Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak
Ebook
Overview
An intimate look at one majestic hundred-year-old oak tree through four seasons--and the reality of global climate change it reveals.
In the life of this one grand oak, we can see for ourselves the results of one hundred years of rapid environmental change. It’s leafing out earlier, and dropping its leaves later as the climate warms. Even the inner workings of individual leaves have changed to accommodate more CO2 in our atmosphere.
Climate science can seem dense, remote, and abstract. But through the lens of this one tree, it becomes immediate and intimate. In Witness Tree, environmental reporter Lynda V. Mapes takes us through her year living with one red oak at the Harvard Forest. We learn about carbon cycles and leaf physiology, but also experience the seasons as people have for centuries, watching for each new bud, and listening for each new bird and frog call in spring. We savor the cadence of falling autumn leaves, and glory of snow and starry winter nights. Lynda takes us along as she climbs high into the oak’s swaying boughs, and scientists core deep into the oak’s heartwood, dig into its roots and probe the teeming life of the soil. She brings us eye-level with garter snakes and newts, and alongside the squirrels and jays devouring the oak’s acorns. Season by season she reveals the secrets of trees, how they work, and sustain a vast community of lives, including our own.
The oak is a living timeline and witness to climate change. While stark in its implications, Witness Tree is a beautiful and lyrical read, rich in detail, sweeps of weather, history, people, and animals. It is a story rooted in hope, beauty, wonder, and the possibility of renewal in people’s connection to nature.
An intimate look at one majestic hundred-year-old oak tree through four seasons--and the reality of global climate change it reveals.
For Arbor Day: celebrated the last Friday in April in most places in the country (including Massachusetts, where the eponymous tree grows.)
Climate change gets personal: through the lens of one majestic oak, hyper-local observation of seasonal change, and the lives of the scientists at work.
Gorgeous nature writing: In the vein of H IS FOR HAWK
Lynda V. Mapes adopts a narrower lens but is equally ambitious in Witness Tree, which gets at sweeping ideas by looking at one century-old oak tree in Massachusetts. Among many other subjects--forest regeneration, acorn production, pollen records--Mapes has plenty to say about our early spring(s). ‘Climate change, the trees, streams, and puddles, and birds, bugs, and frogs, attest, is not a matter of opinion or belief,’ she writes. ‘It is an observable fact.’
The author makes a strong case for why the future depends on the health of the tree’s intricate ecological system and the larger environment of which it is part. She incorporates conversations with scientists and woodland specialists and ably weaves their research into her larger chronicle of change and adaptation.
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.
Mapes writes of her time in the woods with such genuine wonder and delight that what emerges is 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Title: Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak
- Author: Lynda V. Mapes
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Print Publication Date: 2017
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 240
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781632862549, 9781632862532, 1632862530, 1632862549
- Resource ID: LLS:9781632862549
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:27:47Z
Lynda V. Mapes is the environmental reporter for the Seattle Times. She researched and wrote Witness Tree while a Knight Fellow in science journalism at MIT and a Bullard Fellow in forest research in residence with her oak at the Harvard Forest. This is her fourth book. She lives in Seattle. www.lyndavmapes.com