‘Mother Trees’ are intelligent: They learn and remember
May 9, 2021 by Infinite Mother Trees are intelligent: They learn and remember https://t.co/cSr8pWCJ42
Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard. The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Overstor
y. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron’s vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit
Avatar. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller
The Hidden Life of Trees.
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Sorry, Oscars: For decades, the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival has been the ultimate source of anticipation by movie lovers worldwide. No festival on Earth has commanded the same blend of cinephilia and red carpet glamour, as films from some of the most revered directors working today announce their arrival in front of the world’s most discerning audience.
But will that audience show up for the 2021 edition, which has been pushed from its usual May dates to early July? After last year’s festival was canceled due to the pandemic and Cannes could only announce an amorphous list of films, the plan for this year’s edition remains an open question. Though the festival is messaging a full-steam-ahead approach, France remains on lockdown and it’s unclear whether the situation will improve enough for a traditional festival gathering.
Finding the Mother Tree, during a walk near the end of a day. Charles Mudede
I met the Vancouver B.C.-based forest scientist Suzanne Simard on a sunny spring day in 2016. She was in town for an event at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation s LEED Platinum campus. We met at the McMenamins in Queen Anne to talk about her research, which concerned the nature and structure of tree sociality. I was informed of her work by her important contribution to Peter Wohlleben s popular
The Hidden Life of Trees. And I had read this book because it presented a starting point for a project initiated five years before by a passage I encountered in Richard Dawkins
Last modified on Mon 17 May 2021 07.25 EDT
Our relationship with the natural world is balanced on a knife-edge, which means our own lives, too, are facing an uncertain future. For the first time in history, we can draw from a compendium of scientific research that not only warns us to take better care of the Earth, but shows us how to do so. Yet still we place obstacles in our path, and the eco-apocalyptic countdown continues. What is it that stops us from taking action? Einstein once suggested that imagination is more important than knowledge, claiming that knowledge is limited while âimagination encircles the worldâ, and perhaps this is where the answer lies. In order to bridge the emotional chasm between the science and our ability to act, we must take what we know and reshape it into something more palatable. We must tell ourselves a story.