Cover of The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

Book 2017

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

4.52 8 readers shelved it

Publisher
Viking
Published
2017
  • Forest ecology
  • Symbiosis

The author repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world to stop, listen, and look, exploring each tree's connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants, and demonstrating how the lives of trees and people are deeply interwoven. Several trees, including a balsam fir in Ontario and an Amazonian ceibo, are located in areas that seem mostly natural, but which are affected by industrial development and climate change. Haskell also turns to trees in places where humans seem to have subdued "nature"--a pear tree on a Manhattan sidewalk, an olive tree in Jerusalem -- demonstrating that wildness permeates every location.