Booked UP

Booked UP

By Vicky Moon

For the many tree huggers in the area, award-winning environmental journalist Fred Pearce’s latest book, A Trillion Trees: Restoring Our Forests by Trusting in Nature, due out in April, offers a provocative argument for why we need to stop planting trees—and let nature build itself back better.

In A Trillion Trees, Pearce takes readers on a journey through some of the most spectacular forests on the planet. Along the way, he charts the rapid pace of forest destruction, but also explores why some forests are beginning to recover.

At the heart of Pearce’s investigation is a provocative argument: Planting more trees isn’t the answer to declining forests. If given room and left to their own devices, forests and the people who live in and around them will fight back to restore their own domain.

Pearce begins in the remote cloud forests of Ecuador, before taking readers to the remains of a forest civilization in Nigeria, then a mystifying mountain peak in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He examines the boreal forests of western Canada and the United States, where he explores the link between the recent rise in devastating wildfires and the historical suppression of both natural fire cycles and the maintenance practices of Indigenous communities.

Throughout the book, Pearce interviews the people who traditionally live in forests. He speaks to Indigenous people in western Canada and the United States who are fighting for sovereignty over their traditional lands to manage them according to their traditional practices. He visits and speaks with Nepalese hill dwellers, Kenyan farmers, and West African sawyers (selective, environmentally friendly loggers) who show him that forests are as much human landscapes as they are natural paradises.

The lives of humans are now imprinted in forest ecology.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. If you haven’t yet read her latest book, On Animals, then either run to Second Chapter Books in Middleburg, call them or click on to order it. There are chapters on rabbits, chickens, lions and donkeys. Fabulous is not close to enough for this masterpiece.