Play Book Tag discussion

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard is the real deal. This is a great memoir about her life and work in the forests of British Columbia. I read about her research in other books, so I knew she is respected in the field. NOW. But that wasn’t always the case. Her research about the role of mycorrhizal fungi in connecting trees was treated with more than a little skepticism. She was a very young woman telling the older men in power that their forestry policy wasn’t working. They assumed that all the trees were competing for resources, while she had some weird feminine idea that they were cooperating and actually helping one another. The government men ruled that everyone should cut down one type of tree in order to let the more valuable ones grow faster. She continued to conduct very rigorous research, even after they cut her funding, and she had to move away to get a university job. She was slowly gaining support from the growers who could see for themselves that the government plan was failing. In the meantime, she lived an interesting life. I enjoyed reading about her work, her family life, her friends, colleague and students. I have never seen the forests in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve added that to my bucket list of places to visit.