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.

Dr. Suzanne Samarne is known for her groundbreaking research on below-ground fungal networks that connect trees

and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction.

We continue to explore futures this week with another story on motherhood, this time within the world of trees. In this interview, Suzanne discusses her book

Finding the Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, and shares her latest research

on how mother trees recognize and support their kin.

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

forests, 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

...