ROB PRINGLE

ROB PRINGLE

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Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Professor Princeton University · Pringle Lab

For nature and natural beauty to survive, people have to want it. If they don’t ever experience it, why should they want it? What could you see of value in it, something that you not only have never experienced but don’t ever expect to. We intellectually know that the Amazon is an important thing because it stores carbon and it’s home to many species, but I’ve been there. That’s a different thing entirely to be able to appreciate it on that level and care about it for the sheer beauty and magic and joy of being in a place that’s still so big and so wild. So that I think is the most important thing for the next generation.

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

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Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree

Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.