Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America’s Imperiled Forests

This pensive account from Holloway (The Measure of Manhattan), a journalism professor at Columbia University, reflects on humanity’s relationship with nature through her experience attending a tree climbing workshop for women. She recounts how her instructors taught her to “walk” up a trunk by hoisting herself up a rope thrown over high branches and to use a “lanyard” (a short rope looped around a trunk) to maneuver around tricky sections. Profiling the women she met through the workshop, Holloway describes how one participant hoped the program could help her escape her retail job and fulfill her dream of becoming an arborist, as well as how an instructor started a thriving tree care business after sexism prevented her from securing a job elsewhere in the field. Holloway reports in troubling detail how climate change is ravaging the world’s forests; drought-stricken trees, she explains, close pores on their leaves to conserve water when stressed, but as a result they can’t take in as much carbon dioxide and risk “carbon starvation.” The most affecting passages discuss how climbing trees changed Holloway, as when she notes that she conquered her fear of heights by learning to trust herself and, “like using the lanyard to overcome an obstacle, finding ways of becoming unstuck.” Nature lovers will dig this. Illus. (May)