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She is the forest ecologist who has proven beyond doubt that trees communicate with each other.

That a forest is a single organism, wired Suzanne Samard says for wisdom, and for what it is hard

to call anything other than care. She has shifted her field of science on its axis,

and was an inspiration for the central character in Richard Powers' celebrated novel The Overstory.

But it's the understory of a forest that Suzanne Samard brought into the light.

Modern forestry had applied a logic of human societies and what our eyes could see.

Assumed that trees compete with each other for light and soil, and thus tore out mature trees

to plant marketable young species alone and set apart.

Suzanne Samard began her rigorous groundbreaking research with three types of coexistence species,

paper birch, Douglas fir, and Western Red Cedar. What she helped the world see next is resonant

intelligence about more than trees. The processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror

the maps of the human brain that we're also just now drawing. All of this turns out to be validating,

catching up with intelligence long-held in Aboriginal science. Suzanne Samard calls the mature hub

trees in a forest mother trees, parenting, eldering in a mode of mutuality and reciprocity,

modeling what we also know to be true of genuinely flourishing human ecosystems.

The most powerful parts of our social systems can be, you know, the elder that has

aged and is guiding younger people or guiding their culture, and yet they can be almost invisible

in the hierarchy of our social system. In forests, the same thing like the below ground world is like

...