Questions from the Children's Forest Alumni

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - One of the world’s leading forest ecologists was the feature speaker at the Cortes Children’s Forest virtual AGM on Saturday, January 298th. This is the last in a series of programs from that meeting, in which Dr Suzanne Simard’s answers questions from the Children’s Forest Alumni.

Forrest Berman-Hatch emceed the session and this abridged broadcast of the audio opens with him asking, “ How do you see the value of the Children's Forest taking into account all the different factors that are important to small communities like the ecological, the economic, as well as the cultural and scientific values?”

Suzanne Simard: “I think it's fantastic, there is so much value. I grew up in a forest and everything I do - from being in the forest and growing up in the forest - I've put my whole life into protecting forests. Really when children grow up in these places, it just becomes part of them. It's not just like protecting forests, it's protecting all the connections in life.”

“The connections in society: even if your life is devoted to human relations, you learn so much about that in the forest. We are all here together. The trees and plants are our ancestors and we respect them, we learn to respect them.”

“We learn about the relations in the forest. Everything is relational. Loving something is really important to protecting. Those fundamental principles of life, you learn them from, our environments, like our forest where we live. Our whole lives are dependent and interdependent with these places that we live.”

“There's no better place to do that in than in the very home that you grew up in and it's really, really important. It shapes you, it becomes you. You become it.”

Mia Gregg: “The second question we have for you are what roles, responsibilities, activities - that kind of thing - do you envision for youth alumni and young adults in the Children's Forest. Can you envision how the Mother tree network could play a role in the children's forest, which you've already spoken to as well, but some very exciting things.”

Suzanne Simard: “There's kids that are in the forest learning now, I'm sure. I see this around British Columbia when I visit different places. How the curriculum in schools, in a lot of cases, moving into forests or into to outdoors. All the things that we could otherwise learn in the classroom, you can learn all of those and even better in the forest.”

“I was watching some kids in Maple Ridge last week. They were learning trigonometry by measuring the heights of trees and the angles. At the same time, the next activity was that they could build a tree fort in that tree and get to know that tree really intimately. I'm sure that those lessons were embedded in them much more deeply than you would learn them in a classroom.”

“It's just a fantastic place to learn.”

“I think that for alumni like you - Kiera, Mia, Forrest - you've just built on that to find your path for the trest of your lives, whatever you’re doing. I'm sure you are going to make great contributions to society because you learn how societies work from being in those forests.”

“I encourage you to continue on those paths and give back to society because you've learned from the best; you've learned from the trees and all the elders around you.”

“I think we need more and more children who are connected in that way, who will continue to fight for our natural world.”