Finding the Mother Tree Book Discussion

Join Lucy Meigs of Everyone Outside  for a Discussion of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard. You don't need to read the entire book to join in. Click here for more about the book including a trailer. For a recent videos in which Suzanne Simard tells a portion of the story in the book, click here and here. If you like listening to books, I highly recommend it for this one because it is read by the author. 

Please register to receive the Zoom link for the discussion.

In her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths – that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes – in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways – how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies – and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

“The interplay of personal narrative, scientific insights, and the amazing revelations about the life of the forest make a compelling story. These are stories that the world needs to hear.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Author of “Braiding Sweetgrass” and professor of environmental and forest biology, State University of New York. Braiding Sweetgrass is currently Lucy's favorite book.

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