James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Astrum Space · The Science Fact You've Been Taught for Years Is a Lie | Astrum Earth · 28 Apr 2026
podcast
If you look at the use of the phrase Wood Wide Web in publications between 1997 and 2022, you can see an exponential increase in popularity from the early 2000s.
The Wood Wide Web had even spun its silk over Hollywood, with Amy Adams set to star as Simard in the feature film adaption of her research career.
The world, it seemed, had gone tree crazy.
But Simard took things one step further, publishing a book titled Finding the Mother Tree in 2021.
The book is essentially a memoir, telling the story of Simard's professional and personal life against the backdrop of the Canadian forest.
Besides her 1997 research, Simard discusses her discovery that fungal networks can allow for warning signals to be communicated between trees, kin recognised, and preferential treatment applied to closer relatives.
She even suggests that the fungal network in forests works like a human brain, with the fungal strands as neurons and chemical signals as neurotransmitters.
This concept transforms the forest into an ecosystem where no tree stands alone, and familial bonds can get you through hard times.
With a picture like that, who wouldn't have the urge to run to the nearest forest and hug a mother tree?
It certainly was a beautiful idea.
That organisms from totally different kingdoms, plantae and fungi, could come together in symbiosis to promote communication across the entire forest.
It had the potential to revolutionise the way we thought about conservation going forward.
More emphasis could be placed on maintaining mother trees in the forest.
But perhaps even more revolutionary was the idea that trees were more like us than we thought.
They too could speak, could provide for their kids, give preferential treatment to their friends, and maintain a social life.
Amid these global shifts in perspective, it seems like the golden opportunity to seek similarities between us and the plants.
In fact, these scientists were giving us the green light to do so.
the world had certainly fallen in love with the wood-wide web.
But like a tree being felled, it was all about to come crashing down.
Justine Kast, Jason Hoeksema, and Melanie Jones.
Showing 3101–3120 of 4,486 · page 156 of 225
← Previous
Next →