Suzanne Simard

And I love the way that you, you know, your understanding of how nature works with us.

And you quote Suzanne Simard's research on your website about the relationships between trees and fungi and how it's also helped you think about cooperation and interconnection in the natural world.

How, for you, do you think this idea of reciprocity, what it might mean to challenge the way we organise our own societies and communities and environments? It's this interconnectivity and reciprocity.

What's your kind of vision?

Well, yeah, I mean, I came across Suzanne Simard through my partner, Sally Pairns.

She's a painter.

She was researching and researching her.

It's one of those things that makes me so excited for the next decades of research that are going to be illuminating all of these connections.

I think of Suzanne Simard's beautiful work, for example, and that is just, you know, the top layer.

Yeah, about how trees and other plants in the forest and the fungi are communicating and teaming

up.

Yes, the fungus is the most amazing lord of the forest you could even imagine.

1997 it was that someone finally, and her name was Suzanne Simard, she was doing research on the way moisture and nutrients pass through the soil.

And she found out that these threads that are called mycorrhizal threads, myco means fungus and rhizal means fungus, So these little root-like threads were going all through the forest and they were converting nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from the soil into things that trees could absorb and use.

And then the trees were paying them back by giving them carbon and sugars.

So there was this swap meet going on under the forest floor at all times where the trees, now before that, in the sort of Darwinian model where people saw the trees as in this battle to survive and they were gonna crush the opposition, which was how science was thinking when Suzanne Simard started doing her research.

They only saw fungus as a disease.

So if there was a mycorrhizal growth around a tree, they saw it as an illness and would try to clear it up.

And I will tell you why.

So not stunted little trees growing up in the mountains, but the really big, healthy trees that are ancient have already been logged.

And there's only about 3% left, according to Suzanne Simard.

And this has sparked an enormous movement here to try to save these trees.

There's a place called Ferry Creek, which was the last unlogged old growth watershed on southern Vancouver Island.

Fungi pathways can conduct electrical activity associated with plant responses.

Enter Suzanne Simard.

Suzanne is a Canadian forest ecologist whose research helped transform our understanding of how trees interact.

In the 1990s, she conducted experiments with paper birch and Douglas fir trees.

And indeed, it did.

And Gagliano investigated whether plants could learn.

And Stamets, he explored the interconnectedness through fungi and And Suzanne Simard demonstrated resource exchanges between trees.

She investigated older trees and how they helped the whole forest network.

You know, he was one of those people who got it wrong.

20 years ago, you know, Peter Wohlleben, the German forester, he was a forester and now he's speaking for the trees, you know, Suzanne Simard who coined the term the wood wide web, you know.

How trees connect, how trees connect.

And it was her, it was an experience in her childhood, you know, going down a pit and seeing these roots networking, the mycelium network that has made her as popular as she is today.

Let's talk about it.

Suzanne Simard.

Early research.

A Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard grew up around logging in British Columbia and became increasingly troubled by an industry assumption she would observe early in her career.

That trees of different species were purely in competition with each other for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients.

And that removing competition species would help the one loggers wanted to grow.

Well, it's, there's, there's so many things.

Suzanne Simard, that wonderful Canadian ecologist, has really helped us understand these underground connections.

People might not know how much water and nutrients go back and forth between the trees, and how older trees, mother trees, dump their excess nutrients before they die to their kin.

Another thing that, that fascinates me about trees is if we think about it, what...