Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

'Diversity matters. And everything in the universe is connected - between the forests and the prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all the other creatures.'

Suzanne Simard

The indigenous American people know this, the Aboriginal people know this, and I'm pretty sure people in my neck of the woods knew this in the dim and distant past, but we 'civilised' people have chosen to forget. We forgot to take only what we needed; we forgot to put something back for everything we took and we forgot to treasure all the plants and wildlife that lives right alongside us.

Suzanne Simard's book is written from the heart and neatly blends together her scientific research with her own family stories. She was raised in Western Canada, and for generations her family made their living cutting down forests for the logging trade. As she grew up she saw the old method of selective cutting turn into wholesale clearance with great swathes of land stripped back almost to bare earth. All the diversity was lost and when the loggers planted neat lines of pine saplings in a token effort to replace the trees they had taken, most of them died. Suzanne wondered why the new trees couldn't thrive and, as she says in the opening paragraphs: 'Working to solve the mysteries of what makes the forests tick, and how they are linked to the earth and fire and water, made me a scientist.'

I am no scientist, and I would normally walk away from a book with a bibliography eighteen pages long, but I really wanted to read this book and I like to think I understood what I was reading. If you are interested in the subject then this is a great read, but if you just want the vibes without all the reading then go and watch Avatar and you will get some sense of the connectivity that truly exists between absolutely everything on this earth. Let's not wait until we fly to another planet to pick a fight with innocent blue people before we appreciate what we've already got.

Comments

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