Seasonal changes in nature are among the most readily observable clues to the biological effects of climate change. “It came to me,” writes acclaimed environment reporter Lynda Mapes, “You could tell the story of climate change—and more—through a single, beloved, living thing: a tree.” Mapes chronicles her yearlong quest to understand a wizened witness to our world: a red oak, over one hundred years old, in the Harvard Forest. A tree that has seen it all, from our changing relationship with nature in our industrialized and digitized lives to the altered clockwork of nature.
Mapes evokes the wonder and joy of forests, and the poetics and botany of trees, living intimately with her oak through four seasons. She dives deeply into the world of self-described “tree geeks” and becomes one herself, exploring her tree from roots to crown. She also offers a clear-eyed assessment of what the tree tells us about climate change, from the heartwood at its core to the photosynthetic cycle deep in its leaves.
Mixing storytelling, tree lore, and cutting-edge science, Mapes offers a new approach to thinking about how we might live together into the far future on a planet we have changed in ways we never intended—and how trees help show us the way.
Authors & Contributors
Lynda Mapes is the environmental reporter for the Seattle Times. She researched and wrote Witness Tree while a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and a Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Forest. Her five books include Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village. She lives in Seattle.
Reviews
"An unlikely love story about a reporter and a tree. . . . What makes Witness Tree such an irresistible read is Mapes’s love of language combined with a great talent at rendering nerdy information readable."
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Los Angeles Review of Books
"A meticulously, beautifully layered portrayal of vulnerability and loss, renewal and hope, this extensively researched yet deeply personal book is a timely call to bear witness and to act in an age of climate-change denial."
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Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"The intriguing, and more intimate, Witness Tree . . . portrays trees as ‘scribes, diarists, historians.’ They are ‘among our oldest journalists.’ A reporter herself . . . Mapes sets out to tell the story of climate change through one tree. But that is, marvelously, the least of it."
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New York Times Book Review
"For those with an abiding fondness for New England farmsteads and woodlots, Mapes offers up literary comfort food, as welcome as hot cocoa on a chilly day . . . To walk with Mapes through these pages is not only to enjoy the charm of rural New England, but also to experience the global effects of our civilization–for better and for worse–on an intimate scale"
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Natural History Magazine
Advance Praise
"The Harvard Forest is a center for the scientific study of climate change, but also–as this deep book makes clear– for what you might call the philosophic and historical inquiry that we should be making into this most crucial of topics. Lynda Mapes has managed to find a new and intriguing way into this question, and her book will be read with great profit by a great many."
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Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet
"Mapes chronicles how this ‘witness tree’ both mirrors and is shaped by our changing, warming world. Lyrical, engaging, and wise, Mapes invites us to understand trees as individuals rather than a collective forest. This is compelling storytelling and natural history that, like our elder trees, is both enduring and inspiring."
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Brenda Peterson, author of Wolf Nation: The Life, Death, and Return of Wild American Wolves
"Mapes' vivid language immerses us in the grand world of one esteemed red oak. Witness Tree is a splendid story that enriches our view of nature and ourselves"
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David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, authors of The Hidden Half of Nature
