Without any competitors, the thinking went, the newly planted trees would thrive. Loggers were replacing diverse forests with homogeneous plantations, evenly spaced in upturned soil stripped of most underbrush. It seemed like the natural choice.īy the time she was in grad school at Oregon State University, however, Simard understood that commercial clearcutting had largely superseded the sustainable logging practices of the past. When she began attending the University of British Columbia, she was elated to discover forestry: an entire field of science devoted to her beloved domain. She experienced it as “nature in the raw” - a mythic realm, perfect as it was. The forest seemed ageless and infinite, pillared with conifers, jeweled with raindrops and brimming with ferns and fairy bells. They took so few trees that Simard never noticed much of a difference. Her grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine. What are they sharing with one another?īy Ferris Jabr Photographs by Brendan George KoĪs a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi.

Norse realms that survive yggdrasial