Re-Seeing TreesHow alumna Suzanne Simard changed the way we understand the forest.

“I’m a home forest person,” says forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, M.A. ’89, Ph.D. ’96. “I really believe that the beauty of tending our forests, of looking after them, lies in our understanding of the place — so I never wanted to go very far from my forest.”

It’s an early weekday morning, and as we chat over Zoom, Simard sits in a faintly lit empty classroom at the University of British Columbia, where she’s a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences. She has spent just about her whole life and career in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where she’s made her greatest scientific breakthroughs. Simard is a pioneer in the study of the mycorrhizal network, a web of subterranean fungal connections between tree roots that, she proposes, allows trees to exchange resources and help each other thrive.

Despite this emphasis on nearness and familiarity — “ecology means the study of home,” she says — these ideas have reached far. Very far. In 2016, Simard delivered a TED Talk that has been viewed eight million times. She was the inspiration for the character of Patricia Westerford, a forest ecologist, in Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory. Her research has been referenced on Ted Lasso and has appeared on the front cover of the journal Nature; she has published a bestselling memoir, Finding the Mother Tree; and just this year, she was named to the Time 100 “Most Influential People of 2024” list.

In some ways, Simard’s career resembles the growth rings of the trees to which she has devoted her research: a series of concentric circles, expanding their reach and growing more complex. She grew up in western Canada, the eldest daughter in a family of foresters who practiced horse logging: “I come from, you know, thousands of generations of woodcutters,” she says, laughing. “So it’s in my bones and blood and my DNA.”

Swimming against the tide is not easy in science; it takes courage.

Simard studied forestry as an undergraduate at UBC and worked a seasonal job with a logging company in her early 20s, when she began to grow curious about the connections between trees. She observed the detrimental impact of the clear-cutting practices that had replaced the sustainable logging her family had participated in for decades; they might yield more wood in the short term but seemed to have long-term consequences for the forest’s ability to regenerate. Many of the trees that she replanted after a clear-cut — as many as 10% — grew sick and died. She wanted to understand why. She completed a master’s degree in forestry at Oregon State, studying how alders and other shrubs then thought to be weeds competed with pine saplings, but she still wasn’t satisfied with her research.

Starting from a young age, Simard had an instinct that a forest was more than a collection of individual trees. Following a stint with the Canadian Forest Service, she came to OSU to pursue a doctorate studying forests more holistically — trees as members of an interconnected community.

“We emphasize domination and competition in the management of trees in forests,” she writes in Finding the Mother Tree. She wanted to ask a contradictory question: “Are forests structured mainly by competition, or is cooperation as or even more important?” She studied Douglas firs and paper birches, showing that radioactive carbon isotopes respired by one tree could be passed along to adjacent trees — and that the pathway was likely the filaments of ghostly white mycorrhizae spider-webbing just under the topsoil of the forest floor, connecting one tree to the next. These connections are significant not only to the logging industry, she asserts, but also to the understanding of how forests respond to stress, particularly in the face of climate change.

Resistance to her research, which was published in Nature in 1997, came swiftly. Her work “was (and is) a direct challenge to the prevailing competition paradigm. It meant that the forest was not a collection of individuals but included the potential for a web of interconnections and interdependence,” says Dave Perry, emeritus professor of forest ecosystems and society at OSU and Simard’s doctoral supervisor. “Swimming against the tide is not easy in science; it takes courage.”

Simard was not the first researcher to propose that trees exchange resources, Perry adds, but she brought the concept to the mainstream — particularly with her TED Talk and the publication of Finding the Mother Tree. With astonishing intimacy, the memoir chronicles her childhood, the death of her brother, romances, her divorce and a bout with cancer, alongside the development of her career. She draws metaphors from the landscape to help illuminate her experiences, and vice versa.

“You can write journal papers, and it doesn’t really change,” Simard says of her decision to write the book. “I kept thinking, ‘It’s because people don’t read these journal papers. They read stories.’” Other writers, like Powers, had used aspects of her research and of her biography in their writing, and just as she’d felt something was missing from science’s understanding of forest ecosystems, she felt that something was missing from the way her research was being portrayed. “I wanted to tell the story myself,” she says, “and I wanted it told from a female perspective.”

When she says this, she isn’t simply referring to her own point of view as a woman in science. One of the central metaphors of her memoir is that of the titular “mother tree,” which is what she calls each of the towering old-growth behemoths that appear to anchor the mycorrhizal network, shuttling resources to younger and more vulnerable saplings. “It felt like mothering to me. With the elders tending to the young,” she writes. “Yes, that’s it. Mother Trees.”

If the response to her work is any indication, Simard’s language seems to have tapped into a desire to see ourselves as part of, rather than distinct from, the landscape. Still, there are those who say that her metaphors aren’t sufficiently grounded in research. “I was trained as a scientist, and I have great pride in being a scientist,” she says. “There’s been a huge backlash against me writing in this way, and that’s been very difficult for me as a scientist.”

Released in 2021, Finding the Mother Tree became a bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Time and The Wall Street Journal.

Simard observes that some of the backlash to her research in the ’90s is rooted in a suspicion of language perceived as feminine. “It’s not trivial that there is this gendered bias in forestry. When I started out, there were very few girls who actually worked in forestry or in the forest industry,” she says.

Still, science, and culture at large, might finally be making more space for this kind of narrative. Just as many other scientists have since embraced her research on the mycorrhizal network (her Nature article has been cited more than 500 times), Simard has observed institutions and policymakers increasingly considering the knowledge of Indigenous land stewards, whose ways of talking about forests bear similarities to her own. For the scientific establishment, Simard “had legitimized ancient knowledge that the dominant culture had lost and badly needs back,” Perry says.

Before we end our call, I mention the Time 100 list. “That’s hilarious,” she says. “Why?” I ask.

“I feel like the accidental Time 100 person,” she says. “I was like, ‘Really? Did they get the right person?’”

But it was no accident; Simard is one of three scientists on the list whose work involves climate change. “Her 200-plus peer-reviewed articles have deeply informed the thinking of conservationists and environmentalists working to help preserve forests,” Time reports. Lately, she has been working on an ongoing, interdisciplinary climate study that she calls the “Mother Tree Project,” which examines how culling the oldest trees in a stand affects carbon stores, biodiversity and overall forest resiliency. In the face of extractive forestry practices, wildfires and global warming, Simard’s work may prove to be a key to staving off the worst effects of climate change.

“I have had the incredible wonder of watching forests recover from so much,” she says. “We throw so much at them. They burn down. They get eaten by insects. They get clear cut. They get moved around and pushed around. And yet every spring the leaves come out and the blossoms bloom and the forests come back.”