Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality. So much of our thinking of emergence, and indeed,

I believe the wider ecological sphere, has been impacted by the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Samard.

In 1997, she shared a theory termed the wood wide web, which offered a window into the

ways trees communicate with each other through underground networks of micro-risal fungi.

Not only are traces of our work threaded throughout many of our stories,

from our recent multimedia experience breathing with the forest,

to the conversation with Merlin Cheldrake on mycelain landscapes.

Suzanne's ideas have been truly essential in transforming how humans understand the Earth as living and interdependent.

They fundamentally changed our collective perception of trees, the possibility that a forest

could be familial, sentient, and deeply alive-found roots, and offered a pathway for us to

step into a renewed relationship with trees, one of deep attention and care. So this week,

he returns to my conversation with Suzanne from a few years ago, where she speaks about her

life's work and her most recent research on mother trees, the oldest trees in the forest,

and their astounding ability to recognize and nourish their own kin.

Stepping outside the scientific precepts and towards a vernacular that acknowledges connection,

using terms like mother, children, grandfather, she delves further into the intricate web of relationships

that Western systems of knowledge are only beginning to understand.

And wonders what lessons these trees can teach us about healing our separation from the living world.

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