My guest today, Suzanne Simard, is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation

Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Combining breakthrough research and public-facing activism, she's transforming our understanding

of and our public policy towards the forest.

Relationships are complex and it seems short-sighted to think that relationships between trees

that spend their entire lives beside each other wouldn't be more complex than just

being competitors.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Growing up in Minnesota, I spent a fair amount of time in the forest and it's always been

pretty obvious to me that the forest functions a lot like a modern capitalist economy with

trees and plants locked in fierce competition over scarce resources like sunlight, water

and nutrients in the soil.

But Suzanne Simard's research shows that everything I've ever thought I understood about forests

and probably everything you've ever thought you understood about forests is completely wrong.

Let's go back to say the year 1980.

Can you paint a picture of what logging practices looked like at that time with respect to cutting

down trees and replanting the parts of the forest that had been cut?

It was a major transition period between logging operations where there were small companies

or local communities that were logging their forests in a very small scale, supporting

small local mills.

In the case of my grandparents and my dad, they were logging just to feed the family and

just taking the smaller cedars out of these old-girls forests, so it was all very selective

...