The Sunday Read: ‘The Social Life of Forests’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Foresters once regarded trees as solitary individuals: They competed for space and resources, but were otherwise indifferent to one another. The work of the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard upended that, finding that while there is indeed conflict in a forest, there is also negotiation, reciprocity and even selflessness. Ms. Simard discovered that underground fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest. On today’s Sunday Read, listen to an exploration of these links and the influential and contentious work of Ms. Simard. This story was written by Ferris Jabr and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Transcript

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0:25.6	Hi, I'm Ferris Jaber and for this week's issue of The New York Times magazine, I wrote
0:37.6	about a scientist named Suzanne Samard who changed the way we think about the fundamental
0:43.6	nature of forests.
0:47.4	In biology in general, one of the most fundamental principles is that all individuals compete
0:52.8	with each other for space and resources.
0:56.2	It is this ruthless competition between individuals and between species that drives a lot of
1:01.9	evolution, that's what forces organisms to become more adapted to their environments
1:08.3	and to outcompete others.
1:10.0	It's all about leaving more offspring.
1:13.0	I think for a long time, biologists, botanists, foresters, thought of trees as competing individuals.
1:22.3	But Suzanne has shown that that model is far too simplistic.
1:27.0	There's clearly a lot more going on in a forest and in an ecosystem, there's negotiation,
1:32.6	there's compromise, there's reciprocity.
1:36.9	So much of what Suzanne studies is about connectivity and I think right now, because of the pandemic,
1:43.7	the pandemic has really revealed just how connected we all are and how vulnerable we become
	...

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