TOGETHERNESS

A wide-ranging look at symbiosis in the natural world.

British science journalist Hooper (How To Spend a Trillion Dollars, 2021) begins by taking some riveting looks at various examples of symbiosis in plants and animals, delves into the long and complicated history of the idea of symbiosis, and then looks toward the future for ways in which symbiosis just might help to save the planet. He makes a convincing case that, although “until recently, symbiosis was considered little more than a novelty, even by biologists,” it’s actually at the heart of how life on Earth developed and has continued to evolve. The first third of the book describes Hooper’s close encounters with various symbiotic life forms around the globe, including figs in Brazil that both feed and depend on wasps that lay eggs in them, the fungi associated with oaks in Great Britain, and the coral reefs of Malaysian Borneo. The author’s boundless enthusiasm for his subjects is hard to resist. “It has surprised me, the place lichens now occupy in my mind, even my heart,” he writes. His extended account of the development of the concept of symbiosis by scientists over the centuries is ambitious, sometimes overly so, as it detours into accounts of the lives of Rachel Carson, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the painting of Vincent van Gogh, and other cultural touchstones only tangentially related to his central subject. His chapters on the future also tend to wander off track. While he does touch on intriguing examples of new ways to nurture symbiosis in agricultural crops or resetting symbiotic systems in trees with regenerative arboriculture, he also sidetracks at length on the problems created by overuse of fertilizer and pesticides.

A compelling if unfocused study of the value of intermeshed species.