities and have communal lives not that different from our own.

She shows 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 trees with powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Ms. Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence. Her credentials are superb. She has been hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound.    

The book, however, does have its critics   Some reviewers found it too much about her life and not enough about her topic.  This is, I believe, a fair criticism.  There is general agreement the book is well researched.  That said, her critics think her personal biases are overly reflected in her conclusions, that her beliefs in the intelligence of plants are not proven, and that she overemphasizes cooperation vs competition.  These latter critiques will be worthy of discussion.

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