Webinar

Finding the Mother Tree: A Conversation with Suzanne Simard

April 2021

Did you know below the forest floor is an underground world of fungal networks that allow trees to communicate and act as a single being?

Join us for a webinar with TED Speaker and UBC Professor Suzanne Simard to celebrate the launch of her new book, Finding the Mother Tree (which you can now purchase here). The book is a moving account of Dr. Simard’s scientific quest to discover the tree elders that nurture forests in ways that remind us of human families—by caring for each other, sharing food, and sheltering their young.

Watch the Q&A with Dr. Simard and enjoy a beautiful reading from Finding the Mother Tree. You will also hear from Kwakwaka’wakw artist Rande Cook and SCBC’s Robin Strong and Flossie Baker, who will update you on the current old-growth movement in B.C.

Explore resources from the webinar

Buy Suzanne’s book Finding the Mother Tree.
Read the study that Robin mentioned, Conflicting portrayals of remaining old-growth: the British Columbia case
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Meet the Author

Dr. Suzanne Simard

TED Speaker and UBC Professor Suzanne Simard has earned a reputation for pioneering research on tree connectivity and communication. Her research brilliantly illuminates that forests are social, cooperative creatures with communal lives not that different from our own.

Dr. Simmard is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, where she currently leads The Mother Tree Project and co-directs the Belowground Ecosystem Group. Her work has been published widely, with over 170 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Ecology, and Global Biology, and she has co-authored the book Climate Change and Variability. Her research has been communicated broadly through three TED Talks, TED Experiences, as well as articles and interviews in The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Globe and Mail, NPR, CNN, CBC, and many more. She lives with her two adventurous daughters and their wild and crazy extended family in the mountains around Nelson, British Columbia. You can purchase her recently released book, Finding the Mother Tree, here.