AI, Escaping the Screen & Listening to the Living World: DAVID HASKELL on the Songs of Nature - Highlights

About this episode

David George Haskell discusses the deep connections between humans and the natural world, emphasizing our dependency on plants and the intricate networks of life.

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion. Haskell has spent much of his life training himself to see the universal within the infinitesimally small. He's famously sat for a year in a single square meter of Tennessee's forest, a mandala experience that revealed the deep history of the world through a single fallen leaf. He's a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his books  The Forest Unseen  and  Sounds Wild and Broken , and he received the John Burroughs Medal for  The Songs of Trees . His work often focuses on what he calls the unwaged labor of the natural world, the complex biological communities that sustain our planet without a monetary ledger. And his latest book is  How Flowers Made Our World . In it, he argues that we are essentially grass apes dependent on the ancient innovations of flowering plants for two-thirds…

People in this episode

Guest: David George Haskell

Topics covered

• nature
• biology
• interconnectedness
• environment
• human dependency
• ecology

Keywords

• David Haskell
• nature
• biological communities
• flowering plants
• ecology
• forest
• interconnectedness
• human dependency

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Forest Unseen, Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, How Flowers Made Our World

Places: Tennessee, forest floor, Paris

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