Suzanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-05-28

World-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of trees. A true trailblazer, her findings on tree sentience, communication and memory were originally ridiculed by the scientific community. Today her discovery of the way trees communicate, through a sprawling underground network of fungi, shows the hidden intelligence of the forest. Her remarkable journey from woodland worker to international authority on ecology all started in the forests of British Columbia, where her family has lived for generations.

In this event, celebrating the publication of her new book Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne reveals the complex life cycle of the forest and its profound lessons on resilience, kinship and the interdependence of human and plant life. Her deeply personal journey traces the webs of fungi to their centre, where she encounters the mysterious Mother Trees. She shows how these wise and powerful entities nurture the forest and calls on all of us to preserve them or risk the life of the forest itself.

Suzanne will be in conversation with the BBC's chief environment correspondent Justin Rowlatt. 

Part of the British Library’s springtime season on environment: The Natural Word.

Suzanne Simard was raised in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia. She is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry, and has earned a global reputation for her research on tree connectivity and communication and its impact on the health and biodiversity of forests.

Justin Rowlatt is the BBC’s chief environment correspondent with over 15 years of ground-breaking environmental reporting, including interviews with Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, the Dalai Lama and Bill Gates. His adventures as Newsnight’s Ethical Man were widely celebrated and he will be leading the BBC’s coverage of COP26.