Six Video Minutes Of Passion For Science, Trees, and Dirt

Especially for girls 😉

Eating dirt as a little girl led Suzanne to a life as a forest soil scientist. I can relate to this as I have watched my two daughters, and now my grandaughter eat dirt which helped nurture their love of nature.

Suzanne Simard, a professor at UBC in Vancouver, explains that she grew up as a little girl who not only ate dirt but discovered a world of wonder in the soil of ecosystems. She has learned over the course of her life that we are wired for healing and hope.

To fulfill this innate characteristic wired into each of us the magic is a simple switch called intention. As we act on the good intentions that we adopt the result is we feed our soul. For Suzanne her intention to help nuture the natural world around us, she in particular loves forests and soils, by helping Nature she explains we find Nature helps us.

Suzanne is a tree person and she explains about the life of trees from a different perspective than usual, from the ground down, not up! Trees have as much of themselves buried in the soil as they do reaching into the air. So put on your dirt goggles and get ready for a dive into the dirt.

Here’s Prof. Simard’s Video titled 6 Minutes of Passion

6 Minutes of Passion for Science (6) – Suzanne Simard

Trees have been on this earth of our far longer than we humans, or even we animals! For some trees are dumb plants unworthy of being considered for what and who they are rather being seen only as something we humans might use or worse abuse. But in all of the eons of time that plant life on this planet has been evolving it’s foolish and arrogant to think that they did not discover the value in communication before us.

Me replanting trees on a slash burned British Columbia landscape 1973

I have worked in forests for a big part of my life, doing forest science, planting trees, and yes for a brief time in my testosterone charged young manhood even being a “faller’ in the north woods. With all that time in the forest I came upon more than one epiphany with regard to trees and the ecosystem that lives in their sheltering shade.

Trees are not just standing there. They are rooted to the ground yes, but as part of a fantastically evolved design where staying put in one place allows them a special perspective on this world, their world and ours of Nature. Far from doing nothing but stand there ‘like bumps on a log” trees are not wasting time rather they are engaged in complex conversations concerning the nature of everything.

I sometimes see and think of trees when I am amongst them in the context of my parents “Book Club Meetings” that were a mystery to me when I was a child.  Later in life I discovered the value and joy of such deep intellectual conversations. For trees their conversations are not the brief sound bites we humans like to think is intelligent thought, tree conversations go on for centuries even millenia. This story of the leaf and the caterpillar might help you understand trees more.

People like Prof Simard have this same special understanding and respect for trees and are working on gaining sufficient vocabulary in the language of trees (and other plant life) that one day we might just be able to engage them in conversation and perhaps learn a thing or two about how we fit in on this ‘plant net’.

Next time when you are in the company of trees you might sit quietly and patiently and listen very carefully with all of your heart and soul, if you are very lucky you might, like a child discovering the world, catch a few words of wisdom. Don’t lose hope if this doesn’t work the first time, perhaps if you help care for those trees one day during a quiet pause you will hear them.

Here’s a link to another video with Suzanne explaining more of the science of tree sentient communication.