Matthew Battles is Associate Director of the metaLAB and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. His previous publications include Library: an Unquiet History (2004), The Sovereignties of Invention (2012) and Library Beyond the Book (2014).
What astonishingly good writing! What a joy of a book. What a mind, this Matthew Battles. As he writes about trees, Battles could as well be describing his own wild mind: 'uncanny, possessed of depths and mystery, and feral in ways beyond my ken, . . . overspilling with dark abundance, . . . richly disruptive to one’s daily commute.' * Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016) and Piano Tide: A Novel (2016) * Battles … shows how trees--and perhaps more importantly our relationships with trees--are incredibly complicated. Even dappling--that wonderful light that comes through a tree’s leaves--is not as simple as it seems … He makes clear that trees and their data have important stories to tell. That is if we let them. * PopMatters *