There is no way to understand how something grows without also understanding how it dies. When you walk in the forest, you see the abundance and growth, but if you look closer, you will also see disturbance and decay. There is beauty in life, but there is also beauty in death and in what remains behind. In the forest, renewal only comes with dying. It is part of my life’s work to understand how this renewal happens and what these processes have to teach us.

Nature is a rich fabric of endless cycles, from mushrooms and soil animals breaking down logs, to bacteria and fungi transforming organic sources and creating “dead” matter that is full of life, to aging trees “downloading” their genetic knowledge to their young. As young trees mature, they learn, adapt, and grow with their evolving circumstances and pass their wisdom to the next generations, ensuring the forest is enduring, regenerative, and resilient. Our own lives are inextricably bound by the same rules and destiny: birth, growth, death, decay, rebirth.

Nature is waiting for us to listen. And to learn.

*

These teachings were brought home to me in the aftermath of my own encounter with death. Decades of study in the inland forests of my home province of British Columbia had taught me that the web of community—the trees and plants, humans and animals, fungi and microbes, and the breathing soil itself—exists in a vibrant dance, a clockwork of adaptive cycles. Even as I marveled at the way energy cycles through this web, my own life energy was unraveling inside of me. I wrote my first book while recovering from breast cancer. I leaned on the teachings of the old trees to help me heal. In turn, I was able to use the insights I’d learned—about how connection, community, and wisdom are vital to recovery—to ask deeper questions about the forest.

When Finding the Mother Tree was published in 2021, I was astonished by the public’s heartfelt embrace of my scientific discoveries. Reader after reader wrote to thank me for confirming something they said they’d always known in their hearts—that the forest was a connected, intelligent, living system. One of my key findings was that the biggest, oldest trees—the mother trees—are the energetic keystones of the forest, the hubs of an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi connecting the forest. I used the metaphor of the mother tree because of their role in dispersing seed to the understory, connecting with the tender roots of their offspring, and nurturing the new shoots. Mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with tree roots and trade vital nutrients gathered from the soil in exchange for photosynthetic carbon from the trees. A symbiotic relationship is one that is close, cooperative, and interdependent, the result of coevolution over millennia to ensure fitness of the members. These fungi can connect the trees and seedlings together in an extensive subterranean web and serve as pathways for shuttling carbon, nutrients, and water through the forest. The connections and communication provide the ecosystem with strength and resilience.

Generations of trees and plants are deeply integrated in this system of interactions and feedbacks, and these relationships are crucial in the regenerative capacity of the forest. My colleagues and I found that the belowground linkages had patterns suggestive of a biological neural network, that the trees have agency in the transmission of resources, and that together, these properties are suggestive of a type of intelligence. Even more intriguing, the trees demonstrate traits such as collaboration and facilitation, not just dominance and competitiveness. Life in the forest, it turns out, is more complex than “survival of the fittest.” An intricate network of cooperation and competition makes the ecosystem thrive.

The forest wasn’t my only teacher. I learned from my Indigenous colleagues that First Peoples have always recognized the interconnectedness of forests and of all living things. Many Indigenous cultures have long viewed mother trees—and grandmother and grandfather trees—not just as metaphors for interdependence, but as sacred relations who hold spiritual connection to the ancestors, and who provide wisdom, longevity, and regeneration. But Indigenous ways of seeing the world are rarely accepted in Western science methodologies. They are in fact roundly disparaged. Even the use of metaphor, such as “mother tree,” in Western scientific language has been criticized as lacking objectivity and integrity. I found myself longing to push back against these rigid boundaries of science, to learn additional ways of inquiry, other ways of seeing and knowing the natural world. And I had new questions, different questions.

So, early one spring morning, I went back to the forest. I wanted to learn what the mother trees could teach me about survival and adaptability, about living and dying, and about how energy and ancient carbon cycle through the forest. I wanted to find out how the forests were coping with stressors like climate change and clearcut logging—the practice of harvesting every tree in a large expanse of forest. I had a hunch that the forest’s connections, cycles, and diversity could guide us to the solutions we so desperately needed to enhance resilience and protect our global ecosystem.

Hiking deep into the woods, I stopped to rest at a shady hollow, a secluded hiding place for shade-loving trees and plants. I admired a small cluster of fairy slippers, exquisite purple orchids whose lives depend on mycorrhizal fungal connections in the soil. I sat on a decaying log, an old mother tree that had long since passed. Her great body was sprinkled with seedlings of western hemlock that had taken root in her softened bark. I marveled at how the old tree had created a rich environment for new life to grow, cycling back to a beginning.

As trees weaken, perish, and collapse, they change from living biomass to necromass. The soil food web—the community of organisms including animals, fungi, and bacteria—breaks down the rotting logs and decaying litter while extracting carbon energy. Through the complex process of decomposition, nutrients are released and carbon dioxide is respired to the atmosphere. Seedlings establish in the carcasses of old mother trees and unfurl their delicate young leaves to absorb the carbon dioxide, while slurping up the nutrient soup with their tender mycorrhizal roots. The soil and plant community continue the cycle of regeneration as the biomass becomes deeply alive and enriched. The whole forest awakens in a teeming, bustling surge, as rich and joyful as the young at play and the old at work, carrying forward the business of life.

Cavity nesters like woodpeckers, flickers, squirrels, and even bears build nests in the soft decay of the elders and reproduce in the township of the dead and dying. Animals and arthropods, centipedes and springtails disperse the immortal remains of hollowed trunks and broken branches, feeding extensive food chains through the extended ecosystem and creating structures for the living. Carbon compounds seep into the full life of the subterranean ecosystem and recombine into organo-mineral compounds that remain stable in the soil. In an intact forest, this carbon pool—the detritus of plant, animal, and microbial life—is safeguarded in the soil for millennia. The compounds of the old are transmuted into the living, cycling onward for centuries to come.

Yet many of our current forestry practices harm these extraordinary natural cycles. Industrial clearcutting has removed vast amounts of forest, and recovery of these ecosystems is slow. The massive machines not only cut down trees, but disrupt the fragile connections of the forest, both above and belowground. It can take centuries for a forest to recover, millennia for the soil to rebuild.

As I pondered this, I wondered if there could be better ways to tend forests that would protect their cycles, connections, and niches, and the biodiversity they support. Given that people will continue harvesting trees or parts of trees for buildings, paper, clothing, and many other products, surely we could find gentler ways to do it, and take far less in the process. I tried to envision a silviculture system—a program to harvest, regenerate, and care for a forest—that would actually leverage the forest’s natural regenerative capacity and biodiversity. One that would preserve and nurture the mother trees. We needed to protect these legacies, and in so doing, alleviate the stresses of changing climate, resist or dampen wildfires, and stave off insect attacks and pathogen infestations. Fostering abundance and balance in the plant and animal communities could potentially enhance carbon sequestration and storage, practices that held promise for mitigating climate change. I knew that the mother trees were the powerhouses of the forest. If we could conserve these big old trees, they could naturally seed the sites, regenerate the forest, and help buffer the ecosystem from stressful conditions.

What I was imagining would require a radical change—a transformation—in the direction of the forest industry in British Columbia, but surely it was worth pursuing.

Of course, the idea of humans tending forests in this way is nothing new. Forests have been shaped by people since the beginning of humankind. For thousands of years, the First Peoples cared for the forests and waters by aligning with the natural processes that fostered abundance for generations to come. They developed sophisticated practices such as strategic burns that increased food production, enhanced plant diversity, improved the soil, and prevented catastrophic wildfires. When Europeans crossed the Atlantic to North America, they saw only inexhaustible wealth in the vast forests and wild rivers and the plentiful species that inhabited them. They did not grasp that the bounty of resources was deeply influenced by age-old ancestral stewardship that honored the natural cycles and connections of the ecosystems.

The First Peoples’ knowledge and governance systems are based in respect, reciprocity, and responsibility for the nurturing of living beings. The silviculture system I hoped to apply would be guided by these traditional perspectives and a holistic understanding of the natural world. It would embrace the wisdom and intelligence of the forest and employ different ways—more adaptive ways—to protect and care for forests in our changing climate.

My determination to find a better way forward was the catalyst for the Mother Tree Project, a vast study that would take me into the heart of the Pacific Rim forests. My goals were to document the effects of clearcut logging compared with partial cutting, or just leaving the forest to its own ingenuity, on carbon pools and biodiversity—two elements our lives depend on that are rapidly changing as human populations grow and the climate warms—to help us discover new ways of tending forests that would protect the mother trees. I wrote the proposal with my postdoc Brian Pickles and my close colleagues Les Lavkulich and Bill Mohn and others, and much to our surprise, it was funded by the federal government of Canada. It would become one of the biggest forestry field experiments in Canada, with sites distributed halfway across British Columbia, and involve collaboration with many allies, including Indigenous people, local communities, academics, governments, logging companies, artists, and students.

Jean, my longtime colleague and best friend of more than 40 years, took on the role of managing this complex project. With the help of Brian, she located nine experimental Douglas fir forests, eight of them in the interior of British Columbia where the winters are cold and the summers are warm, and one on the mild, drizzly coast east of Vancouver. Across this climatic range, our experiment would compare five different logging patterns, or treatments, to test how protecting different numbers and configurations of the largest overstory, or mother, trees would affect seedling regeneration, the understory plant community, bird and animal habitat, soil composition, and fire risk.

We sought the wisdom of scholars and managers who’d spent their careers investigating silviculture systems. These were experts who had done careful work learning how forests functioned and using the knowledge to develop sustainable management practices. But it wasn’t until I engaged with postdoctoral fellow Teresa Ryan of the Ts’msyen (Tsimshian) Nation that I realized something essential was missing from our project.

Teresa and I had become fast friends and spent many hours discussing the social integration of her culture with the land and how it contributed to the vitality and balance of forest ecosystems. She described how Indigenous stewardship practices were in synchrony with the rhythms of nature. How salmon populations were tended in alignment with tidal cycles, which nourished the forests, animals, people, and all relations. I learned how the ecology of forests had been deeply influenced by ancient stewardship practices, and most importantly, by the Indigenous worldview that all is connected. In turn, I could see how profoundly the people, and their origin stories, had been shaped by the forests. Forests I once naïvely thought were mainly the product of climate, soil, and the lay of the land, I now understood were reflections of the philosophies and practices of the original people.

Until that moment I had spent my scientific career trying to improve upon colonial forest stewardship practices, striving to conserve an ecosystem’s legacies and connections instead of harming them. Now I understood that not only were these forest practices misaligned, but the goals were wrong. We needed to transform away from a mentality of exploitation to a regenerative worldview that valued reciprocity, synergy, and abundance for the entire socio-ecological system.

My conversations with Teresa felt like a homecoming. I had finally found a system of stewardship my values aligned with, instead of chafed against. The colonial system desperately needed to integrate with the forest, in order to restore balance and stave off the losses in biodiversity and productivity it was causing through the commodification of the landscape.

The goals of the Mother Tree Project began to come into sharp focus. Teresa helped me and Jean connect with Indigenous people who knew the land best, as our nine sentinel forests were located within their territories. As much as we could, we discussed the project with the people and learned how to make adjustments for each place.

We did our best to conduct our work with respect and humility, to provide principles and frameworks for stewardship of the land. We held countless virtual meetings with our partners debating the details of the five experimental treatments, such as which specific dominant trees to leave standing. We already knew that protecting these big trees during logging would be important in helping forests regenerate, as happens following natural disturbances like wildfire. Extreme conditions were already intensifying with climate change, bringing unpredicted droughts, heat waves, downpours, and heavy snowfalls that easily killed young trees. If we could design forest practices that protected large trees, they could help mitigate these extremes while at the same time foster thrifty communities of trees, plants, and animals. Our investigations had shown these large trees interacted with their seedlings in profound ways, and this led us to naming the project “The Mother Tree Project.”

After our nine research forests were logged in the patterns we’d specified, the Mother Tree Project crew—our group of dedicated students—and a team of professional tree planters planted mixtures of tree species among the remaining old trees so we could identify the combinations most resilient to the stresses wrought by the shifting climate. It would take us eight years before the last patch was logged and our final seedings established. By the time we were done, we had planted 225,000 trees across an area the size of Denmark, from the rugged interior of the province to the lush rainforests of the West Coast. We planted in the pouring rain and in the blistering heat, enduring tick bites, wasp stings, and close encounters with moose and bears. I visited old-growth forests that were pristine and unspoiled, and walked in clearcuts where every tree had been felled and the valuable ones taken by the lumber companies, leaving behind nothing but stumps and slash. We ran from a wildfire ripping through one of our experiments. I experienced the joy of watching my daughters fall more deeply in love with the forest as both Hannah and Nava pursued careers in forest ecology and joined me in fieldwork on the Mother Tree Project. Nava and I participated in the movement to protect the ancient forests of Fairy Creek, which became a flashpoint for logging practices in Canada.

We would return season after season, year after year, to measure, record, analyze, report, and archive what our nine forests were showing us as they responded, attuned, and adapted to our treatments and to the changing climate. We followed the seedlings from their establishment phase through juvenile and sapling stages, and made detailed plans for others to continue the work after we were gone, following the forests into their maturing and old-growth years, after the mother trees had died and spawned new generations. New professors and students would join us, examining in exquisite detail the responses of the wildlife, soils, hydrology, and microclimatic buffering to all of the treatments and climates.

Through all this, as I witnessed firsthand nature’s cycles of death and renewal, I experienced parallel rhythms of growth, loss, and recovery in my own life. My children grew into saplings alongside the trees they planted, my work flourished and stumbled in tandem with the changes of our forests, my knowledge and spirit deepened as the ecosystems reorganized, and my mum moved through the final stages of her life as wildfires took the lives of some of the mother trees across our experiments.

The Douglas fir forests of British Columbia, where I’ve conducted much of my research, are unique to their geographic place, as are all forest ecosystems. But the same basic life rhythms and cycles exist in all forests, whether the Pacific Rim coniferous forests, the Russian steppe, the Amazonian jungle, or the Mediterranean woodlands. All forests reflect the wonder of regeneration and healing, the ability to adapt, learn, and evolve with change, and to persist over decades, centuries, and millennia. In every cycle across the seasons, forests renew and restore. Trees germinate, grow, and set seed. They disperse their genes in the gusts of wind, feathers of birds, and gravity of freefall in a continuous adaptive cycle of birth, growth, death, decay, and rebirth.

We are all part of the same cycle, inseparable from the trees, animals, water, and air. The forest teaches us to live in synchrony with the natural cycles, to stay in rhythm with the seasons, lifespans, and oscillations, the essential patterns that have evolved for success. I would carry my mum’s life energy forward, just as my daughters and the generations to come would carry on my life energy, all of us constantly renewing, growing, maturing, and dying, spreading seeds of knowledge through the ages. The energy and wisdom of the old cycles evolve into the new. We and every other living thing, all our relations, are part of this infinite, beautiful, self-renewing cycle of existence. Even after the most destructive logging practices, forests strive to heal, although healing will be much faster if any logging is done with respect and care.

Nature is waiting for us to learn that we are all bound by the same rules. And to remember that, when the forest breathes out, we breathe in. When the forest thrives, we thrive. When the forest lives, we live. ♦

Excerpted from WHEN THE FOREST BREATHES by Suzanne Simard. Copyright © 2026 by Suzanne Simard. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.