Environment

NY Times reporter Ivan Penn unpacks the debate over infrastructure: Do we fund huge wind and solar farms with new transmission lines, or go local, with rooftop solar panels, batteries and micro-grids?

SUZANNE SIMARD says trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans too. Simard grew up in Canadian forests as a descendant of loggers before becoming a forestry ecologist. She's now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. She explains her research on cooperation and symbiosis in the forest, and shares her personal story in the new memoir Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

Scott Weidensaul has spent decades studying bird migration. "There is a tremendous solace in watching these natural rhythms play out again and again," he says. His new book is A World On the Wing.