“Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.”
Dr. Suzanne Simard is a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. In 2016, she gave a TED talk about her groundbreaking discovery of how trees communicate with each other. Most recently, Dr. Simard has published a book called Finding the Mother Tree. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
· mothertreeproject.org
· www.oneplanetpodcast.org