A naturalist and filmmaker blends stirring personal narratives with immersive journeys and robust natural history. A lyrical microhistory of apples, which are closely connected to the history of humankind, the book recounts the joys of exploring an array of apples and orchards in gorgeously descriptive language.

Over half of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once found in the U.S. have disappeared, along with their forest-like orchards, supplanted by monoculture, a profound cultural and ecological loss. The blighted fate of apples and trees mirrors our own natural illiteracy; we no longer read the land like a storybook and miss the essential wisdom the land once gave us.

Painting a singular map of our apple past and future, of wild apple trees, old-growth forests, and diverse historic orchards, Kumar shines a light on how we can reenter forgotten landscapes, read the land, and restore our broken relationship with nature. Kumar takes readers on expeditions from her home in the American Southwest, to the Pacific Northwest and around the country, and to the very birthplace of apples in Kazakhstan, meeting farmers, scientists, and searchers and rescuers of lost apples.

A call to action, LIGHT stretches the hearts and minds of readers toward deeper ways of engaging with nature and the land.

Priyanka Kumar is a filmmaker and the author of Conversations With Birds. She has been featured on CBS News Radio, Yale Climate Connections, and Oprah Daily, and her awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor's Award, an Aldo Leopold residency, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. Kumar holds an MFA from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary, The Song Of The Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar, which premiered at Telluride and is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Kumar taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California and serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program.