Category Trees and forests

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When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review – the Indiana Jones of trees returns

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologists

It’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”

The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a try: few people can speak about trees with quite as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she is a Canadian national treasure and global environmental icon. When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she describes once sprinting through the forest with a syringe filled with radioactive isotopes in each hand as she is chased by a grizzly bear.

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‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics

Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature

In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.

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Ancient by Luke Barley review – the secret history of Britain’s woodlands

A former ranger tells the story of how the UK’s forests intimately shaped – and were shaped by – its people

It may not sit well with the politicians who now seek to govern it, but Britain has always been a land of immigrants – our “native” fauna and flora among them. More than 10,000 years ago, in the wake of retreating ice sheets, trees from the warmer south began to re-colonise this chilly north-western fringe of Europe: first birch, then hazel, elm, oak and alder. By the time rising sea levels submerged the marshy lowlands connecting it to the rest of the continent, the new British mainland was covered in a luxuriant tangle of forest. In this primeval wildwood, a squirrel could leap tree-to-tree from north coast to south, east coast to west.

Or so one story goes. In Ancient, woodland expert Luke Barley sets out to tell a more complex and fascinating tale of our forests and the people that have lived with and made use of them. His title points back to the post-ice age woodland and its forerunners in sweltering or wintry deep prehistory, but it also holds a more specific meaning. Under classifications drawn up in the 1970s, a UK wood is considered “ancient” if it was already in existence by 1600 (in Scotland, by 1750), as shown on the earliest accurate maps. These are our last links to the wildwood, places where the undisturbed soil still supports a rich and intricate ecosystem that no human ingenuity can recreate.

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