Northshire Bookstore Event: Marguerite Holloway and Kate Kavanaugh discuss “Take to the Trees” in partnership with the Vermont Woodlands Association

On Saturday, August 23 at 6 pm author and journalist Marguerite Holloway will discuss her nonfiction book Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America’s Imperiled Forests in conversation with Kate Kavanaugh, recorded for the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast. This event is presented in partnership with the Vermont Woodlands Association. 

Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern about their future. Run by twin sister tree doctors Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, the workshop helps people—from everyday tree lovers to women arborists working in a largely male industry—develop impressive technical skills and ascend into the canopy. As Holloway tackles unfamiliar equipment and dizzying heights, she learns about the science of trees and tells the stories of charismatic species, including hemlock, aspen, Atlantic white cedar, oak, and beech. She spotlights experts who are chronicling the great dying that is underway in forests around the world as trees face simultaneous and accelerating threats from drought, heat, floods, disease, and other disruptions.

As she climbs, Holloway also comes to understand the profound significance of trees in her relationship with her late mother and brother. The book’s rousing final chapter offers something new: a grander environmental and arboreal optimism, in which the story of trees and their resilience meshes with that of people working to steward the forests of the future, and of community found among fellow tree climbers. A lyrical work of memoir and reportage, Take to the Trees sounds the alarm about rapid arboreal decline while also offering hope about how we might care for our forests and ourselves.

“Like the trees that it centers, this wonder of a book soars, oxygenates, roots, connects, and awes. It’s a paean to all things arboreal, a memoir about loss and community, and a call to engage in acts of caretaking for our trees and for each other. To do any one of these things well would have made for a good book; to do them all beautifully is a true gift.” — Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of I Contain Multitudes and Immense Worlds.

The Vermont Woodlands Association is dedicated to fostering a culture of responsible forest stewardship across the state. Through education, advocacy and collaboration, they connect landowners, forestry professionals and nature enthusiasts with the resources they need to care for Vermont’s forests. You can learn more about their mission at vermontwoodlands.org.

MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, and she lives in New York.

KATE KAVANAUGH is the host of the Mind, Body and Soil podcast and the founder of Ground Work Collective, a sustainability-based farm finding search engine. Her work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. 

For more information on this or other events, email events@northshire.com, or visit the Northshire Bookstore website at www.northshire.com.

Northshire Bookstore, originally founded in 1976, has locations in Manchester, Vermont and Saratoga Springs, NY as well as at Northshire.com. Our large but intimate general bookstores carry the largest selection of categories and genres including new & used fiction, history, cooking, arts and rare author-signed editions. We also have entire floors devoted to Children’s Books and toys, a full line of stationery, magazines, music, cards, calendars, locally-sourced foods and many fine gifts from clothing to jewelry. Open to the public daily from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM and 24/7 online with free shipping at www.northshire.com