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ed 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.”