Author Event: Marguerite Holloway's "Take to the Trees"

Join us on February 7th at 4pm as we host Marguerite Holloway, who will be in conversation with Aparajita Majumdar to discuss her latest book, Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in American's Imperiled Forests. Signed copies of the book are available for purchase.

About the book:

One of Heatmap's Climate Books to Read in 2025
An empowering journey into the overstory with the arborists and forest experts safeguarding our iconic trees.

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.

About the author:

Marguerite Holloway is is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, and she lives in New York. https://www.margueriteholloway.com

About the moderator:

Aparajita Majumdar is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She is an environmental historian specializing in failed commodity crops, multispecies ethnography, climate change, colonial and Indigenous notions of borderlands, and heritage in South Asia. Her current book project, Planting Recalcitrance: Nature, Knowledge and Heritage in a South Asian Borderland, studies how Ficus elastica, a ‘failed’ rubber crop from the plantations of nineteenth-century British India, became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous lifeworlds in the Khasi hills of India-Bangladesh borderlands. As the rainiest place on earth, the Khasi hills in India connected to the floodplains of Sylhet in Bangladesh, represent an extraordinary borderland ecology shaped by extreme climates, extractive economies and Indigenous regenerative practices.

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