We Live In A World of Trees

Update: 2025-06-09

Description

You've heard people say it. It shouldn't have been called Earth. It should have been called Ocean, but it is simultaneously a planet of trees.

As Richard Powers put it in The Overstory: We live in a world of trees. Once something like 6 trillion trees, and humanity are the late arrivals. So how do we reconnect with trees to stop using them for toilet paper?

How do we learn more about why they're suffering and in some unexpected places surviving to know them, to care for them, and maybe even know ourselves a little bit better along the way?

My guest today is Marguerite Holloway.

Marguerite is the author of the wonderful new book Take To The Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America's Imperiled Forests. Marguerite is a professor at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism. She loves maps and is the author of The Measure of Manhattan.

She has written about science, including climate change, natural history and environmental issues, public health, physics, neuroscience, and women in science for publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Natural History, WIRED and Scientific American, where she was a long time writer and editor.

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INI Book Club:

Take to the Trees by Marguerite Holloway
Foster by Claire Keegan
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

Keep up with Marguerite's writing: https://www.margueriteholloway.com/
Check out the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop: https://www.womenstreeclimbingworkshop.com/
NYC Citizen Pruner Program: https://treesny.org/citizen-pruners-stewardship/

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