University of British Columbia Professor of Forest Ecology, Dr. Suzanne Simard, is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence. Her decades of in-the-field-experimental research have revolutionized our scientific understanding of forests, elucidating how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies–and at the center of it all,  the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them. Suzanne Simard’s book, FINDING THE MOTHER TREE: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, was just published by Knopf on May 4, 2021.

We end today’s Forthright Radio with a recent piece commissioned by the Intermountain Opera Company, composed by Eric Funk, “Requiem for a Forest” and performed by Roots in the Sky.

A video adaptation by Thomas Thomas is available here:                                                          https://bozemanarts-live.com/event/requiem-for-a-forest/

Here are some of the lyrics:

In summer heat
And warming world
Storms whip up,
Lightening rolls,
Sparks run to earth.
The wind turns
Through the mountains,
Forests burn.

From walls of flame,
Plumes so wide
Are seen from space,
The west on fire.
For pine and spruce,
A day of wrath,
Ancient ones
Dissolve in ash.

Fire ends,
Yet fire begins.
As mountains die,
Cones open.
Mors stupebit
et natura
Cum resurgent
Creatura.

Now we must learn
How to live here,
Where fire season
Burns all year.
Blackened earth
With green renew,
May the fires
wake us too.