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, Marine County.

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

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

The emergence of new scientific knowledge often fundamentally alters how we think about things,

rewiring our perception of how the world works.

But how can we take this knowledge and apply it to reimagine our ways of being?

In this era of ecological breakdown,

how can we take what we know and translate it into the practical.

This week, renowned forest scientist Suzanne Samard returns to the show to speak about her latest book

When the Forest Breathes, and the groundbreaking findings

from her decade-long mother tree project,

which hopes to use its data to transform our forestry practices.

Entwining Western science and traditional ecological knowledge, Suzanne takes us through what

mother trees are telling us about how forests recede themselves, and shares insights, both ancient

and new, around the importance of tending to carbon stalks, the relationship between salmon

and trees, and maintaining the continuity of relational networks for forest survival.

Seeing how mother trees offer us a model for living in service to the future, she challenges

us to shed our extractive ways of being and instead work practically with what the earth is showing us.

Suzanne, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Emmanuel, for having me.

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