48 ForOregonState.org/Stater OuR COMMuNIty RE-SEEING TREES How alumna Suzanne Simard changed the way we understand the forest. BY > KATHERINE CUSUMANO, MFA ’24 PHOTO BY DIANA MARKOSIAN “I’m a home forest person,” says forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, M.A. ’89, Ph.D. ’96. “I really believe that the beauty of tending our forests, of looking after them, lies in our understanding of the place — so I never wanted to go very far from my forest.” It’s an early weekday morning, and as we chat over Zoom, Simard sits in a faintly lit empty classroom at the University of British Columbia, where she’s a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences. She has spent just about her whole life and career in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where she’s made her greatest scientific breakthroughs. Simard is a pioneer in the study of the mycorrhizal network, a web of subterranean fungal connections between tree roots that, she proposes, allows trees to exchange resources and help each other thrive. Despite this emphasis on nearness and familiarity — “ecology means the study of home,” she says — these ideas have reached far. Very far. In 2016, Simard delivered a TED Talk that has been viewed eight million times. She was the inspiration for the character of Patricia Westerford, a forest ecologist, in Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory. Her research has been referenced on Ted Lasso and has appeared on the front cover of the journal Nature; she has published a bestselling memoir, Finding the Mother Tree; and just this year, she was named to the Time 100 “Most Influential People of 2024” list. In some ways, Simard’s career re- sembles the growth rings of the trees to which she has devoted her research: a series of concentric circles, expanding their reach and growing more complex. She grew up in western Canada, the eldest daughter in a family of foresters who practiced horse logging: “I come from, you know, thousands of generations of woodcutters,” she says, laughing. “So it’s in my bones and blood and my DNA.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==