Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

In honor of Earth Week, we're revisiting my conversation from last year with Dr. Suzanne Samard, the renowned scientist,

whose groundbreaking research, widely known as the Wood Wide Web, demonstrated how trees communicate

and exchange resources through networks of micro-risol fungi within the soil.

In this interview, Suzanne speaks about the urgent implications of a revolving understanding

of the interdependent nature of forests for healing the rift between ourselves and the living world.

You've described your work as an exploration of how we can regain our respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the forest, and through that help to heal our relationship with nature.

And over the course of your career, you've made some remarkable scientific discoveries about the ways that trees communicate and the intelligence that lies at the heart of the forest ecosystem.

And I was struck how in your new book you describe how even as a child and as a forester earlier in your career, you had this deep respect for trees and the forest and intuited much of what you ended up proving scientifically. Where did this deep respect for trees in the forest come from?

You know, I grew up in the trees. I spent my childhood among the trees always, and my parents are both from what's called the

Kootenie region of British Columbia, which is the inland rainforest. These are beautiful forests.

They're much like, you know, the West Coast forest, but they're inland. So there's towering cedars and

hemlocks and firs and white pines.

And, you know, I grew up playing in those beautiful old-growth forests

and not even really intellectually understanding how connected I had become.

Because it just was our way of life.

And, you know, I understood the forest as this deeply

connected, reverent place. It was like our church, right? These, these huge cathedrals of

trees. And, and so, you know, it, it just absorbed into my bones and blood and DNA. And so then I didn't realize,

I didn't articulate at the time that I had this reverence for trees. But when I grew up and became a

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