Dressing and keeping the garden: Creation care in Reforesting Faith and The Earth Cries Out

Carpenter-turned-doctor Matthew Sleeth writes in his Reforesting Faith (WaterBrook; 2019) about an instance where he had volunteered to plant trees at his conservative church, and one of the pastors told him that he had "the theology of  a tree hugger." "This was not meant as a compliment," Sleeth writes. 

While the pastor was likely drawing some sort of distinction between conservative values and progressive ones as represented by concern for the environment, it certainly implied that God himself isn't a tree hugger or, as Sleeth put it, "My first reaction to the pastor's comment was, 'Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe God doesn't care about trees.'"

It would be awfully bizarre if God didn't care about trees, of course, as he did create them, right? Nevertheless, the encounter sent Sleeth to seek out his Bible—and I should perhaps here note that Sleeth and his church believe that "Scripture is the inspired, inerrant Word of God"—and start reading, cover to cover, pausing to underline everything the Bible had to say about trees. The result was this book, so obviously the Bible has a lot to say on the subject.

Reforesting Faith is essentially a brisk re-reading of the story of the Bible, from God planting the garden of Eden during Genesis' creation stories, with two important trees at their center, to Jesus' death on a cross made from a tree, pausing to note when and where trees appear, and linger on their meaning.

That Sleeth was able to produce an entire book (even a relatively short one, at under 200 pages) on the subject is evidence to how many trees there are in the story of the Bible, even if Sleeth is pretty generous in his definition of a "tree," including as he does tree-adjacent symbols like bushes, branches, walking sticks, fruit or seed; indeed, as Sleeth writes, "Every significant theological event in the Bible is marked by a tree."

What does this mean? 

Well, for one thing, it means that if Sleeth was prepared all those years ago, he probably could have shut down that pastor who made the tree hugger comment pretty quickly and thoroughly. God obviously does care about trees, and the writers of the Bible—although, again, Sleeth would say the ultimate author, via divine inspiration, was God himself—constantly employed them as plot-points and symbols.

For another, it makes a pretty strong argument that Christians like Sleeth probably should be tree huggers. Forgetting for a moment the absolute ecological necessity trees are (providing oxygen and holding our atmosphere together in a livable configuration) and the many other benefits they provide humanity, of varying degrees of importance (holding soil together, breaking storms, providing food, giving shade, being aesthetically pleasing, etc), they should hold an additional, theological value for Christians. 

Anyone can pause under a tree and appreciate, say, the cool of its shade, the way it sways or seems to whisper in a slight breeze, or the beauty of its intricate construction. And anyone can marvel at the unusual slow time scale that trees exist on, outliving humans by decades or centuries, and contemplate what that says about us and our place in the world. 

But for Christians, they can also be a tangible, almost ever-present signal to stop and consider the two trees of Eden, the olive branch the dove brought back to Noah to let him know the flood was abating, the oak tree God's messengers first met Abraham over before initiating the covenant, the grove Abraham planted in Beersheba, the burning bush God spoke to Moses out of, and on and on, until the story Christians read in the Bible reaches its climax, and Jesus retreats to olive groves to pray fervently, and is ultimately nailed to a tree.

"God's original plan was for humanity to dress and keep trees," Sleeth concludes his book, "For those of us who claim the name of Christ, we ought to take a long, hard look at how well we are fulfilling our role as God's stewards." (Here the author is referring to the second creation story in Genesis, where in Genesis 2:15 "the Lord God took the man, and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress and keep it."). 

If pastors are derisively dismissing congregants who plant trees as tree huggers, then the answer would appear to be "Not great." Hopefully Sleeth's book gets into the right hands then, and can change some minds. Christians wield an incredible amount of social and political power in the world in general and America and particular, and it's hard to think of many things that could effect greater and more rapid good for the world if that power were to be applied for planting and protecting trees.

Gary Gardner notes the political power of Christian communities, much of it unused when it comes to the environmental crisis, in his example-filled, blueprint-like The Earth Cries Out (Orbis; 2021). 

"People of faith bring a set of infrastructural, social, financial, political, and, of course, moral and spiritual, tools to the sustainability challenges of our time," he writes, before listing the many virtues of faith communities, from meeting regularly and being highly motivated to bearing moral authority to controlling "meaningful amounts of investment capital" .and managing land and buildings "that are potential sustainability showcases." 

"Few institutions at the global level have such a broad and powerful tool set," he writes, "Of course, these asserts are seldom utilized to their fullest potential; people of faith are arguably punching well below their weight on the critical issues of our day." 

To extend the metaphor, The Earth Cries Out offers coaching on how throw better, more effective punches. 

Gardner begins his discussion with "signs of the times," a phrase that was "Jesus' terms for societal markings of moral importance." These involve the facts that, if you're reading this blog,  you're likely already well aware of, like the rapidly warming planet caused by runaway carbon dioxide emissions and the sixth extinction ("This unraveling of the fabric of life is nothing less than the decimation of billons of years of God's creative work," as Gardner memorably refers to it). 

So what can faith communities do about the state of the earth, which is in its threatened state in large part because, as Gardner puts it, humanity has corrupted the dominion we were given over God's creation into our domination of it...? 

The chapters that follow discuss various sustainability challenges—energy, land, food—as well as work being done by some faith groups to address them, and often times quite specific examples of efforts, efforts that an engaged and committed church or faith community can replicate.

Many of these actions may be familiar to many readers, including smart divestment (particularly of fossil fuel industry) and reinvestment, solar panel installation, creating community gardens and green spaces (the latter of which can serve dual, environmental as well as spiritual functions), patronizing particularly sustainable and just business models, and so on. 

These may be practices that individuals are already committed to in their personal lives, but Gardner discusses them on the scaled-up level of a parish, congregation or other faith community, where the impact is several orders of magnitude greater than that  personal level. 

Though grounded in the author's Catholic faith, the book is filled with examples that aren't limited to a single denomination, or even a single religion, but strives to be inclusive of people of faith in general. Given the enormity of the crises facing us at this point in history, faith is probably going to be a pretty important component in what is needed to fix the megaproblems before us, regardless of the intricacies of how one worships (or if one worships at all). 

If one does so, though, then The Earth Cries Out offers plenty of strategies to bring to one's fellow faithful. 

Fight, fight, fight!: Michael E. Mann takes on all comers in The New Climate War

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet

By Michael E. Mann

PublicAffaris; 2021

Michael E. Mann is a scientist, author and climate activist who rose to some degree of prominence—infamy, in some circles—for his part in producing the so-called "hockey stick" graph, a 1999 graph showing the sharp, sudden and then steady increase in temperatures that accompanied the industrial revolution in a compelling visual. That is, it was shaped like a hockey stick, being relatively flat for a long time and then curving dramatically upward. 

Given his years in the field, he's a veteran of the climate war, or, I suppose, a veteran in what he would now term the old climate war, as his new book heralds the commencement of a new climate war. It's relatively late in the book—page 231—that he defines the old climate war as a war on the science itself, in the form of outright denialism of global warming and a climate crisis of any kind, and the new climate war as the war on action to do anything about actually solving the climate crisis.

The war metaphor runs through the entirety of the book. "We are in a war," Mann writes, "but before we engage, we must understand the mind of the enemy," which he defines as "the forces of denial and delay."  He talks of a four-point battle plan*, he reviews the war so far, he names various factions of enemies and their tactics, and he even addresses his continual talk of war: "The surest way to lose a war is to refuse to recognize you're in one in the first place."

It is an apt metaphor for Mann, as it fits the pugilistic tone of the book. In fact, despite his warnings of the enemy seeking to drive wedges into the climate movement wherever they see the smallest cleavage—say, for example, purity tests, like activists attacking climate scientists for flying in airplanes to get to conferences to give speeches, or the fight over carbon pricing, wherein some faction allow perfect to be the enemy of good—he spends an awful lot of time on engaging in internecine warfare himself. 

Perhaps because Mann has been so deeply entrenched in the climate wars himself for so long, he has opinions and experiences with almost every element of it, and so he has opinions on everything. He doesn't hesitate to share these, and even though he warns of the dangers of climate activists fighting among themselves over relatively small matters, which only helps the forces of delay, he engages in quite a bit of seeming score-settling in the book, reliving Twitter battles in which he quotes his own tweets and quotes since-deleted tweets or tweets that he notes have a high likelihood of having come from bots. 

He also attacks his fellow activists, not necessarily in the harshest terms, but a surprising amount of real estate seems devoted to criticizing other climate activists, usually on the grounds that they are doing it wrong, engaging in, for example, "doomism" (on the part of Vox's David Roberts in some tweets, for example) or overshooting in their calls for systemic change (Naomi Klein's identifying capitalism as a major problem in need of being addressed, for example).

Entire chapters are devoted to the need for the members of the climate movement not to fight among themselves, but, well, Mann does an awful lot of relitigating of minor friendly fire incidents in those chapters and some that follow. 

One hopes that Mann doesn't lose too much of his audience in these sections, or distract from his own messaging. The more compelling parts of the book include those on the idea of deflection campaigns, in which corporations move the onus of action from themselves to the individual**, often quite effectively (Among the examples are the famous "crying Indian" anti-littering ad that deflected the responsibility for litter from those companies that produce all the disposable packaging to consumers who don't dispose of it properly, or the gun lobby's "guns don't kill people, people kill people" slogan). 

So too are the sections on what he calls "the non-solution solution," like attempts to geo-engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change, and his arguments against "doomism", in the chapter "The Truth is Bad Enough." Though that chapter too involves keeping some of his old Twitter fights going, it also effectively argues that there's no need to exaggerate the crisis we're in, which has the risk of paralyzing people with fear—as the title of the chapter indicates, no exaggeration is needed to paint a scary, hopefully action-motivating image of where we're at as a planet. 

Mann seems to love alliteration when discussing the forces of inaction, the enemy armies in the climate wars, or, what he often terms "inactivists." His book details the transition from the old climate war to the new one:

The inactivists have been forced into retreat from "hard" climate denials to "softer denial: downplaying, deflecting, dividing, delaying, and despair-mongering. These are the multiple fronts of the new climate war. Any plan for victory requires recognizing and defeating the tactics now being used by inactivists as they continue to wage war.

That might seem like a victory, what with the enemy retreating metaphor, but we're a long way from a cessation of all hostilities. Still, Mann provides a hopeful note in his final chapter, "Meeting the Challenge":

Despite the challenges detailed in this book, I am cautiously optimistic—that is to say, neither Pollyannaish, nor dour, but objectively hopeful—about the prospects for tackling the climate crisis in the years ahead. The reason for that optimism is a confluence of developments, a "perfect storm," if you will, of eye-opening events that are helping to prepare us for the task ahead. First, there have been a series of unprecedented, extreme weather disasters that have vivified the climate-change threat. Second, a global pandemic has now taught us key lessons about vulnerability and risk. And finally, we've seen the reawakening of environmental activism, and , in particular, a popular uprising by children across the world that has framed climate change as the defining challenge of our time.

I certainly hope that's enough. If you were to read just one book about the climate crisis this year, I don't think I'd recommend this one, if only because of Mann's tendency to get sidetracked by his personal history and his own war stories (Jelmers Mommers' How Are We Going To Explain This?, reviewed in the previous post, is probably a better candidate). But The New Climate War has plenty of redeeming qualities too and heck, who says you only have to read just one book about the climate crisis this year...?

*If you're curious, the plan is: 1.) "Disregard the doomsayers", 2.) "A child will lead them", 3.) "Educate, educate, educate" and 4.) "Changing the system requires systemic change"

**I found this passage  from page 61 particularly well-put:

There are plenty of lifestyle changes that should be encouraged, many of which make us happier and healthier, save us money, and decrease our environmental footprint...But consumer choice doesn't buld high-speed railways, fund research and development in renewable energy, or place a price on carbon emissions. Any real solution must involve both individual action and systemic change....So there is a delicate middle ground—which we must seek out—that encourages personal responsibility and individual action while continuing to use all of the lever arms of democracy (including voting!) to pressure politicians to support climate-friendly governmental policies.

That's the question: Jelmer Mommers asks How Are We Going To Explain This?

How Are We Going To Explain This?: Our Future on a Hot Earth

By Jelmer Mommers
Scribner; 2020

It's a good thing we all know not to judge books by their covers, or else I would be tempted to judge Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers' How Are We Going To Explain This? rather harshly. It's not that the image of a baby crawling around in a radiation suit that adorns it is too alarmist—one really can't be too alarmist about an urgent threat to all life on Earth as we know it—but that there's something almost flip about the image, which not even the worst-case scenarios would make a reality. It therefore looks like a joke, and because the climate crisis Mommers writes about is no laughing matter, it seems almost inappropriate, an overcorrection to the alarmism. 

It doesn't really fit the tone of the book though, once again proving the value of that cover-judging adage: How Are We Going To Explain This? might have a poor cover, but it's a pretty great book. In fact, Mommers' book is pretty much an ideal one on the subject. It's sharply, succinctly and thoroughly explains the climate crisis, how exactly we as a planet and as species got to this point, how deep the shit we are in actually is*, and what we can do about it in engaging, readable prose. And it's less than 175 pages.

Five years in the making, the book was a bestseller in Mommers' home country of the Netherlands, and is now available to U.S. audiences in a translation by Laura Vroomen and Anna Asbury. It's remarkably up to date, with a lot of discussion of the cornonavirus pandemic, and what that has revealed about our society, things that may be quite relevant to confronting the climate crisis, given the similarity of the two.

Indeed, the question of the appropriate metaphor for our necessary response to the climate crisis might be answered by looking to the covid crisis. The New Deal, the U.S. mobilization during World War II, The Marshall Plan, the moon shot—each of these have been suggested historical analogies for how we should think about what we need to do to save the world, although each has problematic elements, or to fall apart at some point (Something Naomi Klein discussed in her On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal). 

But what about coronavirus?

Writes Mommers:

Suddenly governments demonstrated their ability to listen to scientists, free up cash, and take the lead. Even while the scientific facts on COVID-19 were much less robust than those on climate changed, politicians decided to act. The responsible ones among them acted with precisely the "better safe than sorry" mentality that we need so as to stop the habitability of the earth from shrinking further...

Budgetary rules were let go of, central banks rushed in to help, and money was made available to the researchers who needed it most. The speed with which testing capacity an intensive care capacity were ramped up reminded many of wartime. But it was peacetime, and we were learning something about our capacity for collective action. 

Remember, Mommers was watching the pandemic unfold from the Netherlands, so he perhaps had better examples of responsible governments leaping into action to save their populaces than we saw here in America during much of the past year. Still, for all of those noisy individuals who flout the efficacy of masks and the seriousness of the disease, far more Americans took action to slow the spread of the virus. We can probably expect the same from the same players when it comes to combatting climate change; the important thing is to keep those noisy individuals out of the positions of power like, oh, say, President of the United States of America, going forward. 

The book is divided into three parts: What's the Problem?, Where Are We Headed? and What Can We Do? The first part goes all the way back to the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000  years ago and the advent of agriculture, although Mommers moves fleetly through history, noting how humanity and the climate have interacted to the past, and paying special attention to how humanity thought of nature, which, for too long now, was something we thought of as separate from ourselves, rather than something we were ae part of ("History also shows us that the idea of man as an independent and superior being, elevated above all other creatures, is a relatively recent invention, not an immutable fact," Mommers writes, hopefully).

The second part imagines two separate future scenarios, one in which the world has warmed 2.6-degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution (i.e. "hothouse earth"), and one in which the world's warming has successfully been kept to 1.6-degrees Celsius (Here Mommers' book echoes a conceit explored at some length in Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac's The Future We Choose). 

In truth, neither of those exact scenarios is the most likely. Chances are, there will ultimately end up being some amalgamation of the two, and we will end up  falling somewhere between them...although there's also a chance we end up in a world far worse than what is usually presented as the bad option, should various feedback loops and cascading crises exacerbate warming more quickly than expected. 

The third and final part focuses on what we can do, and though you've likely heard most of what we can do collectively and as individuals before, Mommers presents it rather elegantly, and details some interesting actions some are taking beyond the most often cited, like divestment campaigns and lawyers taking legal actions against fossil fuel companies and governments (with varying degrees of success). 

Mommers doesn't diminish the enormity of the undertaking at all—something he refers to as The Great Turn—but also elevates the power of small changes, particularly how one person making a small change can influence others to make that same small change. There is, therefore, a magnifying effect to every little thing we do, whether it's eating less (or no) meat, choosing trains over planes or buying an electric vehicle. 

Whether enough people make those small changes, and whether or not governments ever make the big changes, is sometimes a cause for hopefulness...and sometimes a cause for hopelessness, depending on the day. As frank as Mommers can be, however, I like the relatively upbeat note he strikes near the end of the book:

But then I remind myself that we don't know how this story ends. The behavior of CO2 particles is predictable, that of people is not.

Also unpredictable? The advent of the coronavirus as a pandemic that would radically alter daily life almost everywhere in the world. The pandemic taught us, Mommers writes, that the future is unpredictable and that we're all vulnerable. It also gave us a new example of how an urgent and deadly threat that could inspire collective action for the greater good. 

*Mommers' actual phrasing was this: "The truth of the matter is, we're in unbelievably deep shit. Mankind has never experienced the warmer climate we're heading for. Local droughts, local flooding, local extreme weather conditions—we're used to all that, but nothing in history has prepared us for worldwide climate disurptiton, with many consequences that are unpleasant in themselves and disastrous when combined. 

Don't Panic: Reading Douglas Adams' Last Chance To See 30 years later

Last Chance To See

By Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

Harmony Books; 1990

In 1985 Observer Colour Magazine sent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, zoologist Mark Carwardine and a photographer to Madagascar in search of the elusive aye-aye for an article. I never read that article, but I am guessing it was a pretty inspired idea and the trip went well for all involved, as Adams and Carwardine continued their partnership well beyond that initial collaboration, soon embarking on a quest of sorts using that same template: The pair would pick out one of the world's most endangered animals, and then take a trip to see if they could find it in the wild. They ended up spending several years on the project.

The result of all that travel was the 1990 book Last Chance To See...although, like so much of Adams' work, it wasn't just a book. Adams and Carwardine first produced a BBC Radio 4 documentary series of their adventures that ran in 1989. 

Given the particular subject, animals on the verge of extinction, it is perhaps a strange book to read for the first time 31 years after initial publication. The same can be said of many books dealing with science and current events, of course, but the intervening decades mean much of the most salient information in the book might no longer be relevant; some animals that were on the brink might have recovered, some might have actually gone extinct (Indeed, the Yangtze river dolphin and the northern white rhinoceros, both animals that were searched for in the book, are now presumed extinct and functionally extinct, respectively). 

Of course, while one of the goals of Last Chance To See (the book and the radio show, as well as the original Observer article on the aye-aye), was to raise awareness of endangered species, there are certainly pleasures to be had in the reading of the book decades later, regardless of how up-to-date it's statistics on various breeding programs or wild animal counts might be.

The book is, after all, written by Adams, and the very sorts of witty observations on the human condition and comedy sketch-like conversations that punctuate his novels appear liberally throughout the book, which is essentially a first-person travelogue about an odd couple of traveling companions, each chapter devoted to the journey to a particular place to see a particular animal.

"My role, and one for which I was entirety qualified," Adams explained in his introduction, "was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise." That and, of course, to remember it all long enough to write it down afterwards. While the division of labor isn't entirely clear from the book, Adams seems to indicate that Carwardine had to do all of the hard work regarding the organizing of the trips and also the explaining of things to Adams, while Adams took notes and later wrote the book (While they share the author credit on the cover, the book sounds like Adams and is written in first-person; Carwardine does write an epilogue and he took all of the pictures included).

Each chapter chronicles a different trip, with the aye-aye story told extremely briefly in the introduction. From there the pair seek out the Komodo dragon in Indonesia, the northern white rhinoceros in Zaire (with a detour to visit mountain gorillas), the kakapo in New Zealand, the aforementioned Yangtze river dolphin in China (the only animal they completely fail to find in the wild) and the Rodrigues fruit bat in Mauritus (although their ornithologist contacts there quickly convince them to spend less time with the bat and more time with the even rarer birds that they are working to help). 

While rare animals facing the specter of extinction doesn't exactly sound like comedy gold, Adams is a skilled enough humorist to find plenty of material. This is thanks, in large part, to the fact that he writes not only about the animals and their environments, but about people: He writes about himself and Carwardine, and the ways in which they are different from one another and from those they meet, he writes about fellow eco-tourists (quite memorably in the case of a pair of German students who so perfectly fit the stereotype of Gemran students that Adams is embarrassed by their inclusion), he writes about the various conservationists (many of whom qualify as what might charitably referred to as "characters") and he writes a lot about various bureaucrats in government offices and airports.

By constructing the book as a travelogue as much as a book about animals, Adams is able to treat readers to such stories as he and his crew's attempts to buy a condom in rural China, which proves to be only slightly less difficult than finding a river dolphin (The condom was to cover a microphone so they could safely lower it under the water, although no one they kinda sorta spoke to thought that's what it was for). We get to ride in too-small, overcrowded airplanes and dangerously-driven cars on poor roads. We get to marvel at foreign traffic patterns.

Beyond teasing out comedy bits, Adams proves quite adept at finding and communicating various cosmic ironies about life on Earth. Like, for example, that the lemurs were only able to flourish on Madagascar because there were no monkeys present, and thus they could fill the various niches that monkeys filled elsewhere—and then as soon as monkeys, in the form of ape-descended life forms more commonly known as human beings—arrived, we almost immediately imperiled them, doing the work out distant evolutionary ancestors would have done had they been able to take ships and planes to Madagascar. Now, it's up to us monkeys to save them. 

While best-known for his fiction, Adams is quite a skilled non-fiction writer...although there are several passages where I found myself wondering how much he was fictionalizing certain characters and encounters. Some, like the Melbourne-based expert on venomous creatures that is bored silly by venom and venomous creatures and isn't shy about saying so, seems like the sort of character who might have appeared in one of Adams' novels, and his dialogue seems almost too perfect. 

And then there's the kakapo, an animal so ridiculous that I would have been certain Adams had invented it for one of his Hitchhiker's books...were this book not labeled non-fiction. The kakapo is the world's largest parrot, and the only flightless one, although it appears to forget that it can't fly, as, when threatened, it will run up a tree, run off a branch and make an attempt, only to fall back to the ground where it started.

Their method of breeding is similarly complex and nonsensical, and involves the male calling from a "bowl" it makes in the ground to amplify its voice, and then the female having to walk—sometimes for miles—to get to the calling male's bowl. And hopefully he's there when she arrives, or they will have missed their connection. It  is one of those animals that, when one learns about it, one isn't entirely surprised to find out that it's endangered. 

Adams died suddenly in 2001 at the age of 49, and thus didn't have an opportunity to revisit his work on Last Chance To See. However in 2009, 20 years after the broadcast of the radio series, the BBC released a television show by that name, in which actor (and Adams' friend) Stephen Fry and Carwardine revisit many of the animals to see how they are doing.

 Even that series is now over a decade out of date, however. Time moves fast in the world of conversation, but some broad truths don't change, even if some numbers and statistics might. Animals will always be imperiled, it will most often be all our fault and it will  be within our power to save them. 

Here's hoping for more chances to see. 

A forest of stories: Cécile Benoist and Charlotte Gastaut's children's book for all ages tells over a dozen tree tales

Every Tree Has a Story

By Cécile Benoist and Charlotte Gastaut

Downtown Bookworks; 2018

Originally published in France as Un arbe, une historie (A Tree, A Story), this gorgeous oversized children's book is visually quite striking. The bold artwork by Charlotte Gastaut fills each 14-inch-high, 18-inch-long two-page spread with elaborately constructed imagery, dense with design elements and filigree. There is space left on each for the text of the story being illustrated, of course, but writer Cécile Benoist's paragraphs of prose always look secondary...as is wholly appropriate in a picture book.

Which isn't to say those words are without value, of course, just that they can look barely-there embedded as they are with often arresting images. They are, of course, integral, as they explain what exactly we're looking at, the story of which isn't always clear just by the imagery.

There are just over a dozen stories told within, and thee are occasionally broken up with pages devoted to listing special trees of tree-related facts. 

The stories run a rather wide gamut, but among them are simplified and straightforward versions of those featuring well-known tree heroes like Kenya's Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement and America's Julia Butterfly Hill and her two years spent living in Luna. There are also stories of artists like Sam Van Aken, who created a tree of 40 fruits through grafting, and photographer Michael Nichols, who photographed the gigantic President Tree in California's Sequoia National Park. And there are stories that barely have people in them at all, like that of The Great Banyan Tree in Calcutta, India and the Ténéré Tree that was for a long time the only living thing for hundreds of miles in the Ténéré Desert in Niger.

Though the art is quite sophisticated, the book seems to be aimed toward younger readers, as no stories exceeds a half-dozen paragraphs in a corner of a two-page spread, and Benoist pauses to define words and terms like botanist, dowry, canopy, graft and reforesting the land. At least two of the stories have tough subject matter that might prove a bit challenging for some younger readers, though, like "The Golden Spruce and The Lumberjack", which involves crime, death and suggestions of mental illness, and "Eucalyptus Apocalypse", which tells of the clearcutting of Tasmanian forests in the 1970s, illustrated by a picture in which the vaguely airplane-shaped birds that flit through most pages of Gastaut's art are drawn flying while aflame, looks of concern on their simplified faces.

Gastaut uses a quite limited palette in each of her images, generally just three or four colors beyond that black and white that most of the trees and people are rendered in. It's hard to accurately describe the art—and you're really better off just seeking the book out for yourself than listening to me try to do so—but the coloring as well as the rendering are highly stylized and quite distant from the natural browns and greens and organic messiness one might associate with the natural world (By the way, you can see a handful of stories from the book here). Each page is beautiful, but beautiful in an entirely different way than the subject matter as it exits in the real world is beautiful. 

An all-ages book in the best sense of the word, Every Tree Has a Story has as much to offer adults (be it the aesthetic pleasures of the artwork, or suggestions for people and trees to learn more about) as it does the children it was apparently made for.