When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review – the Indiana Jones of trees returns

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologistsIt’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was wort