Witness Tree

February 27, 2017
Seattle Times reporter Mapes (Elwha: A River Reborn) spends a year exploring the “miracle of the ordinary” through physical proximity to a single large but otherwise unexceptional specimen of a ubiquitous tree, the red oak, inside the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. The work echoes Thoreau’s retreat to Walden in form, though Mapes’s tree is less her teacher than a cherished primary source. Mapes occasionally bursts forth with moments of wonder in recounting her experience, but her overall style of engagement is more academic than sensual. She includes a broad range of expertise and perspective, seeking out archivists, phenologists, carpenters, soil ecologists, professional tree climbers, and local cows, and considering the technologies of webcams and drones. The net effect is pleasant but bland. Mapes displays a down-to-earth optimism in her smooth prose and cheerful banter in her conversations, but her experience feels overly planned and curated; her year-long narrative lacks any notable moments beyond her scheduled expert visits, especially when compared to the lively history of the area that she pulls from Harvard’s archives. Mapes acknowledges climate change fears but ends on a positive note about trees’ resilience and New England’s rewilding in the last century. Her work is unfortunately underwhelming. Agent: Elizabeth Wales, Wales Literary.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
A textured story of a rapidly changing natural world and our relationship to it, told through the lens of one tree over four seasons.Seattle Times environmental reporter Mapes (Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village, 2015, etc.) first encountered the Harvard Forest as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, returning soon afterward for a yearlong stay in the woods. Renting a room in a historic farmhouse, she sought out a majestic century-old oak to serve as her lens from which to explore the past, situate the present, and grapple with an uncertain future. Aided by a colorful team of interdisciplinary experts, Mapes tells a dynamic story from multiple perspectives, including from a hammock in the canopy of the tree. Understanding trees simultaneously as utility and commodity, as ritual and relic, as beings with agency and sustainers of life, the author illustrates how they have found their ways into our homes and memories, our economies and language, and she reveals their places in our entangled future. Seamlessly blending elements of physics, ecology, biology, phenology, sociology, and philosophy, Mapes skillfully employs her oak as a human-scaled entry point for probing larger questions. Readers bear witness to indigenous histories and colonialism, to deforestation and extraction, to industrialization and urbanization, and to the story of carbon and the indisputable realities of human-caused climate change. Understanding these phenomena to be intricately interconnected, the author probes lines falsely drawn between objectivity and emotion and between science and wonder, all while examining the nature of knowledge and the possibilities, tensions, and limitations of science. Passionately discrediting the notion that humans and nature are separate, she links this flawed belief to the root of our current ecological crisis and calls for a reimagining of the ways of being together in the world. 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.

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August 2, 2019

This is a thought-provoking, well-referenced, and -written account of journalist Mapes's (Elwha: A River Reborn) year spent in the Harvard Forest spanning Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Forest experts and researchers have spent decades documenting changes within trees in the area in order to reflect, with undeniable relevancy, the effects of human-caused transformations of surrounding landscapes. Mapes describes the dedicated researchers as well as she does the lives of trees--how they respond to drought, hurricanes, floods, and changing land use. The human history of New England is vividly rendered, with due reference to Henry David Thoreau and several other historical authors. Without being polemic, Mapes writes of how forests adapt to our changing world; however, the work would have benefited from a few photographs, including just one map for illustration. VERDICT Overall, highly recommended and of interest to historians and anyone concerned with natural history.--Henry T. Armistead, formerly with Free Lib. of Philadelphia

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