The Songs of Trees

Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

By: David George Haskell

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, David George Haskell

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

fantastic!

transportive, informative prose challenge the mind the explore connections between trees, people, evolutionary and historical events.

Profoundly moving!

In poetic prose, DGH invites us to see and hear our world and ourselves differently.

One of the most fascinating books I've ever read

This is not a book I would have picked up on my own. But for a book club I'm in I would have missed the exquisite experience of listening to "The Songs of Trees". A blend of biology, history, culture, anthropology, and geography all wrapped in some of the juiciest language I've heard in a long time. I loved having the coordinates for each tree, and to discover how close to some of them I have been. Also really glad I had purchased both the Kindle and the Audible versions so I could listen, but then also use the written word for reference. I have given this book as a gift to three people already. Spectacular!

Poetry and science collide

Haskell's ability to illuminate the connectedness and complexity of nature through beautiful writing is--I think--unparalleled. A great read.

History, biology, environment all wrapped up in a cellulose bow.

The trees that were highlighted and the history that accompanied them; the reader is gentle on the ear.