42 pages • 1 hour read
Suzanne SimardFinding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Simard’s Impact on Science and Art
Simard’s research on interspecies cooperation and mycorrhizal networks has inspired a new understanding of the forest in Western culture. She has devoted her career to combating the practices of the Forest Service’s policymakers and has inspired a new generation of researchers who uphold her concepts of cooperation, Mother Trees, and community.
Though Simard’s nontraditional ideas and gender initially met with skepticism in her research community, she continued to learn, present her findings, and speak publicly against harmful forestry practices. She is now a highly regarded scientist with over 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference presentations and papers. Her work has appeared in Nature and National Geographic. Simard continues to work on the Mother Tree project as well as TerreWeb, a graduate-student-focused initiative to train the next generation of scientists to better prepare for and understand global change science.
Simard has more recently shared her research with the general public using platforms such as TED. Her June 2016 TED Talk, “How Trees Talk to Each Other,” launched her public speaking career. She has since given talks to Google, the New York Botanical Gardens, and TEDx centered around her research and memoir. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest is a New York Times Bestselling book. Her theory of the Mother Tree influenced James Cameron’s film Avatar, in which a central Mother Tree connects and communicates with not only the entire forest but also the humanoid beings living on the film’s fictional planet. Simard’s life also inspired the character of Patricia Westford in Richard Power’s novel The Overstory, published in 2018 and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The film rights to her memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, have been purchased by Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal, with Amy Adams slated to star as Simard.
Geographical Context: British Columbia
Simard’s research and experiences with the forests of British Columbia were crucial to the scientific theories she developed over the course of her career. Simard often describes the untouched nature of the forest ranges she hikes and camps in. These forests are part of the boreal forest belt that occupies most of Canada’s natural land and includes alpine tundra terrain. It includes species of bears, caribou, and wolves. The land is largely publicly owned, with the primary industry in the region being forestry. The harsh, demanding climate is populated by slow-growing spruce, pine, and aspen forests, all of which feature extensively in Simard’s discussion of her research. The nature of British Columbia’s forests, and particularly the need to share water and nutrient resources in areas with harsh growing conditions, is crucial to understanding Simard’s research, as her theories directly reflect the ecological needs of her local region.
British Columbia is also the homeland of several First Nations peoples, whose attitudes toward nature generally and the forest in particular Simard cites as an influence on her own thought. She especially references the Secwepemc, who cultivated much of the land where her research took place in a way that respected nature’s own balance. For example, Simard describes one old Mother Tree:
[Whose] life had started when the Secwepemc people […] regularly lit fires to create habitat for game, or to stimulate growth of valuable native plants, or to clear routes for trading with neighboring nations, and they’d kept the fuels low so the flames were never intense enough to have burned off her thick bark completely (233).
Simard therefore portrays the old forests of British Columbia as a symbolic link among peoples throughout history, underscoring her ideas about humans’ interconnectivity with nature and one another.
