A Journalist Takes to the Trees
In her new book, Marguerite Holloway tells the story of forests in the climate change era.
In 2017, Marguerite Holloway—a professor of science journalism at Columbia Journalism School who has written extensively about climate change and the environment—discovered an illustrated journal that her late mother had kept about many of the trees she had encountered and their natural history. That discovery set the gears turning for Holloway’s new book, Take to the Trees. In addition to exploring Holloway’s relationship with her mother and her experience with grief, the book includes extensive reporting on the latest climate change research, and showcases a range of people who are fighting to protect forests, including the arborists and tree climbers Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, who run the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop, which Holloway became involved with. Columbia News caught up with Holloway to discuss the book.
What spawned the idea for this book?
It was a whole confluence of things. Discovering my mother’s tree journal while I was grieving her death and her many years of dementia was one thing; I had known she was a naturalist and loved being in nature, but I had never known about her journal. I was also doing a lot of reporting at that time about climate change, and learning about how various tree species are coming under threat. As part of that, I wrote a story for The New York Times about how climate change is affecting the forests of New England; and while reporting that piece, I met twin sisters Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll and Bear LeVangie, who invited me to learn to climb. As is often the case, one story led to another. At some point it became clear to me that I wanted to write a book that wove together all those threads.
How much did you know about climbing before researching the book?
I knew absolutely nothing, and I was, at that point, completely freaked out by heights. But I managed to get up a 70- or 80-foot Eastern hemlock in the process of reporting.
What was different about writing this book than writing a long-form article?
There’s a lot about family loss that I wrote about in the book—the loss of both my mother and my brother. It’s the first time that I’ve ever written in the first person in this way, combining that with the science journalism that I’ve done for my whole career. It has been a powerful experience writing this way, one that feels very right and true to me and that I hope to continue to pursue.
Did doing your book research make you more aware of the immediate perils forests face?
It is quite overwhelming what is happening to trees and forests right now. The scale is absolutely staggering. When you talk to tree scientists who are working at all different scales, they are very aware of this and it is daunting and scary.
I would say that being around researchers and climbers who are really trying to help care for trees and who are trying to work toward a future in which there are healthy forests that can adapt and that are resilient, gave me a lot of hope. But there is no way around the fact that the picture right now is quite stark.
Do you have any book recommendations for tree enthusiasts?
Overstory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about trees, changed the way many people I know see and interact with trees. I really love the work of the Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, who recently wrote Tree Stories. Also Valerie Trouet’s Tree Story—she has a new book coming out as well. There are so many more—a profusion—it is hard to select just a handful, but my book has an extensive bibliography folks can look at.