Instant National Bestseller. New York Times Bestseller.
The author of Finding the Mother Tree offers a powerful vision for saving our forests based on nature's deep-rooted cycles of renewal.
Raised in a family of loggers committed to sensible forest stewardship, trailblazing ecologist Suzanne Simard has watched as timber companies leave forests at higher risk for wildfires, water crises and plant and animal extinction. But her research charts a new course. The forest, she reveals, is a symphony of finely honed cycles of regeneration - from mushrooms breaking down logs to dying elder trees passing their genetic knowledge to younger ones - that hold the key to protecting our forests. Working with Indigenous communities, whose models of responsible forestry have been largely dismissed, Simard examines how human interventions - particularly destruction of the overstory's mother trees - endanger new growth and longevity. If we can honor the tools that trees have honed for sharing intergenerational wisdom, she argues, we can protect these sacred places for years to come.
As she considers how older living things facilitate the conditions for new growth to flourish, Simard faces parallel loss and regeneration in her own life, watching her two daughters grow and savoring her final days with her ailing mother.
