Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science and Self-Discovery in America'

East End Books Ptown Presents: Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science and Self-Discovery in America's Imperiled Forests w/ Marguerite Holloway 8/20 at 6pm. Ptown.

Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern about their future. Run by twin sister tree doctors Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, the workshop helps people--from everyday tree lovers to women arborists working in a largely male industry--develop impressive technical skills and ascend into the canopy. As Holloway tackles unfamiliar equipment and dizzying heights, she learns about the science of trees and tells the stories of charismatic species, including hemlock, aspen, Atlantic white cedar, oak, and beech. She spotlights experts who are chronicling the great dying that is underway in forests around the world as trees face simultaneous and accelerating threats from drought, heat, floods, disease, and other disruptions.

As she climbs, Holloway also comes to understand the profound significance of trees in her relationship with her late mother and brother. The book's rousing final chapter offers something new: a grander environmental and arboreal optimism, in which the story of trees and their resilience meshes with that of people working to steward the forests of the future, and of community found among fellow tree climbers. A lyrical work of memoir and reportage, Take to the Trees sounds the alarm about rapid arboreal decline while also offering hope about how we might care for our forests and ourselves.

Marguerite Holloway is Professor of Professional Practice; Director of Science and Environmental Journalism at Columbia University and has written about science — including climate change, natural history, 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. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, the story of John Randel Jr., the surveyor and inventor who laid the 1811 grid plan on New York City, and of the researchers who use his data today (W.W. Norton, 2013). She wrote the introduction to the most recent edition of Manhattan in Maps (Dover, 2014).

Holloway enjoys interdisciplinary teaching and often collaborates with colleagues working in documentary, photojournalism and animation — particularly in the realm of climate change storytelling. She has worked on several innovative interdisciplinary digital and data projects. She and colleagues at Columbia and Stanford universities had a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation to develop Science Surveyor, a prototype for an algorithmic tool to improve science journalism. Holloway and colleagues from Fordham and Brown universities worked on The Templeton Project, a sensor-based effort to chronicle the story of New York City’s rats, funded by the Tow Center for Digital Media.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School. She won the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001 and a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009; the New York Observer named her one of the city’s top professors in 2014

Review Quotes:Like the trees that it centers, this wonder of a book soars, oxygenates, roots, connects, and awes. It's a paean to all things arboreal, a memoir about loss and community, and a call to engage in acts of caretaking for our trees and for each other. To do any one of these things well would have made for a good book; to do them all beautifully is a true gift.--Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of I Contain Multitudes and Immense WorldsReview Quotes:Take to the Trees invites us to contemplate pushing past our own limits up into the treetops, as well as respecting the guidance of trees. I learned much from this wise book, and can only hope that many readers follow this writer up into the highest branches, to gain an understanding of where we are planted on this earth. Holloway's insights are urgent and necessary.--Sarah Ruhl, MacArthur fellow, playwright, and author of SmileReview Quotes:In her powerful and affecting book, Marguerite Holloway makes a case for how caretaking trees is really caretaking ourselves, and each other.--Florence Williams, author of The Nature FixReview Quotes:Take to the Trees is as lyrical and energetic a book as its title would suggest. In this hybrid of participatory journalism, environmental essay, and family memoir, Marguerite Holloway moves with effortless grace among her literary genres, and in so doing teaches us not only the facts but also the poetry of the natural world. One can't finish this wonderful book without seeing the nonhuman world with new eyes.--Darcy Frey, author of The Last ShotReview Quotes:The book in part is a sad tale of the damage we have done, but when Marguerite Holloway herself takes to the trees and learns from those who work with them, she plants the seeds of reconciliation between people and the nonhuman world. Readers should take the title literally and do likewise.--William Bryant Logan, author of Sprout LandsReview Quotes:Powerful and moving, Take to the Trees will resonate with anyone looking for ways to live with optimism and courage through our current era. Just as Marguerite Holloway literally climbs into trees and finds herself, so too does the book explore the connections between trees and the branches of our lives--from the visible canopy to the subs

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