As a species, we often struggle to see the wood for the trees. It’s a breakthrough, then, to understand that they may be considered one and the same… that forests, like ant colonies, are a kind of superorganism: trees are interconnected, they communicate with each other, and even offer community healthcare in the form of shared nutrients.

Published in 2015, Peter Wohlleben’s international best-seller crystallized a new philosophy of forestry, an area of study co-opted by the timber industry long ago. A forester by training, Wohlleben resigned from his job when he saw the damage wrought by the cycles of clear-cut and single species cultivation in his native Germany. Like the book which inspired it, this doc has an engagingly anecdotal, loose-leaf structure, with Wohlleben as our environmental tour guide, leading us to the oldest known tree (a very slight 10,000-year-old Swedish spruce), through burned out pine farms, digging into deliciously rotting undergrowth, and even sharing a stage with David Suzuki in Victoria, BC. You will never look at a tree the same way again.