 Welcome. I am Alison Johnstone MSP, the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament and Chair of Scotland's Futures Forum, and I would like to welcome you all to this online edition of the Festival of Politics 2021 in partnership with Scotland's Futures Forum. This evening's event is in conversation with Professor Suzanne Simard. We are pleased that so many people are able to join us online this evening, and I look forward to hearing comments and questions from our audience as we get into our discussion. I am delighted to be joined tonight by Professor Suzanne Simard, who is author of Finding the Mother Tree. She is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry and has earned a global reputation for her research on tree connectivity and communication and its impact on the health and biodiversity of forests. Today, Professor Simard's work is taking a scientific orthodoxy and has inspired countless researchers, writers and filmmakers, as well as generating millions of views of her TED talks. Despite Professor Simard's groundbreaking discoveries, she was initially dismissed by the male-dominated scientific establishment of the day. It would be years until the world took her ideas seriously. In 1997, a landmark paper in the journal Nature coined the term Wood-wide Web to describe her work, marking the dawn of a new era of ecological awareness. Her latest book, Finding the Mother Tree, has been described as a scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama. Welcome, Professor Suzanne Simard. There will be an opportunity for our online audience to put questions and views to the Professor throughout the event. If you would like to make a contribution, please enter your question or comment into the question and answer box. Be grateful if you could state your first name and where you are from and will aim to get through as many as possible. I am going to begin with a question directly to the Professor. I understand that you hail from a family who are some of the original settlers in British Columbia. Can you imagine a life without having grown up alongside trees? I can't actually. It's true. I grew up in what we call the inland rainforests of British Columbia, which are these amazing forests, huge trees, cedars and hemlocks. They're iconic forests. I've always had them around me. I have had, on occasion, the opportunity to travel to different countries. When I was in my 20s, I went back as a backpack tourist to Asia. I just couldn't wait to get back home. After a while away, I missed the mountains. I missed the forests. I guess everybody would miss their own home. It was the trees and forests and mountains that, when I finally got back home, I felt so much more at peace. They're in my blood and bones and DNA, and I can't imagine not having grown up among them. For those who are not familiar with your revolutionary work, could you give a brief summation of how you managed to change the world's views of trees? I know that's quite a big question. It's quite humbling. I don't often think of myself that way, but it started out just like everybody trying to work in the area that you're interested in. Of course, forests were, as we mentioned, just part of who I was. I followed in my grandfather's footsteps and great grandfather, who were horse loggers. I became a forester. As a young girl, of course, I couldn't do the heavy, dangerous work. This wasn't part of the picture. I did get involved in the field of civil culture, which is how to grow trees. I observed that we were taking our iconic old-growth forests and converting them into very simplified plantations. I was seeing that these were not very healthy forests. They weren't diverse. They were really at risk of infections by diseases and insects. That's what got me going on trying to figure what we were doing wrong. I felt like we were really unraveling these forests through our forest practices. When I was seeing these pathogens spreading through the trees, I started looking below ground at what we might have disconnected. That's when I discovered in following some of the amazing research already done in the UK in laboratories in the meadows that plants could be connected by mycorrhizas. Mycorrhizas are these fungi that are basically obligate symbionts with almost all plants around the world. Certainly all trees, all tree species depend on them, where the tree provides photosynthate and energy to the fungus which grows through the soil and picks up nutrients in water and delivers back to the tree so the tree can meet its needs for nutrients. In discovering that these trees could actually be connected by these fungi, that really showed to me that when we were converting our old forests to plantations or even just deforesting, that we were really disrupting this network and that provided avenues for these infections, these infestations. It was really degrading the integrity of the forest. That's how it got started. It was from a truly heartful place of being very disturbed by what was going on in our forests. I wish I could say that things are different now, but we still have these same issues of clear cutting old forests, planting them to simplified plantations and disrupting these networks in fairly major ways. Our forests are still not as resilient as they could be. That's how it got started. After many more years since that first nature paper came out, my lab has been full of graduate students who have expanded on the story of what these networks do and how important are they and how do they help forests recover. I'm sure we'll talk about some of that as we go along. I'm heartened to hear that you mentioned that your lab has expanded and that you're working with graduate students who have obviously been inspired by your work. Clearly, as I mentioned in introduction, you faced a lot of scepticism in that male-dominated scientific community when you began this work. Did you ever lose faith in that period? We're still not seeing the change that you would hope to see. Do you ever despair that the world is just not waking up to the ecological reality? I mean it's taken a long time for sure and it's been a big struggle, but now I feel like there are so many things converging on that people are really opening up their minds and accepting these findings. Things like we're in a climate crisis. We're in a pandemic. People are going to be migrating to get to and from these different crises that are going on. I see that in my own country. We're already undergoing climate migrations in small pockets. I think that reality has really hit home. I've read that almost 80 per cent of people on the earth have experienced in their own personal way some aspect of climate change. Of course, we've all been exposed to the pandemic. People are waking up because they need to. We're in a crisis and looking for solutions. There are solutions. With regard to those solutions, how do we proactively heal forests from human impact? That's the big question, but we know so much. I think I want to send this hopeful message out there that we do have a lot of good practices that we can apply to help mitigate these problems. For example, I can give you three ideas. One of them is that in large parts of the world, whether it's the west coast of North America or the boreal forest across Canada, Russia and Scandinavian countries, or the tropical forests across South America and Indonesia and so on, those places, there's still a lot of old growth forests left. Well, I should say there's still intact old growth forests left. I'm going to backtrack it. There's not as much as we've had. We've lost about a third of those forests worldwide from land use change and other practices, but we still have a substantial amount left. The first thing that we need to do is protect those forests because those forests, intact forests are actually absorb or store about 70 to 80% of our terrestrial carbon. If we keep these forests intact and then restore our remaining forests, scientists are saying that these kind of practices can actually absorb about 35% of greenhouse gas emissions. It really is in our favor to really focus on this. Of course, the other 65% comes from things like mitigating fossil fuel consumption, decarbonizing our energy sector as quickly as we can. Of course, cement production we also know is a major issue. Those things aside, in forests, conserving old growth forests or old primary forests is the first thing that we should do because there's no amount of planting trees, which I know that people really want to do, but planting trees is not going to add up to the same mitigation that's provided by saving what we have still remaining because these old forests store a ton of carbon, tons and tons of carbon. The second thing that we can do is to go into forests that are damaged and restore them. That does involve tree planting. It also involves favouring the advanced growth of older trees, letting them grow out through their whole lifespan instead of cutting them down in 50 or 60 years, but just actually letting them grow old so that they can accumulate carbon in the ecosystems. That's the second thing. The third thing that we can do is that on areas that were forested at one time that could support forests, we can convert those damaged ecosystems back to forests. That's called aforestation. Really it's like making a new forest. I think that there's definitely room for that around the world and I think that's the hope with these plants for planting a trillion trees is to try to get some of those places back into forests. The last thing I'm going to mention is that when we are going to still need wood in the future is when we do harvest trees, do it sustainably to make sure we leave the legacies in the forest so that they can be bootstrapped into the next generation. We need the gene banks, for example, of the old trees. We need to leave these old trees behind and then take out a few trees as we need them, but this is a major shift away from the current practices, which are predominantly to clear cut forests and plant them to monocultures. Thank you. So many points there that I'd like to pick up on, but I'm going to a question from Stu and Stu asks, how does one get into silver culture? Do you need more people specialising in this skill? And he'd also like to know how soon can he start? Thank you, Stu. That's a great question and I encourage you with all my heart to go and do that. We don't have enough people working in silver culture and really this is, you've hit on one of the major solutions, I think, and that is that people over time over the last 100 years have moved away from the land and into cities and that means that we have less knowledge and fewer people looking and knowing the land. And really, we need to understand, you know, we need to understand the places that we're in. For example, as a civil culturalist growing trees, you would need to know, you know, what are the native species there or what species can you introduce there if there are no native species that are left? And how do you manage them? And how do you keep them adaptive and still resilient as climate is changing? Because that change is going to be continuous and episodic as well. There's going to be episodes where it's more severe than other times. And that's going to require healing of the land and to heal the land, we have to have eyes on the ground. We have to have real practitioners out there. And so that was where the civil culturalists comes in. And the civil culturalists, it's a position that is, you know, needs to be more and more highly valued where you really are using all of your mind, all your understanding to bring to bear on this global issue of how do we keep our planet green and continuing to take up carbon. And just one more comment I'll make is that, you know, over the last, I've watched over the last 20 years or more that there's been fewer and fewer civil culturalists, there's fewer and fewer people on the land as we move towards a more digital world. And we also move more towards genetic or quick solutions. I shouldn't say genetic is a quick solution, but there's been more of a focus on that than in ecology. And so I encourage anybody who's listening, especially that you're interested in this too, to pursue this because we need you. And there are forestry schools around the world that train in this area and you can easily find them. I think there's a forestry school in Aberdeen in Scotland, actually, if you were to stay home. But certainly I work at UBC, which has an excellent forestry faculty as well. And I think these faculties have undergone a huge changes because of the, you know, of the, I don't know, I would say this shift, this cultural scientific shift has happened over the last 20 years, but it's going to shift back again as our needs become more evident and we need more experts like you're going to be. I hope in the future. Thank you. I think that was a very empowering and inspirational call there for those who'd like to get involved. You know, I just can't think of yet more useful work. I'm sure you really appreciated your response. I have a question from Vivian. Can the fungi so essential to intact forests be replaced or introduced? And how quickly can anything even resembling a functioning forest be built up? That's a great question. It depends on where you're starting from. But let's say you're in Scotland. I've been to your beautiful country a couple of times and I love it. You know, I think that at one time Scotland and you've got remnants of these forests was forested. And then there was a sort of a huge deforestation of events or events over time of conversion to agricultural land. And in that sort of conversion, you do have a wholesale shift in the below ground fungal communities. At least we've learned that from our forests in British Columbia where forests are converted to or we lose the sort of like the foothold of the forest on the land. So what we find is that in a forest, for example, that might have let's just say a baseline of 100 fungal species all different with their different niches in a forest. That's about on average what there is in our native forests here. When you convert them to say a grassland or a simplified community, the first thing that you do is you lose a lot of those native native fungal species that are associated with the trees that were there. A lot of them are very specific to tree species or at least specific to genera or families of trees. And heathlands or grasslands form a whole different suite of mycorrhizal fungi, these helper fungi than trees. They tend to be what we call our busketer mycorrhizes, which don't really associate with trees unless there are some trees that do like the yew tree and the willows and cottonwoods, cedars, cyprus, they form our busketer mycorrhizes, but the pines and birches and oaks all form this other group called ecto mycorrhizes. So if the conversion has happened over like for a long period of time, you would have to bring those ecto mycorrhizes back into the community to get trees established again. And there is a long history through the world of bringing trees into these kinds of communities or even migrating things like Douglas fir has been migrated over to New Zealand and Australia and Chile and Scotland I think. And what's happened is that at first these migrations failed because the mycorrhiza community wasn't there to help them along. And so once people figured out that they needed the soil inoculum to go along with it, they started introducing the inoculum along with it, and that really allowed these trees to get going. So that is, we have a good history that we can do that, right? We can introduce inoculum and you can purchase inoculum. You can also bring it from an intact forest nearby. For example, I know in Scotland you have places where there's still forests left and you can actually re inoculate areas that you're trying to a forest or a re forest that have been in fallow for a long period of time. I've successfully done this in lots and lots of experiments myself in trying to restore grasslands or even restoring old mine spills where we've brought in migrated or transferred soil from intact forests and really the seedlings get going and they do really well. Thank you. I have another question from Ian in Creef this time. When reforesting, it would seem that diversity may be the key to combating the numerous pathogens that are attacking our trees. Could we plant no more than 20 per cent of any single species in a reforested area with maybe the young trees of each species being sourced from different areas? That's Ian's question. Yeah, Ian, that's a great question. Really, this kind of harkens back to Stu's question about knowing your land and knowing what species belong where. I think I would be hesitant to put a number on the proportion, like 20 per cent, it depends on what belongs there to begin with, what's well adapted to that location. For example, in some of our forests in Canada, we have huge areas of land that are predominantly lodgepole pine with some aspen and spruce mixed in, and it comprises naturally about a high proportion of the community over 50 per cent. To say, oh, we're only going to have 20 per cent lodgepole pine, it would actually not be good for those ecosystems because that's the species that's well adapted. So you really have to know your land, what belongs there, the kinds of disturbances that are coming along, but certainly having a diversity of species, what naturally fits is what you would aim for. So understanding the natural patterns that were out there prior to or in similar areas, and then you're absolutely right that that diversity is absolutely essential. Once you match that properly, it's absolutely essential for keeping forests healthy and resilient and resistant to infections and infestations. So there's a couple of ways I can describe this, but one is if you have a diversity of species, let's say you have 10 species instead of just one of trees, then if there is a specific insect that is specifically attacks or infests that one species that maybe you've planted over 100 per cent of the area, if that insect or pathogen takes off or becomes epidemic, then it will take out that one whole forest if it's only comprised of one species. If there's 10, and that's only comprising 10 per cent of the population or of the community, then you'll still have all those other trees left that are not susceptible to that particular pest or herbivore or pathogen. Another thing is diversity, this works in so many ways, but diversity also increases resilience or resistance of individual trees to infection because they're healthier and they're growing better because they have a community of companion trees and plants. So in ecological theory, we call this niche complementarity, where species complement each other. You know that some species will have the ability, for example, to fix nitrogen and that improves the nutrition of all the trees around them. When the nutrition of the trees is high, they tend to have more resistance to diseases, just like we humans do as well. When we're healthy, we don't get flus and we don't get sick as much. It's the same thing in forests. So that diversity is really, really important in keeping the health of the forest up. I have got more things on this, but I think I'll wait for the next question and try to build that in. Thank you very much and the next question comes from Mark. It is, how widely are your ideas about good forest management now accepted? Is there still a significant challenge in getting those ideas accepted? What are any barriers and are there any areas or countries of best practice that you would highlight? Yeah, so many great questions. I would say where I'm from in Canada and I would venture that this is true around the world just because we've moved economically towards the concentration of ownership of wealth in the hands of a few. And that's true in forestry. So, for example, where I'm from in British Columbia, we used to have many, many mills and small companies and they've merged into five major companies now. And so they basically have jurisdiction over huge amounts of land or resources. They have licenses to harvest huge areas of forest. And because it's economically driven, instead of ecologically driven, they tend to go for the cheapest, most expedient way to reforest, to log for one and then to reforest. So the logging by and large is still clear cut logging where they don't leave big old trees behind, which is what my research shows that you should be keeping old trees so that they have a diversity of fungi associated with them, that they connect the forest, that they form the nucleus around which forest can recover. And so the cutting patterns haven't changed. And then how we reforest, we are still trying to reduce diversity in forests by trying to concentrate resources on those individual trees in the monoculture or in the planted forest with the idea that all these other plants are competitors rather than part of a community. And so I would say, you know, no, things haven't changed. In fact, in some ways they've gotten worse as we've gone down this economic model of concentration of wealth and ownership. And we really do need to diversify that just like in, you know, economics and ecology, both need diversification so that we can have a diversity of ideas and practices put in place that will make a more diverse landscape. So, yeah, it's, there's a long ways to go, but it's hopeful because, you know, more and more people are understanding how crucial it is that we do transform forestry practices that we do need to, you know, conserve and restore and an a forest that we need to figure out better ways of leaving the legacies behind an ecosystem so that they can become healthy forests in the future so that there are good gene banks. There are good, there's good soil left. There's still a lot of carbon and nutrients in the soil. We know now we really need to focus on doing this. And it's seeping into public awareness. And so I think that once that awareness is there and people are feeling the crunch and the pressure from climate change that they'll pressure their governments to try these different methods that are much more holistic and ecologically sound. And I can't remember the other parts of the question. Yeah, I think that was a very fulsome response. Thank you very much. I'm just wondering, can you tell us more about your current work on whether trees can distinguish us as human beings? What do trees know? Yeah, trees know a lot. Holy. So, you know, trees actually are evolutionarily much older than us. And we, you know, we all kind of evolve from the same basic genetic material back, you know, millions of years ago, four million years ago. And so a lot of the, you know, the genetic makeup of us comes comes from the genetic makeup of our predecessors of our ancestors, which includes the trees. And so because of that legacy, because of that gene pool, we share a lot of things in common. And so let me just talk about some of those things. So one thing, you know, you know how humans were very social creatures, right? We live in communities and we specialize. We have, you know, we have politicians and we have bakers and we have school teachers and, you know, the whole complex system that makes a country or a community work. It's the same thing in forests that, you know, trees growing communities as well. They're very social. They don't grow by themselves. They're a consortium of many species, many individuals, and even across different kingdoms of organisms. For example, the symbiosis between fungi and trees is the community is that symphony of organisms that really makes a forest healthy and vibrant. Yeah. So, and so what do trees do? How do they do this? Well, one of the things they do is they connect below ground through mycorrhizal fungi. And I wouldn't say it's not just the fungi. They're connected and have pathways or networks with many other creatures. It's just that the fungi are really cool because we can actually see these networks. We can see the trees linked together. We can make maps of these networks. But bacteria also do this. They form biofilms and they connect individuals through biofilms right along the mycorrhizal networks, for example. And through those networks, the microbial networks, the fungal networks, is a lot of communication going on. So trees will transmit resources back and forth between them according to who needs more. So they'll transmit carbon and nitrogen and water and phosphorus. And then our later studies are they also transmit information about things like identity. And I think that gets to your question about perception of identity. Who's around me? So the trees perceive their neighbors. They know who is related and who is not in the plant world. We've done lots of experiments to show this. And they respond differently than neighbors respond according to the identity of their neighbor. And they send messages back and forth. And one of the things we found out is that old trees will favor their kin if they recognize kin that seeds from their own cone crops, for example. As for people, certainly when we do experiments like we purposely injure a tree or shade a tree or pull its needles off, trees go into an instant response. They change their biochemistry almost instantly. They start to go through all kinds of hormonal responses. If it's an injury, like if I pull the leaf off of a tree or a needle, it will trigger these defense responses in the trees. They'll start to make enzymes and monoturpings to defend themselves against this. And what we found is that these trees through their mycorrhizal networks also transmit this information about defense to their neighbors. And then the neighbors upregulate their own defense machinery and they defend themselves. And so, yes, the fact that we can measure this when we injure a tree tells us that, yes, they, of course, are responding and are to us. They have a way of perceiving us just like they do when, for example, a squirrel clips off a cone or anything that might feed on the bark or rip off needles. Or just any animal or organism that does that also elicits these kinds of responses. And so, yes, so they can distinguish whether, for example, a caterpillar eats a leaf or a person pulls off the leaf. They have a different degree and amount and type of biochemical response to that. So, yes, it's intriguing, it's interesting, it's not something that I've directly sought out to say, can they perceive us? But to our experimentation in different ways, I understand that they are able to distinguish. That's incredible, you know, you're saying they'll know if it's a squirrel or if it's a person. Just that level of awareness. So it must be hugely traumatic if we see large-scale logging of an ancient forest. You know, we've seen some documentaries on TV here in recent weeks just showing what's happening with regards to clearing sites for meat production and so on. We're seeing almost straight lines, right angles of ancient forest beside nothing at the moment. That must be very, very traumatic for those forests. Is that what you're telling us? It is. It's traumatic. Of course, by clear-cutting trees, you're killing the trees. There's no two ways about it. Once you take off the photosynthetic crown, cut the tree down, the root system dies within us very, very quickly. It's basically you've killed the tree. Of course, the tree is going to respond to its own death. So, yes, it is traumatic. The other thing that's traumatic about it is that there are ripple effects all through the ecosystem. So it's not just the tree that goes, but all of the symbionts, the fungi, the bacteria, the soil food web also turns over at changes. So it'll change from what it was in the forest, which would be very diverse and highly tightly coordinated in a complex system to kind of a more weedy kind of environment. Where a lot of weedy species come in, fungi that are easy to grow on grasses or thistles or whatever the invasive plants might be. So the whole soil food web changes over. Along with that goes a change in the soil carbon pools, nitrogen pools, the water. So, for example, just to go through an explanation of what happens, let's say you have a forest, cut down all the trees. Because you no longer have a crown that's photosynthesizing anymore, you know, the canopy. It's also not transpiring anymore because photosynthesis goes along with transpiration. That's the emission of water into the atmosphere. And so the area, or at least the canopy will be dried out because there's no transpiration. So what happens is that water stays in the soil and the water table rises up. So when the water table rises up, you can get flooding. The other thing that happens is when the root systems die back that the pores in the soil, you know, the little holes in the soil. That's where all the bugs like live in and they get air in the soil. That's where soil water is regulated. Those collapse in a lot of cases. And so in the collapsing soil and the rising water table, this can result in runoff. And so you can get erosion in those cases. The other thing that happens is that, you know, you take the trees off and those trees are turned into different forest products like toilet paper or paper or all parts sometimes into long-term wood products like houses. But the other part that's affected is what's below ground. And so as this water table is rising up, the soil is also heating up because there's more sunlight coming onto the forest floor or onto the ground. And so decomposition also speeds up. So you start to get, you know, these soil organisms will start because it's warmer. Their life cycle speed up. And so they start to decompose the organic material that's in the soil. And this causes even more emissions of CO2 and the reduction of the carbon stocks in the soil. And what we have found just speaking of carbon stocks, which of course we're all very interested in because of climate change and greenhouse gases. What we found in our forests in British Columbia is that when they clear cut, we actually lose a lot of that soil carbon just from, you know, just from cutting down the forest. A lot of that forest soil gets moved around or disturbed and it increases decomposition. And we found that we are losing between 60% and 80% of forest floor carbon right along with clear cutting. And so the consequences are huge, right? So it affects the hydrology, as I mentioned. It affects carbon pools and it affects the nutrient availability as well to the regrowing forest. So yeah, there's lots of downstream ripple effects from cutting down a forest. Yeah, thank you very much indeed. I think that this sort of leads us on to another question from Ian and Creef who's asking and they answer me, seem obvious, but I'd be very grateful for your comprehensive views. Should we shift, therefore, from clear felling to continuous cover felling, ie thinning or small group felling? Yeah, I agree with that. But in general, that's right. But one of the cautionary principles is not to do the same thing everywhere. So we need a variety in the cover that we leave on the landscape and it needs to be matched with local site conditions. And so certainly what we're doing, I have a big project in British Columbia that crosses a climate gradient that's the size of Denmark. And we're trying different ways of group selection or group felling and leaving groups of trees. And the configuration, whether you leave individuals or leave groups and how big those groups should be depends on the climate region that you're in. So if it's a really moderate, more sort of very rich environment with like high rainfall, it's nice and warm, then you can actually leave fewer trees just to have the same effect is in a more poor ecosystem that's colder where you would want to leave groups of trees to protect the new seedlings coming up. So the message there is don't do the same thing everywhere but make sure you're matching it to the site. Conditions, another cautionary principle about continuous cover forestry. Again, like we don't want to do the same thing everywhere in some places, it's not going to match up very well. So first, just to give an example, continuous cover forestry means that you have canopy that's still intact. And in some areas, you actually need more open spaces for some species to regenerate. So things like pines, pines need more space. And so if you want to encourage pine growth or anything that's shade intolerant, you need to create bigger gaps than if you are growing back shade tolerant species like in my case in my world it would be cedar trees or maybe in Europe it would be beach trees. You would want to leave a more closed canopy for regeneration of those shade tolerant species. And so you can work with canopy cover to guide the development of the next forest and the species composition, which is really sensitive to the amount of shade that is being cast over them as a consequence of your cutting patterns. Thank you. I have another question from Stu who is asking, what sort of understanding of some of the concepts you've been discussing was already known to indigenous cultures in Canada or elsewhere? Is this something you look at? It is definitely something I look at and so this idea of connection, which is what really I think people really, we all feel that this is intuitively makes sense and of course scientifically we know that this exists now. We've used western scientific tools to understand these solid connections, these internet below ground, but in talking to Aboriginal people and even in some of the early writings in oral history there was an understanding already that these fungal networks existed in the soil and that they supported, they were the foundation of the forest. And these fungal networks were treated with a great deal of respect, as were the trees. In fact, all creatures in the world of indigenous people are their relations and they are our relations. We're of the same genetic origins and whereas in the western world we've tended to separate ourselves from nature and think that we're different, but we're actually not different. We're just, you know, an interdependent with the whole ecosystem and that is really is the worldview of many of indigenous cultures worldwide. And so, yeah, that understanding is well known. It's in language. It's in ancient languages of words that describe this kind of connection, what it means. The English language doesn't include so much of that, but in the cultures around where I live, every single one of the hundreds of languages here have words for this idea that we're all connected together. And I continue to work. I work quite closely with Aboriginal people, indigenous people in Canada to try to reinvigorate our forests based on this idea of connection rather than disconnection, which is what we've been doing industrially for quite a long time now. Can I just ask—obviously we've been speaking about your book, Finding the Mother Tree—could you perhaps elaborate on the importance of the mother tree's role in looking after the forest? Yeah, yeah, I can. And I like that you called it the mother tree's role. So it really is about the role, the role of the elder of the mother tree in the forest that's so important. So just to describe a little bit about why, you know, what is a mother tree? Well, they actually are the biggest and oldest trees in forests, or if your forest is all of the same age, it would be just simply the biggest trees. And the reason that they're so important is because they have, you know, they have big crowns, a big canopy, they photosynthesize a lot compared to smaller neighbours. A lot of that energy ends up, or at least, you know, between 30% and 80% of that energy, depending on the ecosystem, ends up being transmitted into the soil and into the roots and into the mycorrhizal networks. And so they are the big connectors, they've got more roots, they've got more points of connection, and they connect to many of the other trees in the forest. In making a map of our networks in British Columbia, we found that, you know, mother trees can be connected to 80% of the other trees in the forest. So they really are the nucleus. And then, through our experimentation, we found that these old trees will, in forming these connections, they provide like a great platform for new seedlings to get going on. So when a seed falls on the forest floor, it grows a root, within a month or two, it hooks into this massive network that the old trees are supporting, and then they benefit from that huge resource uptake capacity of the existing networks that is, you know, basically fed by the old trees. The other thing that we found is that these old trees will transmit nutrients and water and carbon directly into seedlings to help them, give them a head start, to subsidize them until they have enough leaf area themselves to photosynthesize and support themselves. And even then they stay connected in this big network and, you know, transmit information about their health and their, you know, their shading condition, their nutrition, their disease, or whatever has happened to them. They all are perceiving this from each other. And there's another important point that I wanted to make about the mother tree. So the mother tree really is mothering, in a sense, the new generations of seedlings coming up. And these old trees again also recognize which ones are their own kin, which is brand new research coming out of, you know, labs in North America that trees recognize kin and they actually can support their kin through transmission of carbon to the mycorrhizal networks and to increase the nutrition of their own offspring. And, of course, that fits in with their ideas of natural selection, you know, that they would favor their own genes so they can carry on to the next generations. And so, yeah, so that's what led us to calling them mother trees is just because of that, you know, that nurturing aspect of the old trees in the forest and how important these elders are in their role in doing that. Thank you very much. That was very illuminating. Can I just ask on forestry? I'm just interested in your views as to the gendered nature of forestry as a profession. Yeah, what's happening out there on the ground? Yeah, I mean, it's changed dramatically over the span of my lifetime when I started in forestry. Of course, I described how I came from a forestry family, which of course was male dominated. My grandmother's were not out there chopping down trees. They were at home looking after the kids and milking the cows and, you know, keeping the home stable while the men went out and logged. And then, you know, in because it was such a male dominated industry that flavored, you know, who was doing the science and who was doing the forest practices predominantly men. And so, of course, their viewpoints are what shaped those things, the science and then the practice. And so when when women started coming into the field, which, you know, I entered in about 1980, there are very few of us. Most of the research, you know, very little have been done by women. And so that perspective was missing. And I think that now that there are more girls coming into forestry, there is as many girls in forestry now as boys. And that's a good thing because then there's a diversity of understanding and how we look at forests. So, for example, this idea of connection and collaboration, you know, that was very much a that's a very much a female point of view. And it took female females to do, you know, to carry that research forward. Whereas before, you know, it was in the practices till still today are heavily dominated by the idea that trees only compete with each other. And that shaped forestry practices in dramatic ways and competition was very much like the thinking of men and how forests were structured. They didn't really think about this collaborative social aspect of forests. And so growing, you know, plantations so that the trees are spaced apart uniformly that they grow by themselves and compete for light and water. And that's, you know, it's all about the individual. Now we've changed that idea to know that, you know, that actually forests thrive in their social communities. But it really did took it took a lot of women in the field to change that perspective. But and it's not trivial, you know, that that perspective has not been there for so long. And because, yeah, like I said, like forestry practices are completely shaped by the idea that competition reigns supreme. How we plant trees, how we space them, how we weed them out, how we reduce the diversity in plantations to try to concentrate resources in those individual trees that will be the next crop. All of that is based on this idea that competition is what matters the most. And now we know that's not true. So that it's only one aspect of the many ways that trees interact and communicate with each other. So it's a good thing that, you know, there's a diversity of people working in the field, you know, that more women are getting involved. And more, and, you know, a diversity of cultures as well. You know, the idea of oneness and collaboration was long, you know, as we talked about before embedded in indigenous worldviews. We need to get that back. We need to incorporate those viewpoints into our practices now, because those are sustainable practices. And now I'm remembering one of the questions back was, are there examples in the world of where we can see where this works and there are. Two examples come to mind. One is the Menominee Forest in northern United States. I think it's in Wisconsin where the Menominee Nation has done selective harvesting of their forests for 100 years or more. And those forests are, you know, they're accruing, you know, they get wood out of the forest to support their lives, but the forest is still intact. It's still a thriving productive forest. Another example is the Wildwood Forest on the east side of Vancouver Island. Another selectively harvested forest that is producing even more basal area or wood than it was before. So it definitely can be done to use these perspectives of connection of society, of leaving the elders of more continuous canopy cover or using partial retention. These ideas work and we've got lots of evidence around the world. Thank you. As someone who's obviously very happy working in forests, I'd like to ask how you feel about your work inspiring the world of film, such as the film Avatar, which apparently borrowed aspects of your work. And now we hear of the Amy Adams biopic of your life. Are you comfortable with that world of entertainment? I suppose it's got real power to carry these messages far and wide. It sure does. So far, so good, right? Yes, there was Avatar. Although, you know, back when they made that movie, I was not really, I wasn't directly consulted on it, but they read my papers and so that did influence them in that way. And, you know, James, or sorry, Richard Powers book, The Overstory, you know, with the main character, one of the main characters, Patricia Westerford was based partially on my character. And all of that matters, right? It raises awareness in the public when it's in popular culture like that, in popular media, films, books. You know, people are writing symphonies, people are writing operas, people are doing art using these concepts, and that all expands our awareness in the world of these connections. And, but when it comes to Amy Adams and the biopic, I don't know, you know, I'm a little bit nervous about it because who knows what that's going to turn out with, turn out like, and hopefully my hope is what it will do is that it will even expose even more, you know, what we're doing wrong and what we can do right to help people move along so that we can be a more healing kind of planet instead of, you know, exploiting. Thank you. That was a very interesting response and I'll certainly await the biopic with interest. You've spoken there about healing and some of your writing has been very personal. You've spoken about the forest as a, and you've also spoken about, you know, the forest being all about connection and relationship. But you've spoken about the forest being a sanctuary when you were going through treatment for breast cancer. And I wonder if you'd be willing to expand on, yeah, just on that idea of why that was so helpful for you at that point in time. Yeah, you know, from growing up in forests, it was always, the forest was always a place of sanctuary for me and always, you know, that's where I, you know, I feel good in forests. And it's not just me, people all around the world. It's well documented now that the healing aspect of being in a forest, forest bathing or, you know, and it actually, there's, you know, evidence of our, you know, how we change when we're in a forest, how we calm down, how we calm down. We, we have like positive hormonal responses to forests. There are even, you know, you know, the soil organisms in the soil, the things that we smell. A lot of that is the cycle of the nutrients that's going on in the forest floor. We smell that and we feel good. It's life, right? It brings life to us. And so certainly, you know, when I was going through chemotherapy for breast cancer, I went to the forest as much as I possibly could. And one of the, one of the, the drugs in the chemotherapy was pachlataxol and pachlataxol is a derivative of the U tree. And I know you have U trees in the UK in Scotland that are, can be a thousand or more years old. These are ancient trees and they produce taxol or the trade name pachlataxol as a defense, a defense enzyme themselves. And so it protects them against disease and infections. And this was actually known by Aboriginal people in North America for a long time and used for its medicinal properties and tinctures and ointments and bathing to heal, you know, I'm not sure, heal illness. And so I would, when I knew this, right? And so I would go to the U trees that live around me because my forests are full of you as well, and go and spend time with those U trees and just give thanks for saving my life and taking my children and being together with these trees. And, you know, one of the things I also did is I made a promise to myself that I would try to give back. And so I've got a new graduate student, Eva, who is Eva Snyder, who is working with us. And the idea is that U trees live in communities as well, right? They have neighbours. They're connected to other neighbours in my world. They're maples and cedar trees and the ferns and the understory plants. And the idea that the community influences the health of the U tree and that it influences the chemistry of those U trees and the pachlataxol that they produce. And so we're trying to figure out whether or not there are certain community aspects that enhance the ability of the U tree to produce this amazing chemical that we have used and benefited from as human beings as well. So that's her work and that's pretty exciting. It certainly is and thank you for your answer there. I think we would all agree that you have given back in so many ways and continue to do so. We're sort of, we're beginning to run out of time just now. I think I've been really struck this evening by, well, I think you're, would you say it was a fair summation that your number one call really is about saving what we have. We are, we are, we are focused I suppose because we've got to the stage of having lost so many trees that we have a real focus at the moment on planting. But I think it's fair to say that we simply cannot bear or contemplate the loss of any more of our great forests and we really have to protect what we have as a, you know, if there was one message that you'd like, you know, this is the festival of politics. If there was one message that you'd like to reach politicians and parliamentarians worldwide, what would that be? That would be it. I mean, it's too, it's great to invest in trees and planting trees and it gives people a sense of agency and healing the planet and that's a good thing. But the first and foremost thing that we need to do in addition to decarbonising our energy sector, the first thing we need to do in forests is to protect the old forest that we still have. Because, you know, when you cut down those forests as climate is changing, we're never going to get them back, right? Because climate is changing so quickly that the forests won't come back the way that they were before. They're going to be different species compositions. There's going to be a much less carbon capital in them. We're going to lose so much biodiversity and carbon in the cutting down of these forests and we can't afford to lose any more. We're in a biodiversity crisis and in a climate crisis and those things are tightly entwined. They feedback on each other. So yes, we need to save these old forests and so how do you do that? Well, you know, there's all kinds of mechanisms that are coming up, market mechanisms that we really need to start really pushing and that is to make it profitable to save these forests instead of turning them into logs. So how do you do that? Well, you start valuing those other things that forests provide to water, air and so on. But one of the things that's easy for us to count that actually will take care of a lot of these other things is carbon. And so I think it's an easy logical mechanism that we can really move on very quickly and that is to buy carbon credits. Use whatever mechanism is in place to raise the price of carbon so that it matches the value of these ecosystems and then start buying them up so that these forests can be left intact. And then the cultures that are living in them and a lot of the intact forests are in Aboriginal cultures around the world. They map directly on each other is to empower the people with enough funding, which you can get through the carbon credits to actually start stewarding their forests like they did for thousands of years. They can look after the forests in the way they've known to do for long, long, like for millennia. So to me saving these forests is first and foremost and there are market mechanisms that are emerging and we need to push those forward as quickly as we can so that we can make sure that these remaining forests are left intact. Thank you. That seems like a good point to end on what we need to do and how we might go about it. Can I just begin to draw this evening's proceedings to a close? I'd like to thank you all for your contributions. I'd like to thank everyone who's joined us online. Thank you so much for your questions and for making such a positive contribution to this excellent in conversation event, but I'd particularly like to thank Professor Susan Suzanne Simard for giving us your time this evening and taking part. Can I take this opportunity to remind everyone watching that the festival continues for one more day with panels on resilient cities and business innovation and solutions to sustainability in big brains to big solutions and the role of culture in good health and wellbeing as well as discussions on mental health and the inequalities created by Covid-19. Thank you so much for joining us this evening and I do hope that you'll be able to join us to model too, but thank you again. Thank you all for joining us.