Donate
In 2021, scientist Suzanne Simard’s compelling memoir Finding the Mother Tree argued that life in the forest is more complex than a simple race for competition between species. Forests are, she believes, a complex network of cooperation and competition, facilitated by mycorrhizal fungal connections between roots that operate something like a biological neural network. Trees, she argues, have agency in the transmission of resources, and perhaps even a type of intelligence. The book blended science, memoir and an intriguing proposition to great effect, stimulating useful discussions about anthropomorphisation – Simard’s critics blanch at metaphors like ‘mother tree’ – and bringing an interesting scientific debate into the public domain.
Simard’s new memoir, When the Forest Breathes, covers the five or so years of her research since. Specifically, it drills down into forestry practices. The Mother Tree Project is a large study examining the effects of clearcut logging in British Columbia, the common practice of felling big sweeps of trees at once and leaving the ground to regenerate. Simard has been looking at whether there are less destructive methods that enable forests to regenerate more effectively and remain resilient to the accelerating effects of the climate crisis.
As the project’s name suggests, her priority is the mother trees: old, large trees that Simard thinks share their excess carbon and nitrogen through the mycorrhizal network with other trees and seedlings. Her hypothesis is that preserving them during felling will improve forests’ capacity to regenerate: if forests are agentic adaptive systems, then the mother trees should be their most able restorers.
The team pick nine sites covering “an area the size of Denmark” and treat them with combinations of different logging and replanting patterns. Her graduate students install additional experiments – such as testing whether trees show ‘kinship’ with their own families – and the team frequently collaborate with Indigenous people of the sites’ territories to tailor the cutting and replanting regimes to local knowledge systems. The book moves between different sites and groups, exploring different facets of theories of cooperation, and documenting Simard’s experiences with friends, family and foresters along the way.
The resulting book is engaging, but somewhat uneven. Where Finding the Mother Tree was driven by Simard’s growing conviction in theories of collaboration in forests, and battle with the establishment, When the Forest Breathes has less thrust. The team’s findings seem to have been most revelatory in terms of proving the amount of carbon stored in the forest floor (rather than tree canopies) and unearthing the extent of destruction caused by clearcutting, intensive forestry machinery and the felling of old growth. These are topics that most readers are unlikely to have had precise preconceptions about, and their links to Simard’s ideas about forests as connected systems can be unclear. The prose can be slippery, veering between light and playful (“The whole forest awakens in a teeming, bustling surge, as rich and joyful as the young at play and the old at work, carrying forward the business of life”) and soupy (“Nature is waiting for us to learn that we are all bound by the same rules. And to remember that, when the forest breathes out, we breathe in. When the forest thrives, we thrive. When the forest lives, we live”).
But, for lovers of her bestseller first book, it remains a real pleasure to be invited back into Simard’s forests. When the Forest Breathes is another generous and raw glimpse into an unconventional group of scientists and communities, their lives, losses and experiments. Simard is an essential investigator of new and old ideas about forest ecology, and we are very fortunate that she is willing to take us along for the ride.
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard. Allen Lane, 2026. ISBN: 9780241763315
