Biodiversity 15:
Saving the Mother Trees:
Exploring the Symbiotic Wisdom of Biodiversity and Indigenous Communities
A 10-week course with Jim Laurie
September 16 – November 18, 2026
Forests, wetlands, and grasslands are not separate ecological systems. They are connected through water, soil, fungi, animals, plants, and the long observational knowledge of Indigenous peoples.
This course explores how these relationships shape climate resilience and how restoring them can help rebuild a more habitable Earth. Drawing on two companion texts—When the Forest Breathes: Renewal & Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard and the abridged and illustrated edition of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds by Merlin Sheldrake—we will examine the symbiotic networks that sustain living landscapes.
Participants will learn how trees:
- Mother Trees support forest recovery through extensive mycorrhizal networks
- Clear-cutting and monoculture replanting disrupt soil, water, and carbon cycles
- Fungi connect plants, exchange nutrients, build soil, and support ecosystem resilience
- Beavers and Beaver Dam Analogs restore wetlands and rehydrate degraded landscapes
- Bison, wildebeest, antelope, and other grazing animals shape healthy grasslands
- Dung beetles, prairie dogs, microbes, and fungi create underground ecological networks
- Indigenous communities have developed place-based knowledge through sustained observation of land and living systems
A central theme of the course is the role of keystone species and ecosystem engineers. Beavers slow and spread water, creating wetlands that support biodiversity and resilience to drought, flood, and wildfire. In grasslands and woodlands, large grazing animals affect vegetation, soil structure, nutrient cycling, water retention, and carbon storage through hoof action, grazing, dung, urine, migration, and wallow formation.
Wood bison offer a particularly powerful example. By rolling their large bodies into the ground, they create wallows that collect water and may become shallow ponds. These disturbed areas can support microbes, insects, plants, birds, and other animals, catalyzing biodiversity across the surrounding landscape.
The course also examines the rapidly growing field of underground network research. The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, is mapping mycorrhizal fungi around the world and revealing how these largely invisible systems influence soil health, plant communities, and planetary carbon cycles.
The course culminates in Jim Laurie’s contrast between Scenario 500 and Scenario 300. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now approaching 430 parts per million and continues to rise. If current trends continue, concentrations could exceed 500 parts per million by 2061, when Halley’s Comet returns.
Scenario 300 presents a different pathway. It calls for restoring billions of acres of forests, wetlands, grasslands, and biologically active soils to amplify photosynthesis, rebuild water cycles, increase biodiversity, and return atmospheric carbon to living landscapes.
Classes combine short lectures, visuals, videos, discussion, and breakout conversations. Jim Laurie’s teaching style emphasizes participation, curiosity, and mutual learning—ensuring that each person has an opportunity to share something and discover something new.
Whether this is your first Biodiversity course or your fifteenth, you are warmly invited to join a growing community exploring how symbiosis, ecological restoration, and collaboration with nature can help cool the planet.
Format
This is a 10-week course that meets every Wednesday, starting September 16, 2026 and will run until November, 18, 2026. Classes will be held from 12 – 2 pm ET and 7 – 9 pm ET on Zoom. Students can choose either class time to accommodate their schedules (or participate in both).
The course will have reading assignments, slide presentations, videos, and breakout sessions to discuss topics raised in class and to get to know your classmates.
Instructor Jim Laurie’s goal is that each person shares something and learns something new in each class. There are many “old timers” who have taken several courses, but we also have new people in each course. The Old Timers are eager to encourage the “Newbies” and help them catch up and feel comfortable as part of the Symbiosis Team.
Course Books
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal & Resilience in the Natural World
By Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard has spent her life studying and learning from the boreal forests of British Columbia. In When the Forest Breathes, she examines the ecological consequences of clear-cutting and replacing complex forests with monoculture plantations.
Clear-cutting exposes forest soils to sunlight, heat, erosion, and moisture loss. These disturbances can accelerate the oxidation of soil carbon into atmospheric carbon dioxide while damaging the biological networks that support forest recovery.
Simard’s research demonstrates the importance of protecting older “Mother Trees.” These trees are connected to surrounding plants through extensive mycorrhizal fungal networks and can help support nutrient exchange, seedling growth, soil recovery, and forest resilience.
Her work also explores how plants and fungi communicate, share resources, and respond to predation and disturbance. Drawing on collaboration with Indigenous communities, Simard highlights ways of understanding forests through patient observation, relationship, and learning directly from the land.
In Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds
By Merlin Sheldrake
In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake explores the living world from the perspective of fungi.
Through accessible writing and vivid color photographs, Sheldrake shows how fungi form partnerships with plants, recycle nutrients, decompose organic matter, build soils, and connect organisms across ecosystems. These relationships influence the health of forests, grasslands, food systems, and the atmosphere.
The illustrated and abridged edition provides an engaging introduction to fungal intelligence, mycorrhizal networks, and the many ways fungi shape life on Earth. It complements Suzanne Simard’s work by revealing the underground systems that connect Mother Trees, seedlings, grasses, microbes, and entire ecological communities.
Together, the two books invite participants to see forests and grasslands not as collections of isolated organisms, but as entangled communities built through communication, exchange, adaptation, and symbiosis.
Your Course Instructor
Jim Laurie
Jim Laurie is a restoration ecologist and co-founder of Biodiversity for a Livable Climate. He has the belief that biodiversity is the key to the human future. Our species can thrive if we can rapidly shift to a symbiotic world view. We are not in competition with nature, but we are co-creators of what will follow. Jim feels very lucky for his varied life experiences and people he met along the way. Learning from John Todd and the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, Jim built small biodiverse ecosystems to clean toxic wastewater at a chemical plant in Texas. These natural systems broke down even recalcitrant compounds like ammonia, chloroform, and BPA to very low levels. The “shared wisdom” came from self-organizing ecologies of microbes linked with plants, and animals. While in Texas, Jim also met Allan Savory, a biologist from Zimbabwe and New Mexico who was helping ranchers reverse desertification with his Holistic Management process. Jim spent many weekends learning from ranchers. They were tripling grazing herd sizes and at the same time restoring grasslands to their once barren landscapes. Later, he went to a Maryland farm to build a lab and “clean room” to grow mushrooms. He was studying the work of Paul Stamets, who had just written “Mycelium Running” in 2005 stressing how critical mycorrhizal networks are for the health of forests and topsoil. It was upon these foundations of ecological thinking and design that Biodiversity for a Livable Climate came into being ten years ago. Climate change had become a major concern in New England, but there was little understanding that global warming is a symptom of the loss of biodiversity. Jim has been determined to make ecological restoration of grasslands, wetlands, and forests a centerpiece for future planning. Keeping the ground covered on agricultural lands and creating “Living Shorelines” as sea level rises are also essential. As of late, Jim has dedicated his efforts to teaching and spreading the message of restoration. He started homeschool classes in the summer of 2014 teaching AP Biology, AP Environmental Science and Restoration Ecology. Some of his students went on to speak at four Bio4Climate conferences between 2015 and 2017. When the Covid epidemic hit us in 2020, Jim began teaching Biodiversity courses using Zoom technology. In 2023 we had two courses. one on “Symbiosis in Evolution” where we read Sweet in Tooth and Claw by Kristin Ohlson who visited several classes. In the Fall course we read books by authors Judy Schwartz and Fred Provenza who also attended Zoom classes leading discussions and taking questions from over 35 attendees.
Jim speaks fondly of the “Symbiosis Team” as his students call themselves, and continues to teach, train, and inspire all ages in recognizing the power of natural systems in producing and maintaining a livable climate. We were excited to see John Feldman’s film premier of “Regenerating Life.” Many of our Bio4climate staff were featured in the film while sharing our thoughts about Nature’s importance in our future.
Join the Emergent Learning Community
Join the Symbiosis Team, an emergent learning community led by biologist and futurist Jim Laurie, creator of Scenario 300. It is not a typical course. People of all ages willing to stretch their minds with deep science and radical ideas about the nature of our living planet meet regularly to explore new concepts together. Many find this a place not just for the exchange of information, but to support each other in living in a way that is more connected to the web of life.
While each course builds on our understanding, you do not need to have taken any of the previous Biodiversity Courses. Whether this is your first or tenth course, please join us if you are curious about nature and its power to restore ecosystems to abundance. The veterans of previous classes will help you catch up in your learning. We are developing into a “Symbiosis Team” to ameliorate or reverse the impacts of global warming and ecological degradation. Everyone has much to learn and share and there is much to be done. We need and appreciate your enthusiasm on the team, and encourage people to join at the level that they are able to.
Sliding scale pricing is available, as are scholarship options. To join us, register below!