Summary: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Lynda Mapes, author of Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak, published in April by Bloomsbury. Lynda has been a reporter with the Seattle Times for nearly 20 years, covering Northwest tribes, nature and the environment. Her previous works include Washington, the Spirit of the Land, Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam and The Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village. Lynda first encountered the Harvard Forest as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She then accepted the Bullard Fellowship in 2014 that enabled her to live at Harvard Forest to continue her work there, which ended up giving us this wonderful book. Witness Tree. So the tale of one year in a small forest with one run of the mill (NPI) 100 year old red oak. What can one learn from that? Well, a lot more than I thought I would. I learned about the cocktail of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide that starts the engine of photosynthesis and not only keeps a red oak alive and thriving, but sustains the very environment in which we live our lives, so far comfortably. I learned about the story of carbon itself and its inextricable tie with our own spiral toward drastic climate change. I learned about the interdisciplinary way that one can approach a tree, as an equal and in so doing learn as much about yourself as you do about the tree. Some folks say that looking too closely, you can’t see the forest for the trees. Linda belies that old saw and sees both the tree, intimately and up close and sees not only the forest but also our world and what is happening to it.
