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

Spirits are not otherworldly ghosts from a distant heaven or hell but are the very nature of the forest, earthed and grounded, connecting soil and imagination.

Tilting our heads away from the atom, it seems that life is not just networked; it is network.

These connections and movements are extensions of the solar-powered network, mediated by the actions of Homo sapiens.

Two billion years ago, the boundary between the self and the community was already blurred.

The forest is not a collection of entities joined by such networks; it is a place entirely made from strands of relationship.

Without the network, the homogeneous chemical soup lacks any tang of life.

Virginia Woolf wrote that “real life” was the common life, not the “little separate lives which we live as individuals.” Her sketch of this reality included trees and the sky, alongside human sisters and brothers.

A network, once established, might be called an individual.

The cancer of unrestrained cellular individuality can, and still does, destroy networks from within.