Contemporary Authors

1. Elwha: A River Reborn, photographs by Steve Ringman, Mountaineers Books (seattle, WA), 2013 2. Breaking Ground; The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village, foreword by Grances Charles, University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 2009 3. Washington: The Spirit of the Land, photographs by Terry Donnelly and Mary Liz Austin, Voyageur Press, 1999 4. Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak, Bloomsbyry USA (New York, NY), 2017.

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Kirkus Reviews, 2/15/2017
A textured story of a rapidly changing natural world and our relationship to it, told through the lens of one tree over four seasons.
Seattle Times environmental reporter Mapes (Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village, 2015, etc.) first encountered the Harvard Forest as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, returning soon afterward for a yearlong stay in the woods. Renting a room in a historic farmhouse, she sought out a majestic century-old oak to serve as her lens from which to explore the past, situate the present, and grapple with an uncertain future. Aided by a colorful team of interdisciplinary experts, Mapes tells a dynamic story from multiple perspectives, including from a hammock in the canopy of the tree. Understanding trees simultaneously as utility and commodity, as ritual and relic, as beings with agency and sustainers of life, the author illustrates how they have found their ways into our homes and memories, our economies and language, and she reveals their places in our entangled future. Seamlessly blending elements of physics, ecology, biology, phenology, sociology, and philosophy, Mapes skillfully employs her oak as a human-scaled entry point for probing larger questions. Readers bear witness to indigenous histories and colonialism, to deforestation and extraction, to industrialization and urbanization, and to the story of carbon and the indisputable realities of human-caused climate change. Understanding these phenomena to be intricately interconnected, the author probes lines falsely drawn between objectivity and emotion and between science and wonder, all while examining the nature of knowledge and the possibilities, tensions, and limitations of science. Passionately discrediting the notion that humans and nature are separate, she links this flawed belief to the root of our current ecological crisis and calls for a reimagining of the ways of being together in the world.
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.

Publishers Weekly, 2/27/2017
Seattle Times reporter Mapes (Elwha: A River Reborn) spends a year exploring the “miracle of the ordinary” through physical proximity to a single large but otherwise unexceptional specimen of a ubiquitous tree, the red oak, inside the Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. The work echoes Thoreau’s retreat to Walden in form, though Mapes’s tree is less her teacher than a cherished primary source. Mapes occasionally bursts forth with moments of wonder in recounting her experience, but her overall style of engagement is more academic than sensual. She includes a broad range of expertise and perspective, seeking out archivists, phenologists, carpenters, soil ecologists, professional tree climbers, and local cows, and considering the technologies of webcams and drones. The net effect is pleasant but bland. Mapes displays a down-to-earth optimism in her smooth prose and cheerful banter in her conversations, but her experience feels overly planned and curated; her year-long narrative lacks any notable moments beyond her scheduled expert visits, especially when compared to the lively history of the area that she pulls from Harvard’s archives. Mapes acknowledges climate change fears but ends on a positive note about trees’ resilience and New England’s rewilding in the last century. Her work is unfortunately underwhelming. Agent: Elizabeth Wales, Wales Literary. (Apr.)

Witness Tree': An engrossing book on what a tree teaches us about climate
By Joel Connelly, SeattlePI Updated 9:59 am, Tuesday, April 11, 2017
"Witness Tree," by Lynda Mapes, is science writing of a high order, a book that is lucid, learned, all the while and rooted in its author's infectious pleasure at sharing a journey of personal discovery.
Mapes is environment reporter with The Seattle Times, and fixed on the 4,000 acre Harvard Forest, a research laboratory like none other, as a learning tool while on a Knight Fellowship at its namesake university.
She takes us to an environment unfamiliar to Northwesterners with our cherished old growth forests. We enter a corner of America once cleared for hardscrabble farms, which has experienced restoration of forests and return of its critters. Writes Mapes:
"The regrowth of forests on former agricultural land over the six-state region of New England and beyond amounts to one of the great, accidental rewildings of our time, The results of the walkaway from hundreds of thousands of acres of pasture and farms has created some of the most densely forested regions of America."
In her research, Mapes adopts a red oak tree, likely a little more than 100 years old. She climbs up into its canopy, even directs a video camera to see what four-legged creatures visit at night. She tromps the forest with earthy researchers who study the earth.
The oak has experienced, in its lifetime, a myriad changes that humankind has brought to planet Earth.
"It would have seen carbon dioxide levels rise from about three hundred parts per million to four hundred parts per million," Mapes writes. "It would have seen a mean annual temperature rise of about one degree Celsius -- nearly two degrees Fahrenheit.
"The oak lived through all those changes and also endured acid rain, witnessed the development of cars; and withstood huge increases in pollution."
Yet, the big oak thrives, even as climate change has unleashed a minute insect, the hemlock wooly adelgid, that is killing hemlock forests of the East, from Georgia to Southwest Maine. The Western Hemlock is resistant.
What Mapes engaged in, during a year living in the research forest, is called phenology. It is a long-neglected science that studies the timing of biological phenomena in nature and their relationship with the earth's environment, particularly the climate.
In the Harvard Forest, that means researchers' findings that spring comes steadily earlier, and the first frost of fall weeks later.
"Daffodils,/That come before the swallow dares, and take /The winds of March with beauty," Shakespeare wrote.
The blooming has advanced so dramatically "as to no longer fit its literary frame," writes Mapes. She invites participation in phenology through the Season Spotter blog at https://seasonspotter.wordpress.com
"Climate change: the trees, streams and puddles, and birds, bugs and frogs, attest, is not a matter of opinion or belief," Mapes adds. Leaves don't die; frost isn't running for office, frogs don't fund raise, pollinators don't put out press releases."
Forests may have grown back in New England, but climate change has forests under stress -- everywhere. Global trade transports new pests. Global warming "stokes heat and drought," burning forests in Alaska and infesting lodgepole pine forests with pine bark beetles over a swath of British Columbia the size of Sweden.
The reviewer naturally stresses what a politician would call the book's "sound science." Yet, "Witness Tree" carries the aspect of an attic of history. Diaries of a forever-weary 19th Century farm wife are quoted. We learn about the great 1938 hurricane that flattened forests across New England. The impact of the Erie Canal on New England farming is discussed. Thoreau and Wordsworth get quoted.
Mapes delivers a stirring final witness to "Witness Tree":
"We are not separate from nature, we are of it, and in it, and we need an ethical framework to match. We need a tree culture, a nourishing mutualism that embeds us in creation, working with one another in collaboration with nature to sustain us in our common home."
"From such a perspective, solutions can emerge. Without it, they likely will not."
"Witness Tree" is published by Bloomsbury. It costs $27. The book's book launch is 6:30 Tuesday at the Seattle Public Library. Mapes will likely recoil at my copy, so many pages are turned in, so many passages underlined, and so often that the phrase "Nut Graph" appears in the margin.

Boston Globe, April 25, 2017, Lynda V. Mapes, "What a Year with a Single Tree Reveals about Climage Change."
MY HAMMOCK RODE the wind in the tree’s topmost branches, its rocking embrace some 80 feet up amniotic and primal.

This was my triumphal tree climb, a capstone of a year spent with a single 100-year-old oak at the Harvard Forest in Petersham. My climbing instructors had slung the hammock, and I had hauled a picnic in my backpack up into the tree to share: roast chicken, a side of incendiary dhal, and, to top it all off, a big slab of dark chocolate.
We ripped into the food, then quieted, just enjoying being in the top of the tree. A black and yellow swallowtail butterfly cruised past my shoulder; chickadees called sweetly, alert to our presence. The leaves stirred in every direction, and the tree moved with the breeze, up, down and sideways, all at once.
Feeling both at home and distinctly a visitor, I thought what familiar and alien things trees are. They remain wild, essentially other, a kingdom apart. We need them, but they do not need us.
I had lived this tree’s seasons, from its hail of acorns in fall to the sharp glitter of burning stars through its bare branches on winter nights. I had watched its spare winter geometry soften into the filigree of first leaves in spring, that time we so yearn for, the season of fresh starts and new life. I had endured biting black flies as the tree’s deep-olive-green summer leaves grew resplendent, and reveled in the glow of yellow and red maples lighting the autumn wood.

As a journalist, I’d set myself the task of a fresh look at climate change beyond dueling politicians, press releases, or marches for the environment. Instead, I sought the quiet counsel of living things. My oak, it turned out, was the perfect teacher.

The tree first came into my life along with John O’Keefe, a biologist who for the past 25 years had studied the same 50 trees at the Harvard Forest, less than two hours west of Boston. I was a Knight Fellow in science journalism at MIT in 2013-2014, sitting in with professor Andrew Richardson’s lab at Harvard University. Andrew and his colleagues were onto something new, taking data from John’s daily walks as the literal ground truth to enhance a new observational method that Andrew and his collaborators had devised: a network of bank security cameras, of all things, mounted on towers to keep an eye on the tree canopy. Here was a way to see the pageant of the seasons John was watching, but on a far bigger scale.

Known as phenology, the observance of seasonal changes in nature is perhaps one of humanity’s oldest biological records. In the eighth century, Japanese monks made notes on the first cherry blossoms; closer to home, Henry David Thoreau kept records on the first flowering of plants on his daily walks around Concord.

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Disregarded as a mere hobby by mainstream science for generations, phenology has been rediscovered as researchers explore old records to find evidence of our changing climate. Nature, John’s records attest, is an articulate witness.

The observations from John’s forest walks showed in pointillist detail a changing world. He noticed everything: the mineral scent of the soil released in the spring thaw, the first call of wood frogs, the arrival of ice on the puddles. Recorded year after year with his No. 2.5 pencil, his hyperlocal focus brought home a global reality: The seasons are not what they used to be. On average, spring is earlier. Fall is later. And winter is getting squeezed on both ends.

I’d heard of John’s work and asked if I could join him on his surveys. Not long into our adventures, I sent him an e-mail. “John,” I said. “I need a tree.” I wanted a frame through which to probe global questions, from the changing climate to shifting seasonal timing and the evolution of the New England landscape and how these can be revealed through the life of one forest and even one tree.

“Here,” John said, putting his hand on the bark of a big red oak — more than 80 feet tall with a 65-foot crown spread — as we walked his survey loop one day. “This might be a good one for you.”

Sprouted beside a stone wall in what used to be a pasture now grown back to woods, the oak had stood witness as the people who worked the land left for jobs in towns and factories, making the carbon dioxide emissions that are altering our world. Borrowing a term from the trees that settlers once used to mark the bounds of changing landscapes (the living landmarks turn up in survey notes and maps still kept in town records all over New England), the big oak would be my “witness tree.”

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Before long, I had moved to the woods as a Bullard Fellow in forest research to live with my tree. My base camp was an apartment in Community House, a glorious, many-times-remodeled 18th-century New England farmhouse rented by Harvard to house visiting scholars. There was even a troupe of cows in the pasture out my front window for company. My tree was just steps away.

Biologist John O’Keefe (left, with Lynda V. Mapes) has studied the same 50 trees for 25 years. Mapes spent a year in the Harvard Forest studying one red oak and kept meticulous notes.
DOUG MACDONALD

Biologist John O’Keefe (left, with Lynda V. Mapes) has studied the same 50 trees for 25 years.

WHILE IT IS A NATURAL New England wood, signs that the Harvard Forest, founded in 1907, also is an outdoor classroom and laboratory are never far from view. Trees bristle with tags and flagging, and the forest floor is studded with equipment. On just one tract of the 4,000-acre forest, where my big oak stood, more than 40 experiments were underway, involving dozens of scientists from Harvard University and around the country and world.

In hiking boots, snowshoes, bare feet, snow boots, muck boots, sandals, bedroom slippers, and waders, I explored the forest in every kind of weather, at every hour. There was so much to learn about something seemingly so simple: a tree.

Scientists are still probing the brilliance of trees’ photosynthetic alchemy, turning sunlight, water, and air into the substance of their leaves, roots, and branches, a feat mere people have never been able to re-create. But what of the poetics of trees, how they move, breathe, and command such fluent agency? I truly had no idea; to know even one tree well, I discovered, is to be dazzled.

Trees are not just standing there. They are busy, productive, consummate diplomats, managing a suite of relationships both collaborative and combative. Although they may look sedate and aloof in the forest, seemingly each trunk to itself, up in the canopy and below ground the real story is revealed.

I had noticed particularly when I climbed the oak that each branch tip reached just exactly to the edge of the next tree’s branches, as close as possible, yet chastely not touching its neighbor, a phenomenon scientists charmingly call canopy shyness. In this way, each tree, I discovered, claims exactly its place, presenting an interwoven, interspecies community of branches to the sun and wind.

Below ground, a network of fungal filaments less than one-20th the width of a human hair thrums with the exchange of nutrients amid an uncountable constellation of microbial life.

And silent? Trees are anything but. In addition to the wind songs in their branches, their creaks and cracks, oaks have a language all their own of pheromones that can call out a sharp warning to neighbors if under attack by packs of caterpillars devouring their tender leaves. They can even summon an airstrike of beneficial wasps to rid them of the chewing horde. As if that wasn’t enough, for the attentive interpreter, trees also depict the seasonal gyre, from the plainsong of winter dormancy through each station of nature’s procession.

Yet in many people’s lives today it is easy to forget the seasons, and even our connection with nature itself. Eating diets detached from calendar or place, living in climate-controlled enclosures, and defeating the cycles of light and dark with ceaseless light, we are deracinated, disconnected, unmoored from the seasons, one of our deepest chronologies.

But not John O’Keefe, whose immersion in the rhythm of 50 trees over time has allowed scientists like Andrew to combine ground-level phenological observations with satellite imagery, drone photography, and data from cameras, together with other measurements, to explore the effect of climate change on forest ecosystems.

Not surprisingly, Andrew and his collaborators are still figuring out what to do with so young a method. Their work keeps turning up surprises, from learning that red oaks like mine at the Harvard Forest are growing faster and more efficiently than at any time in the last 20 years to discovering that the growing seasons now are lasting even longer than the leaves on the trees.

Leaves fall off, their season complete, even as the weather remains fine, the frost date stretching deeper into the calendar. The trees don’t have to shut down for the year, but they do.

There are several possible explanations. “Plants know from the history of their ancestors how long their timeline is,” says Trevor Keenan, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lead author with Andrew on a paper exploring spring and fall seasonal timing. “So it makes sense they would have some mechanism built into their optimum function, to have a preprogrammed senescence. . . . The question is, how quickly can they learn to change and detect that the environment around them has changed?”

Another theory is that once trees have filled up their carbon stores, they are finished with their work. “They have been as productive as they need to be for the year,” Trevor says. “They are done.”

For me the idea of seasons lasting longer than the leaves could stay on the trees was a lot to take in. There is something unnatural about it — because, of course, it is unnatural. It’s a human forcing of the climate system, imposed on a natural physiological cycle with its own timing. There are two calendars now: the seasonal timing evolved within living things and the seasons cooked up by us.

The big oak, in full summer regalia.
LYNDA V. MAPES

The big oak, in full summer regalia.

AMONG CLIMATE SCIENTISTS, climate warming is not controversial. They are in near-universal agreement that global warming is underway, and due primarily to human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.

It follows from the laws of physics that the more greenhouse gas there is in the atmosphere, the higher the earth’s average annual surface temperature will be. So no one should be surprised that the earth logged its warmest year ever recorded for the third year in a row in 2016.

Yet climate is not weather, and the two can be easy to confuse — or be used to sow confusion by those seeking to deny the scientific consensus on climate change. I experienced this while I was at the forest, during a record cold winter with snowfalls so mighty that in Boston the National Guard had to dig out the snowbound rails of the T. Yet back at my home in Seattle, my husband was cutting the grass during a record early spring.

Extremes are the new normal as the changing climate works its way on the landscape with varied effects. How trees are faring in the face of it is not one story, even in one forest. At the Harvard Forest, red oak, the dominant tree in these woods, is surging, at least for now, but warmer winters also have set invasive woolly adelgids on the march, expanding their range in a rampage expected to take out most of the eastern hemlock at the Harvard Forest and beyond, as the bugs literally suck the life out of them.

The future, climate scientists warn, may bring storms, droughts, fires, pest outbreaks, floods, and species extinctions, scaling ever upward in severity according to our failure to reduce carbon emissions and stop making our problem worse.

Perhaps there will be a technological fix. Perhaps we will figure out how to break the connection among prosperity, comfort, and carbon. But this much is for sure: In an uncertain world, forests can help. They are a repository of only good verbs: Shelter. Nurture. Moderate. Cleanse. Regenerate. Provide. Connect. Sustain. And in the resilience of the oak, more is revealed of the climate change story than the usual gloom-and-doom scenarios to which we have all become so accustomed.

I take heart in the journals of Thoreau. How he lamented in the 1850s about living in a time in which the big trees were already gone, and the “nobler” animals with them. But it is worth noticing that some things, many things, are much better now than when he was writing, or when my big oak sprouted. The regrowth of forests on former agricultural land over the six-state region of New England and beyond amounts to one of the great, accidental rewildings of our time. With the trees, Thoreau’s animals have returned to their forest home: bear, moose, deer, and more.

Harvard professor Andrew Richardson scales a tower to adjust webcams that keep an eye on seasonal changes in the trees. See the images at harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/webcams.
LYNDA V. MAPES

Harvard professor Andrew Richardson scales a tower to adjust webcams that keep an eye on seasonal changes in the trees. See the images at harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/webcams.

MORE THAN BUILDING material, fuel, and carbon-storage utilities, forests are foundational to life on the earth, refuge for countless animals and an endless source of human joy, renewal, and refreshment. The big oak and its forest were certainly all of that for me.

Particularly when climbing it. I had realized early on that just walking below my tree would not be enough. So it was my great good luck that Melissa LeVangie, the tree warden of Petersham, and her twin sister, Bear — professional arborists, competitive tree climbers, and instructors with national reputations — lived up the road and were willing to take on a rank beginner such as myself.

On a frigid morning as winter began to grit its teeth, Melissa joined me in the woods with the oak for my first climb. She sized it up with an experienced professional’s eye, gauging its safety for a climb. She noted its broad spreading crown and first branches, some 20 feet up the trunk, where the tree opens wide for big gulps of sun. Sure, she declared, this climb should be no problem.

Opening a heavy pack of gear, Melissa soon had me trussed like a turkey in a climbing harness, ropes, and helmet, all clipped together with a confusing array of carabiners and knots and pulleys that seemed quite important, in a life-or-death sort of way. I was noticing she had her blood type written on her helmet just as Melissa announced it was time to get my feet off the ground. Too stubborn to bail at this point, I gave the rope a pull, releasing my hold on earth’s dear, familiar gravity, and swung free in the air.

Melissa stuck close from the start, helping me into the first rank of branches. Exhausted, excited, I eventually let my feet rest in the big oak’s broad boughs.

From my perch, the connectedness of the oak to a vast community of lives was beautifully revealed. There were tapestries of lichen and moss. Insects on urgent errands. Birds aloft in their tiny treetop kingdom. And a sweep, as far as I could see, of trees of many arboreal nations: white pine, white birch, red oak, red maple, black birch, cherry, and beech. The oak was the largest tree in its grove, but it was a beneficent monarch. From more than 100 species of animals and insects that dined on its acorns and leaves to the vast network of fungi lounging all through its roots, the big oak was alive in so many dimensions and hosted a far larger menagerie of lives than I ever would have imagined.

It was on our last climb, finally all the way to the top of the oak with that picnic and hammock, that I thought it seems our task now is to live on this earth at least as successfully as this tree. It felt like a lesson, a personal reckoning, to simply grasp the reality of where we stand on this earth. We are not separate from nature; we are of it, and in it, and we need an ethical framework to match. We need a tree culture, a social and political act of biomimicry inspired by the genius of trees.

I had watched my tree through four seasons. I had seen trees change scientists’ understanding of the world. And the big oak had certainly changed me. I had learned many things, but most of all this: People and trees are meant to be together, and if we work at it, that’s how we will stay. Right here, dwelling in our common home on this beautiful earth, far into the future, amid the wonder of trees.

The author will read from her book at the Fisher Museum of the Harvard Forest in Petersham on May 2 at 7 p.m. and at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston on May 5 at 6 p.m.

Lynda V. Mapes is a reporter for The Seattle Times. This story is adapted from her new book, “Witness Tree: Seasons of Change With a Century-Old Oak.” Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Kirkus Reviews, review of Witness Tree, 2/15/2017 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lynda-v-mapes/witness-tree/ Publishers Weekly, review of Witness Tree, 2/27/2017 https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-63286-253-2 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/11/2017, Joel Connelly, review of Witness Tree. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/Witness-Tree-A-witness-to-global-warming-in-11064293.php https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/04/25/what-year-with-single-tree-reveals-about-climate-change/pvmeHnPJOvyVad7oOWhOTM/story.html

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  Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak
  By Lynda V. Mapes
  Bloomsbury, 2017; 240 pages; $27.00

  Reviewed by Laurence A. Marschall

  Order from Amazon.com
  An old science is finding renewed relevance in the era of global climate change: phenology, the systematic study of seasonal events in the lives of plants and animals. Though the term itself was not coined until the mid-1800s, there are continuous records of the blooming of cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan, dating back to the eighth century. A millennium later, Gilbert White’s much-loved The Natural History of Selborne, published in 1789 and still in print, chronicled the comings and goings of willow wrens, chaffinches, hedge sparrows, woodlarks, and a host of other British birds, along with the appearances of insects and flowering plants.

  Witness Tree, an appealing memoir by environmental journalist Lynda Mapes, sits squarely in this phenological tradition. It recounts a fellowship year spent at the Harvard Forest, a 3,500-acre ecological research preserve in central Massachusetts. For those with an abiding fondness for New England farmsteads and woodlots, Mapes offers up literary comfort food, as welcome as hot cocoa on a chilly day. She walks forest paths in sunshine, moonlight, rain, and snow; clambers over mossy stone walls; listens to the sounds of birds; and spies on tad-poles in a vernal pool. She gets per-sonal with the cows in a nearby pasture, and chats with local farmers and tradesmen about how the things were different in years gone by.

  Most of all, Mapes watches and thinks about trees, for she is, by her own admission, “besotted with wood.” “Trees are time made visible,” she writes, and early in the year’s sojourn she adopts a century-old oak as the centerpiece for her rambles. It is a witness tree not only because it has seen a hundred years of seasons, but also because it bears witness to her jottings over the year. The author addresses her tree from all perspectives—taking a core sample to determine its age and growth history, lying on the ground at its base, climbing sixty feet into its crown with ropes and harnesses. And, since we live in the digital age, she even helps install a witness-tree webcam so that she and her readers can keep tabs on the venerable oak wherever they are and whenever they wish.

  Just as change was a central concern of Gilbert White, so change is a focus here. Mapes writes of how the Harvard Forest differs from the primeval wilderness that existed for centuries before colonization, and how small farms and small industries came and went. And in conversations with the environmental researchers that work there, she discovers how climate change is altering it today. Leaves come out five days earlier on average than they did twenty-five years ago; first frost has moved back by almost two months. To walk with Mapes through these pages is not only to enjoy the charm of rural New England, but also to experience the global effects of our civilization—for better and for worse—on an intimate scale.

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