'Not just an elegy to our lost elms but also a meditation on life, culture and trees.' - FRED PEARCE
For millennia,
elms shaped our landscape and our folklore;
then they started dying.
For the past century, a deadly pandemic has raged across the world, destroying all in its path and outmanoeuvring scientists' desperate attempts to halt it.
Dutch elm disease has killed hundreds of millions of trees globally and over 25 million in the UK alone, altering our landscapes forever. Few young people have seen a mature elm tree, yet they once covered great swathes of Europe and North America and their legacy lives on in our mythology.
The Lost Elms is a love letter to our vanished elms - the story of how we have nearly lost them all, and the long, slow fight back. It tells the gripping story of the scientists desperately trying to halt the disease's relentless progress, and demonstrates the deadly effect globalisation can have on the environment, the threat of climate change, the importance of biosecurity and the intricate ways in which trees are interlinked with other species. Woven throughout is a lyrical look at the elm's central place in our history, culture and folklore - the elm features heavily in Greek, Celtic, Japanese, Germanic and Scandinavian mythology; as the 'Liberty Tree' it played a symbolic role in both the American and French Revolutions; and since ancient times the elm has held associations with death and the supernatural.
However all is not lost: recent breakthroughs in ecological understanding reveal elms to be far more resilient than we ever imagined. This tree holds an important place in our history, and now might just offer hopeful lessons for how we can save other disappearing species and our environment.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Not just an elegy to our lost elms but also a meditation on life, culture and trees. -- Fred Pearce, author of Fallout: A Journey Through the Nuclear Age Unofficial poet laureate of our woodlands. -- The Scotsman Haggith's captivating book is full of personal reflections and anecdotes. It is engagingly written and has important things to say about globalisation, the threat of climate change and the value of biosecurity. -- The Independent This book defies us not to fall in love with elm trees, with the idea of elms and all that their loss and what remains represents to us. -- Kirsteen Bell * Caught by the River * Her enthusiasm is contagious. As someone who began this book with literally no idea what an elm looks like, I was inspired to download the Woodland Trust tree-ID app and resolve to pay more attention to our ligneous friends. * Guardian *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Headline Publishing Group
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-0354-1234-1 (9781035412341)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Mandy Haggith lives in a remnant of ancient rainforest in northwest Scotland and spent 20 years as a forest activist, from award-winning local campaigns in Scotland all the way to the UN. She is now an honorary research fellow and lecturer in creative writing at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She is the author of Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - The True Cost of Paper, five novels and six poetry collections, and editor of the tree poem anthology, Into the Forest.
