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    Unavailable
    The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
    Unavailable
    The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
    Unavailable
    The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
    Audiobook10 hours

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

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Forest Unseen visits with nature's most magnificent networkers - trees 

    "At once lyrical and informative, filled with beauty." - Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

    David Haskell's award-winning The Forest Unseen won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world. Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans.

    Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees' connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants. An Amazonian ceibo tree reveals the rich ecological turmoil of the tropical forest, along with threats from expanding oil fields. Thousands of miles away, the roots of a balsam fir in Canada survive in poor soil only with the help of fungal partners. These links are nearly two billion years old: the fir's roots cling to rocks containing fossils of the first networked cells.

    By unearthing charcoal left by Ice Age humans and petrified redwoods in the Rocky Mountains, Haskell shows how the Earth's climate has emerged from exchanges among trees, soil communities, and the atmosphere. Now humans have transformed these networks, powering our societies with wood, tending some forests, but destroying others. Haskell also attends to trees in places where humans seem to have subdued "nature" - a pear tree on a Manhattan sidewalk, an olive tree in Jerusalem, a Japanese bonsai- demonstrating that wildness permeates every location.

    Every living being is not only sustained by biological connections, but is made from these relationships. Haskell shows that this networked view of life enriches our understanding of biology, human nature, and ethics. When we listen to trees, nature's great connectors, we learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.


    Read by Cassandra Campbell, with the preface and two interludes read by the Author
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 4, 2017
    ISBN9781524750534
    Unavailable
    The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

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    Reviews for The Songs of Trees

    4/5

    29 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Some very good writing on trees and their stories, though honestly I found my eyes rolling a few times at the over-flowery language. Sometimes it just got to be a bit much. 
    • 5/5
      What a pleasure to listen and learn from this beautiful collection of stories about our wooden neighbors. This lyrical narrative littered with deep knowledge of biology, ecology, and culture has created a story that is both stimulating to the mind and sweet to the ears.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Lots of fascinating stuff about trees and their relationships to the rest of nature, but some of it got bogged down in politics to the point where I got impatient with it. I understand that politics affect nature and vice versa, but when the book wandered there I found it difficult to stay interested. The section on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a particular can of worms, though he seemed to be trying for balance. Despite this, the book will make you look at trees very differently, and that's a good thing. The section on urban trees was particularly strong.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Haskell writes beautifully about trees. Each chapter focuses on one tree that he has studied, and starts with the aural environment around the tree - the sounds of rain on leaves in the rainforest, or waves on the coast, or subways rumbling under the New York City sidewalks. From there, he branches out to talk about how trees are a nexus in the interconnectedness of everyone and everything on earth, from the fungi who have a symbiotic relationship with them to the aborigines whose culture revolves around them to the farmers who cultivate them to the city-dwellers who sit in their shade. And from there, he expands even farther to discussions of environmentalism, ecological morality, climate change, racism, war, peace, and ultimately, connections between human beings. I learned a lot of interesting things about trees (turns out, palm trees are utterly fascinating), but also really appreciated the macrocosmic view of the role trees play in our physical and cultural worlds.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The big hole at the heart of this book is Africa. I feel like crowd sourcing a fund to send David Haskell to finish the book. Apart from that it was personal and interesting and I liked it a lot.

      2 people found this helpful