A report on the underground networks in the forest
Suzanne Simard is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry. In spite of her status in academia, rigorous research and love and respect from her students it took over 30 years for her ideas to break through.
Ferris Jabr writes in the New York Times Magazine: “By analyzing the DNA in root tips and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits…
Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. Crucially, a majority of the carbon sequestered in forests resides in the soils, anchored by networks of symbiotic roots, fungi and microbes.
Each year, the world’s forests capture more than 24 percent of global carbon emissions. When a mature forest is burned or clear-cut, the planet loses an invaluable ecosystem and one of its most effective systems of climate regulation. The razing of an old-growth forest is not just the destruction of magnificent individual trees — it’s the collapse of an ancient republic whose interspecies covenant of reciprocation and compromise is essential for the survival of Earth as we’ve known it.”
On May 4, 2021 Suzanne Simard’s book, “Finding the Mother Tree” came out.
In a rare Ted talk in June 2016 Simard laid out what she discovered. This radio program also includes excerpts from her Zoom seminar at UBC: Dispatches from The Mother Tree Project, on Oct 22, 2020.
And in late 2020 the acclaimed environmental writer Ferris Jabr accompanied Suzanne Simard for several days of field research in rough terrain for what became a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. This program ends with quotes from his extraordinary science based article.
Ferris Jabr has also written for the Scientific American, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New Yorker.
By now Suzanne Simard’s insights are beginning to influence the thoughts about climate change, carbon sequestration and harvesting techniques in departments of forestry throughout Canada and the US.
Podcast (file2): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)
