How to Plant a Billion Trees

(Hardback)

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In recent years, environmental groups have proposed planting a billion trees to avert the climate crisis. That number of trees would make a dent in the carbon dioxide refracting sunlight through our atmosphere, but not enough to stop rising temperatures. Yet such a project meets the absurdity of climate change with hope that the trauma weve done to the planet can be healed. By weaving together personal and environmental traumas, How to Plant a Billion Trees shows how vulnerable people, communities, and ecosystems react to trauma by providing workable and even sustainable recoveries.

My babysitter raped me when I was 11 years old. Then I had an abortion. In How to Plant a Billion Trees, I consider the damaged ecosystem of my body, my family, my town, and our earth. As an adult, Ive struggled to rebuild community, after a childhood of displacement in elementary school and church. How did my unhealthy childhood ecosystem perpetuate further disease And how did that same childhood teach me about developing community Just as trees communicate through the ecosystems theyve built, I explore my ecosystem to understand how to build community and belonging, from looking for a gifted class to accepting my own mother. Yet climate change, which affects all ecosystems, threatens to make each of us insecure misfits, even the trees, who once felt like never leaving home.

Author Bio

Nicole Walker is the author of the forthcoming collection. She is the author of Sustainability: A Love Story, Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. Shes nonfiction editor at Diagram and Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.