Current Writing

In the Name of the Fir: A Cure for Tree Blindness

What is the process of seeing trees more deeply? Curing tree blindness requires understanding what makes a species distinct, its signature. But that’s not enough. Trees also have histories. They have been hacked down for military purposes. They have been appropriated by poets like Longfellow. They have been fashioned into musical instrument sounding boards.

In my book, as I wrestle with my own degenerating vision, I craft an intimate portrait of a reemerging forest struggling with pounding coastal storms and invasive insects and fungi, yet emerge newly sighted and uplifted after a trek through a remote old-growth forest. There I discover that a forest is not a collection of individual trees but a hieroglyph, vast and layered—and an intergenerational new-growth story of the human kind unfolds, ensuring that my tree blindness is not hereditary.