If this sounds like the latest Avatar movie, you aren’t far wrong. In fact, this scenario describes the “wood-wide web” — or how forests and trees communicate with each other.

Canadian scientist, Suzanne Simard, first floated this theory back in 1997. Her initial research headlined in Nature magazine. A fourth-generation forester from British Columbia, Simard had grown up hearing stories of how her grandparents had clear-felled ancient western red cedar forests by hand. The massive logs were hauled out by horses, and then launched down river to be milled as timber. “Grandpa taught me about the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how my family was knit into it,” she says.

The giant stumps of these trees are still visible today in Canada, just like they are in old-growth forests in Australia. When I’m walking in places like Dorrigo National Park, I often think the cuts in the base of the stump are like two haunting eyes. These marks show where two men would stand on a plank of wood as they used axes to manually cut the tree down. It was a painstaking, slow and dangerous process for the men involved (we don’t know, of course, how it was for the trees…) Now, however, an entire forest can be bulldozed in a matter of hours.

Photos below: From Old Treasury Building, Reproduced courtesy of Museums Victoria.