When forests are treated purely as commodities, with no regard for preserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change, we all suffer for it, humans and wildlife alike. But my returning guest, forestry scientist Dr. Suzanne Simard, explains that a conservation-minded approach to logging can protect forests while still satisfying economic interests.
Suzanne promotes valuing forests for the life they support rather than solely the resources that can be extracted from them. She is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and is widely credited as the scientist who changed the way the world thinks about trees. She pioneered the research showing that forests aren’t just collections of individual trees competing for resources — they’re complex, communicating communities, connected underground through fungal networks, sharing nutrients, sending signals, and actually looking out for one another.
Dr. Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and the author of “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest” and “When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World.”
Photo Credit: Paul Joseph
Suzanne spent years pushing a scientific idea that her peers thought was radical — that trees communicate, cooperate and support each other through vast underground networks. Turns out, she was right.
She’s someone who doesn’t just study forests, she fights for them. Her TED Talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people. She wrote a New York Times bestselling book, and the science wouldn’t just catch up, it would change forever.
Her previous book, “Finding the Mother Tree,” opened millions of eyes to a whole new understanding of forest intelligence and introduced her work to a global audience hungry for exactly this kind of science. Now she’s back with her newest book, “When the Forest Breathes,” and it’s every bit as compelling. In it, she goes deeper into the cycles of renewal that allow forests to heal, adapt, and survive, if we let them.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The subject matter is so interesting, and Suzanne’s personal interjections really made it feel like I was reading the book of a good friend.
Caring about forests has always been second nature to Suzanne.
“ I grew up in these forests, and this was the way we lived,” she says. “ We were people of the forest, and we made a living from the forest, but we never, we never exploited or took down the forest.”
‘When the Forest Breathes’
Suzanne explains that her new book is more of an “activism book” than her first book.
“‘ Finding the Mother Tree’ was really about the basic understanding of how a forest works from the perspective of my science and how I understood forests,” Suzanne says. “And the new book, ‘When the Forest Breathes,’ is really about, what do we do about this? Because, globally, we are losing forest cover. We’re losing our primary forests at a pretty rapid rate. We only have about half of them left, and even that half that remains is affected by climate change.”
Forests are such an important place for biodiversity and the global climate cycle, she points out.
“ People needed to understand the gravity of the situation, and therefore when we know the truth, that we can do something about it,” she says.
It’s alarming and frustrating to read about the lack of compassion that industry has toward forests. Suzanne details examples of when there is an effort to relieve some pressure on a clearcutting project and the effort can’t succeed because of the obstacles in place. Clearcutting is “the most brutal way that we can treat a forest, and it’s the most common way that we treat forests,” she notes.
Clearcutting doesn’t just remove trees and the life they support. It degrades the soil on the forest floor.
“ The soil is where the growth comes from,” Suzanne says. “It’s the essential foundation to life.”
Forests are commoditized and often handed over to big corporate entities in free market economies that prioritize profits and don’t care about forest conservation, she explains.
“It’s not just a problem for research, it’s a problem for us globally because the care, the stewardship, the tending of the forest, that tender need to look after the forest often goes unheeded or not done very well,” she says.
Trowels and seedlings for replanting at Peter Hope Lake in British Columbia.
Photo Credit: Steph Troughton
Can Forests Be Healed?
“Healing us and healing the forest go hand in hand,” Suzanne says.
By practicing good stewardship, we can get what we need from the forest while at the same time creating good conditions for a forest, she says. This could solve about one-third of our climate change problems.
“ Some people say if we actually really actively steward forests in a meaningful way, including restoration of the damaged forest, leaving primary forests, even doing some afforestation in areas, as climate changes that we could actually solve climate change,” she says.
In her research, she has seen how forests can recover and heal themselves. But if we damage them too much, there is a tipping point where it’s a lot harder for them to heal without more intervention.
“ Forests seed, they root, they regenerate,” she says.
“ We need to do our part, and that means leaving trees, leaving the plants, not spraying them with herbicides — leaving the legacies that the forest needs to recover, and then it will. It will rebound. So I have really encouraging data on that.”
When Planting Trees Is Not the Best Way to Restore a Forest
After a forest is clearcut, a company or the government may come in to replant it, but not with the mix of native local genotypes that had been there before. The saplings may be useful for future timber production, but they won’t put the forest back the way it was. Planting into a clearcut forest also interrupts the natural recovery that a forest would undergo on its own.
A clearcut forest will sprout back from its rootstock and the seeds that come in naturally. “ It’s wired to heal,” Suzanne says.
But when it’s replanted with species that were chosen for their economic value rather than their ecology, the forest will never be the same. And when planting with saplings that all came from the same seedstock, the replanted forest will lack the genetic diversity and genotypes that it had before.
“ If you look at a forest, the best-adapted seeds are from that place because there’s local adaptation that goes on, not just of trees, but the mycorrhizas, the fungi that are associated with them,” Suzanne explains.
“ The default should be natural regeneration, and the planted seedlings are insurance. But right now what we’ve done is we’ve said ‘the default is the planted, and oh, if naturals come in, that’s great.’ We’ve got that backwards.”
Local adaptation gives trees that extra edge they will need to survive climate change, she says.
A Mother Tree Project student showing soil gradients taken from a soil pit.
Photo Credit: Danica Law
An Unfortunate Disconnect
“One of the reasons we got ourselves in this is because we removed ourselves from the land,” Suzanne says. “We have this idea that we have human exceptionalism, that we’re not part of nature, we’re completely separate, that we have domination over nature. We just use it as a tool for us, and we’ve forgotten that we are the land ourselves. We’re just animals, just like all the other ones in this big earth. The difference is we have brains and empathy and mindfulness — and therefore we should be able to make compassionate decisions. We should be able to do this. But we have to remember that we’re just part of this ecosystem, and we need to be caring for it as our home. And that means changing our economic system.”
Leaving Big Trees Behind
“When you walk in a forest, you notice that there’s different sizes of trees, different species,” Suzanne says. “Even if it’s not a forest — any plant community, you have some species that are bigger than others or older. And what we’ve done is we’ve tried to measure carbon pools as an indicator of the vitality of the forest and the productivity of the forest. And so when we look at the carbon pool in that suite of trees, the biggest trees and the oldest trees hold an outsized amount of that energy in the ecosystem.
“And those big trees, therefore, are like keystones in the forest. They’re really important in the energetics of the forest. They’re photosynthesizing and redistributing that photosynthate to the heterotrophic community, the animals and the bugs and the plants and all the other plants and so on.”
Old, big trees are also habitat for a variety of animal species and moss and lichens that play essential roles in the ecosystem. Bears like to den in old tree cavities, and keystone birds like goshawks, marbled murrelets and spotted owls love big old trees, she points out.
Suzanne and her students researched how big trees affect forest recovery by harvesting trees in three ways.
“One was leaving individual trees, and the idea was to leave the biggest trees scattered like seed trees. The next one was to leave clusters of trees centered around the big trees. And the third harvesting technique was to leave a continuous cover of forest with all the big trees still there and just thinning from below.”
They found that big trees really do matter.
When a big tree is left standing alone, it’s vulnerable. It may die of shock when a drought comes. “ We’ve lost probably at least a third of these individuals in that particular treatment,” Suzanne says.
When a big tree was preserved with 30% of the smaller trees around it kept intact, the researchers found that the neighbors supported the elder.
“We were able to protect those old trees and create some small gaps where young ones can come … It creates kind of a mosaic of community types. It creates diversity, and it works pretty well,” Suzanne says.
The research team found that the best option of the three is to leave a continuous cover of forest and just thin from below, meaning taking the smaller trees out. The smaller trees are contributing the least into those ecosystems — low carbon pools, biodiversity, she explains. “They can actually sap the bigger trees of moisture, so they can actually be a negative impact. They can also have fire risk because they ladder up to the canopies of the old trees. So if fire gets in there, they can make it more intense and severe. So thinning out from below is actually a good thing to do.”
Forest canopy and sky at Hiladi Village — meaning “the place to make things right” — an ancient traditional summer village and sovereign rematriation project of the Ma’amtagila First Nation. Located at the Adam River estuary on northeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Photo Credit: Grace Brade
Get Connected
Suzanne says that because people live in cities and don’t always have access to a forest where they can go see the trees, forest conservation is just not front of mind.
“We have to figure out ways to connect people,” she says. “Maybe it just means growing a plant in their apartment, but some way that’s going to connect them with life and the value of life. If you grow plants, you can feel that goodness inside you, right? You breathe in the air of the plant in your apartment, and you feel good. You see the green, you feel good. And just imagine, globally, that’s what we need. We need all people to say, ‘We need these places.’”
Constitutional Rights for Forests
I had the opportunity to visit the Amazon rainforest in January, and it was a life-changing experience for me. Suzanne was also there recently. She visited the Achuar territory, which has been protected by Indigenous people against the threats of extraction —including logging and oil, gas and mineral extraction — and they’ve been quite successful.
“We should be doing this everywhere, right? We need to learn from these countries that have been successful at protecting their very life systems,” she says.
Ecuador and other countries have written rights of nature into their constitutions. It changes the legal framework surrounding logging and other extraction.
“ It’s been a fight. It’s constantly being challenged by extractive industries to tear down that law, but the Ecuadorian people stand up and say no. And so it’s really hopeful,” Suzanne says. “It’s a great precedent.”
She points out that this is the opposite of the law in Canada, where she lives, where the law favors logging.
“ To change the law so it’s set up for protection of life, that’s a huge step forward,” she says.
Regeneration of a forest understory.
Photo Credit: Grace Brade
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Dr. Suzanne Simard on forest renewal and resilience, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
How have forests inspired you? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Episode 185: Restoring The American Chestnut: An All-Out Effort to Save This Iconic Tree
Episode 206: Our Most Essential Trees: The Nature of Oaks, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 245: The Hidden Life of Trees, with Peter Wohlleben
Episode 265: Finding the Mother Tree: How Trees Take Care of Each Other, with Suzanne Simard
Episode 410: Create a Mini-Forest with the Miyawaki Method
Episode 411: How Conservationists and Foresters Saved America’s Public Lands
Episode 418: Recognizing and Confronting the Threats Facing America’s Trees
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Earthbound Expeditions | Chile: A Journey Through Nature’s Wonders with Joe Lamp’l | 2027
Dr. Suzanne Simard on Instagram: @drsuzannesimard
Dr. Suzanne Simard on BlueSky: @drsuzannesimard.bsky.social
“Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest” by Suzanne Simard
“When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World” by Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard TED Talk: How Trees Talk to Each Other
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