About this item
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 ExtinctionDavid 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.
About the Author
David Haskell is a writer and biologist known for his rich integration of science, lyrical writing, and attention to the living world. The late E. O. Wilson said of his writing that it is "...a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry". Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize winner and director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT wrote that he "may be the finest literary nature writer working today". Haskell's books, The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees, won numerous awards including the US National Academies' Best Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, Reed Environmental Writing Award, National Outdoor Book Award, Iris Book Award, and John Burroughs Medal.Born in London, brought up in France, he has lived for the last thirty years in various parts of the United States, including Tennessee, Colorado, and New York. Haskell received his BA from the University of Oxford and PhD from Cornell University. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and Professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, where he has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching.His latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, continues his deep sensory attention to the world, celebrating the joy and creativity of the living world as expressed in sound, from insect songs to human language and music.In a world beset by barriers, his work reminds us that life's substance and beauty emerge from relationship and interdependence. Find him at dghaskell.com or on social media @DGHaskell (Twitter) , DavidGeorgeHaskell (Instagram and Facebook) .
