Nora Murphy Johnson, PhD

“I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system. And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, and we can learn from experience. A system is ever changing because its parts—the trees and fungi and people—are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by…but put them together with rhizobia and they make miracles.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth