Reading Simard

Starting October 26th We will be reading—over several meetings—

Professor Suzanne Simard's When the Forest

Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural

World.

For the October 26 meeting, we will be

reading chapters 3-6.

Her empirical and speculative work raises

foundational questions for the histories and

philosophies of science (including neuroscience),

economics, indigenous studies, legal theory, and

post-humanism. For instance, if some of the

core premises of "modernity" are the divides

between "subjectivity" and "objectivity,

" or humans/culture versus nature, or human versus

nonhuman, or consciousness versus matter, it

seems as if the last century and our own have

steadily called those premises mere tropes.

Simard's work implicitly and explicitly extends

that tradition. Through controlled experiments in

forests, she raises provocative questions about

the breadth of intelligent sentience