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.
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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
Her 2015 Mother Tree project is a research initiative aimed to protect the biodiversity of British Columbia woodlands, drawing on indigenous knowledge and changing forestry practices in North America to be more sustainable.
These are admirable goals, goals which we can agree are probably good for conservation regardless of whether the person advocating for them believes in the wood wide web or not.
Like many scientific arguments, the situation has become messy, with researchers picking at details and scrabbling to express where they stand on the matter.
Unfortunately, by the time the smoke clears on this debate, the public may have lost interest in the result, and scientists will definitely struggle to garner the same kind of enthusiasm that once buzzed around the wood-wide web.
But as Kast says, our job as scientists is to present the truth, as close as we can get to it.
Errors, misinterpretation and even overexcitement are all traps that scientists and the media reporting their findings can fall into.
We are all human after all.
So we need to always be open to reflect objectively and update our presentation of truth as we gain new insights.
And one thing scientists can all agree on, these revelations about the wood wide web should never be used to discount trees altogether or neglect their conservation.
Now, with all that disillusionment behind us, it's time to move on to something more concrete, because we may be unsure about the extent of plant communication, but there is no doubt among scientists that plants do communicate.
Moving from sink to source, plant leaves can be the trigger for vital messages.
Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, encompass a large group of molecules that tend to have a low molecular mass, so they can evaporate easily and travel through the soil or air.
For several decades now, scientists have suspected that they play a role in tree communication, particularly when trees are exposed to stress.
Because trees can't just run away from predators, they may have adapted to make use of VOCs as a warning signal in the event of an attack, giving them more time to prepare.
A 2013 study cut the leaves of willow trees to mimic the damage caused by nibbling creatures.
This caused them to release VOCs, and as a result, neighboring trees were then more likely to be munched on instead.
The same was found in another study, this time on alder trees.
They saw the same effect, but funnily enough, trees further from the damaged ones showed weaker resistance to herbivores, suggesting that if a signal was involved, there was a limit to how far it could travel through the forest.
So we've discussed some of the evidence for VOCs being used in communication.
But how did scientists piece this together into a theory of what was really going on?
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