NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how
people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the
forest—a moving deeply personal journey of discovery Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that
the world is a web of stories connecting us to one another. [The book] carries the stories of
trees fungi soil and bears--and of a human being listening in on the conversation. The
interplay of personal narrative scientific insights and the amazing revelations about the life
of the forest make a compelling story.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence her TED
talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. In this her first book now
available in paperback 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 complicated 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 learn and adapt their behaviors recognize
neighbors 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. And Simard writes of her own life born and raised into a logging world in the
rainforests of British Columbia of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the
forest and how she came to love and respect them. And as she writes of her scientific quest
she writes of her own journey making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists
beyond data and technology that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the
world.
