Modern life has become remarkably efficient at creating distance. Distance from where food comes from. Distance from ecosystems. Distance from community. Distance from our own bodies and attention spans. Even as climate crises, biodiversity collapse, burnout, and political fragmentation intensify, many of the systems shaping daily life continue to encourage separation.

A growing number of scientists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, writers, and ecological thinkers are challenging the worldview beneath that separation. Across fields ranging from forest ecology to Earth systems science to Indigenous language revitalization, many are arriving at a similar realization: The living world is far more interconnected, intelligent, participatory, and relational than dominant industrial culture has long assumed.

In this conversation, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, whose research transformed scientific understanding of forest communication and mycorrhizal networks; science journalist Ferris Jabr, who explores how life shapes the Earth itself; and Jeannette Armstrong, whose work centers Indigenous language, land-based knowledge, and relational worldviews, explored what becomes possible when humans begin to see themselves not as separate from the living world, but as participants within it.

Their discussion moved through ecology, language, colonization, restoration, science, ceremony, and healing — ultimately asking what kinds of cultural transformation become possible when relationship replaces separation.

The Fiction of Separation

Modern industrial society depends on a profound act of separation: humans from nature, forests from living systems, land from relationship, and even people from their own bodies and communities.

For Suzanne Simard, that separation is embedded deeply within industrial approaches to land management itself. Reflecting on her early career in forestry, she describes a system focused primarily on extraction rather than ecological health. “The goals were wrong in the first place,” Simard says. “It’s not about the health of the land, it’s about cutting down the trees, not regenerating trees.”

That mindset, she argues, has reshaped entire landscapes while also reinforcing the idea that humans exist outside the ecosystems they depend on.

Ferris Jabr traces this worldview through the broader history of Western science and philosophy. Earlier cultures often understood Earth as animate, interconnected, and alive. Over time, however, Western scientific thought increasingly focused on dividing the world into discrete categories: human and nature, animate and inanimate, organism and environment.

That shift, Jabr argues, coincided with systems of industrialization and colonialism that depended on treating the planet not as a living relationship, but as “a field of resources to be extracted and used.”

For Jeannette Armstrong, the consequences of that separation are not merely ecological, but deeply cultural and psychological as well. She describes generations of Indigenous youth being taught that connection to land, ceremony, and traditional lifeways was incompatible with modernity — that being rooted in the living world was somehow “backwards.”

But the rupture extends far beyond cultural loss alone. “The loss isn’t just a loss of language,” Armstrong says. “The loss really has to do with something much deeper than that.”

Language Carries a Worldview

The words used to describe the natural world are never neutral. They shape perception, reinforce values, and determine how people understand their relationship to the living systems around them.

In industrial forestry, language often reflects hierarchy, control, and extraction. Suzanne Simard describes being trained to classify trees as “dominant” or “sub-dominant,” while plants like huckleberries, salmonberries, and thimbleberries were labeled “competition” or “weeds” that needed to be removed so commercially valuable trees could thrive.

That vocabulary, she argues, reflects far more than scientific categorization. It encodes an entire worldview — one in which forests are treated primarily as production systems rather than living communities.

Simard’s use of the term “Mother Tree” intentionally pushes against that framework. The phrase became controversial in some scientific and forestry circles precisely because it challenged the detached language of industrial management with something relational, interconnected, and alive. “It was very female,” Simard says. “It was very connective, and it also talked about abundance.”

Even seemingly small linguistic choices can reveal deeper assumptions. Ferris Jabr notes that people commonly refer to “the earth,” while planets like Mars or Jupiter are rarely spoken about the same way. “Earth is a living entity with a name,” he says. “You don’t put ‘the’ before names.”

For Jeannette Armstrong, language is not simply descriptive; it is ecological knowledge accumulated over thousands of years of relationship with place. Speaking about the Syilx word tmixʷulaxʷ, Armstrong describes a concept that expresses life as an ongoing regenerative force: continuously moving, cycling, and renewing itself in the present moment.

“My sister described that as stepping into a flat world and then stepping into a three-dimensional world,” Armstrong says of speaking her language.

Across each perspective, language becomes more than communication alone. It becomes a way of organizing reality itself — shaping whether the living world is understood as a collection of resources, or as a web of relationships humans remain inseparable from.

Restoration Is About People, Too

Ecological restoration is often framed as a technical process: restoring habitats, replanting native species, rebuilding soil health, or protecting biodiversity. But in reality, restoration is human and relational: a process that can also restore belonging, agency, memory, and connection.

“When we’re talking about restoring land,” Jeannette Armstrong says, “we actually are restoring people to be part of that land.”

That restoration is deeply connected to healing intergenerational trauma for Armstrong. She describes how colonization, residential schools, and cultural erasure severed many Indigenous people from language, ceremony, food systems, and land-based relationships — ruptures that continue to reverberate physically, psychologically, and spiritually across generations. But she also points to a growing body of research and lived experience suggesting that reconnection itself can be transformative.

Referencing her work in ecopsychology and community healing, Armstrong describes an approach that shifts the focus away from viewing individuals as inherently broken. “Rather than treating the individual as being broken,” she says, “it’s the world around them that’s broken, and if you fix the world around them, and they are part of fixing the world around them, things happen in their lives that change them.”

That healing, she explains, is often profoundly embodied. The sounds of language, drumming, wind, birds, water, and land can reconnect people to forms of memory and relationship that exist beyond intellect alone. “Your body memory knows when it’s out there in nature,” Armstrong says. “Your body remembers.”

Suzanne Simard sees similar patterns in her own work with students and forest restoration. Again and again, she says, students working directly on the land experience a renewed sense of purpose and agency. “They feel really good,” Simard says. “I think it’s because they feel like they have agency in this world, that they’re doing something that they can see the results of.”

The Earth Is More Alive Than We’ve Been Taught

Modern science has often portrayed nature as passive matter — a backdrop against which life unfolds. But growing fields of ecological and Earth systems research are revealing that living systems actively shape the planet itself.

That realization became the foundation of Ferris Jabr’s work. Research into plant intelligence and communication first led him to Suzanne Simard’s work on forest networks, but it also opened a much larger question: What if agency, responsiveness, and collaboration are far more widespread throughout the living world than humans have traditionally assumed?

“There’s this co-evolution between Earth and life,” Jabr says. “It is able to regenerate itself in a way and for a period of time that completely dwarfs what’s happening on just the organismal or cellular level.”

That regenerative capacity appears across scales. Jabr points to ecosystems rebounding unexpectedly quickly after disturbance: rivers recovering after dams are removed, landscapes regenerating after fire, life continuously reorganizing itself in response to disruption. “Life is all about keeping itself going,” he says. “That’s one of its defining features.”

Even deep beneath the Earth’s surface, microbes are carrying out astonishing processes that challenge conventional definitions of life and metabolism. Some microorganisms, Jabr explains, survive without sunlight or oxygen by interacting chemically with rocks and metals, essentially “breathing” the Earth itself.

Simard’s work similarly challenges the idea of forests as collections of isolated organisms. Her research on mycorrhizal networks, forest communication, and Mother Trees points instead toward ecosystems built on connection, reciprocity, and interdependence. “We are one with the forest,” she says. “We are the forest.”

That shift in perspective echoes ideas long associated with the Gaia hypothesis and many Indigenous worldviews: Earth is not merely a planet inhabited by life, but a living system continuously shaped by life itself.

“The more-than-human world is doing that healing,” Simard says.

Reconnection Requires Participation

Modern Western culture often treats connection to the natural world as intellectual or symbolic — something to appreciate, study, or believe in from a distance. But relationship with the living world is fundamentally participatory. It is built through presence, stewardship, reciprocity, and direct engagement with place.

That means restoring habitats, learning the ecosystems where we live, planting native species, stewarding forests and waterways, rebuilding reciprocal relationships with land, and participating directly in the work of regeneration.

Suzanne Simard has seen firsthand how healing emerges through participation, particularly in students and research crews working directly in forests shaped by wildfire, logging, and ecological decline. “Doing stuff on the land is really crucial,” she says. “Being out on the land is absolutely essential to the joy in your soul.”

That work, she argues, restores more than ecosystems alone. “They feel like they have agency in this world,” Simard says, “that they’re doing something that they can see the results of.”

For Jeannette Armstrong, rebuilding relationship with land also means recovering forms of meaning, ceremony, and spirit that industrial culture has pushed aside. “We need to regenerate that,” she says, speaking about humanity’s relationship to the unseen dimensions of life and the sacredness many cultures once recognized in the living world. “That’s the thing that’s going to make the transformation.”

Even hope itself, Ferris Jabr suggests, is less important than relationship. “I do have hope,” he says, “but also I just love this planet and its peoples and its creatures way too much to give up.”