Embedded in our liturgy for SEASON OF CREATION: WEEK TWO  June 21, 2020, was a conversation with Lynda Mapes, Seattle Times envi­ronmental reporter and author of Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak.  You can find the link to the stand alone interview HERE.

As a newspaper reporter, Lynda was looking for a fresh way to understand and tell the climate-change story “beyond dueling politics or science.”  A conversation with Andrew Richardson, associate professor at Harvard University, and a subsequent invitation to come to the Harvard Research Forest for a yearlong Bullard Fellowship, gave Lynda the opportunity she craved.  She writes:

“Here, at one of the world’s premier research forests, in the classic New England village of Petersham, Massachusetts, a new center of my world emerged.  In this forest so like the woods I had loved as a girl, it came to me: you could tell the story of climate change—and more—through a single, beloved living thing: a tree.”

Kirkus Review of Books calls Witness Tree “a textured story of a rap­idly changing natural world and our relationship to it, told through the lens of one tree over four seasons… 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.”