To Hear The Trees Speak

Introduction: The call of the baobab

'No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.'?

Boris Pasternak

It is on a June morning in New York City that the baobab trees speak to me. I haven't been expecting this call. But we have some history, these trees and me. I've had an image of a baobab fixed in my mind for a long time, since I was 17.

I was in Malawi for a year, teaching English. At weekends, I occasionally went on a road trip with two other teachers. It was on such a trip that we came across a baobab tree by the side of a dried-up river. An elderly woman stood on a footbridge, just standing, looking at the memory of the river. Perhaps she was remembering when water flowed.

The baobab tree is revered as the Tree of Life in many African countries. It is at the heart of villages, a source of nutritious food and precious shade. Maybe this image lodged in my mind because of the juxtaposition between this grand tree, with its swollen trunk and spreading branches, the emptiness of the riverbed, and the slight figure of the woman, contemplating what had gone and what was to come. The baobab stores water in its trunk so it can survive times of drought. This was a time when the rains had not come. Out of shot, in the picture in my mind, under the rainless, cloudless Malawian sky, are white hessian sacks of grain stamped 'USAID', piled up outside a shed ready for distribution.

On that June morning in New York City, 27 years later, I leave my apartment on the 24th floor of a building in lower Manhattan, ride down in a mirrored elevator to the Art Deco lobby and say hello to the doorman on the way out. I descend into the subway and hustle my way into a crowded carriage. As I hang on to a pole, swaying to keep my balance and jostled by the bodies of strangers, I wonder at my life lived so much of the time either high in the sky or underground. I navigate the maze of exits at 42nd Street Station, which I now do on autopilot, and walk through the forest of high-sided billboards in Times Square. Good Morning America is being broadcast across the country, shots from the shiny sunny studio filling a giant screen. Theatre signs compete for the attention of tourists who have not yet started to fill the streets. The Naked Cowboy is not yet performing his songs. Office workers like me are making our way to desks high up, behind glass walls. I take a deep breath, inhaling the mix of car exhaust, weary humanity and a sour undernote of last night's hot dogs and onions. Giant yellow m&ms dance on a tall billboard, looking down at me with wide grins. I look up and smile at the topsy-turvy nature of this world. I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland, surrounded by cavorting confectionery. Alongside me at street level, a few skinny trees stretch their limbs skywards, their body clocks no doubt confused by the 24-hour barrage of lights on Broadway.

I enter the office through the clunk of the revolving doors, which keep the ice-cold of the air-conditioning in during the summer, and the ice-cold of the New York winds out during the winter. I click my way through the security turnstile and wait for the elevator and its stopping-at-all-floors-particularly-when-you-are-running-late-for-a-9am-call journey.

I am first into the alcove of an office that I share with two colleagues, with a straight shot view back down to Times Square. I open up my emails. A headline in a newsletter jumps out at me.

'Giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years.'1

I read the story beneath the headline. Researchers are attributing the sudden collapse of the baobabs to climate change. I feel a gripping in my heart and grief for these baobabs that are dying. I think of their presence at the centre of village life and the impact on the people who live with them. If these 1,000-year-old trees that have lived through many cycles of drought are dying because of climate change, then what does this tell us about the severity of the crisis that we are facing?

I think about those trees all day, as I sit through calls and put together PowerPoint presentations. My work is as a sustainability consultant. My clients are big corporations and I talk about climate change with them every day as I help them to set goals to reduce their carbon emissions or report their progress against their sustainability targets. But climate change is too often an abstract concept, lines on a graph showing rising concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere and a corresponding rise in global temperatures. I am frustrated that change is not happening fast enough, and that it sometimes feels like tinkering around the edges.

I know the urgency of the story told by the rising carbon numbers. But the baobabs are an embodiment of the effects of climate change that are happening right now. Who is listening to the message that those trees are sending us? Trees have grown on this earth for 300 million years, long, long before we arrived on the scene. They created the conditions for us to come into being by transforming the atmosphere into one that would support human life. And now we are changing that atmosphere with our carbon emissions, with consequences for all of us. What are we doing? What am I doing? What is my place in this changing world?

I go home that evening to my apartment on Pine Street, the street name a nod to the past. This area of lower Manhattan had once been a forest, and then farmland, before it had become a forest of skyscrapers. I take a fresh notebook from a shelf. I write on the first page. 'A history of the future of the world in 12 trees. Or maybe 10. Baobab, eucalyptus, oak, redwood, birch.' What could the trees have to teach us about how to live - before it is too late?

That I am having such a deep emotional response also catches me by surprise. It has been so long since I have experienced such a current of feeling. I have been in an emotional drought. My father had died suddenly eight years before, and my marriage had ended abruptly three years ago. I have closed off my heart to protect myself against another shock.

At the age of 44, I am separated and don't have children. This hadn't been how I had envisaged this stage of my life. I carry the grief of not having children, and grief for the family life that might have been. Life just didn't work out that way. I am childless by circumstance, or childless not by choice. I didn't meet the right person at the right time. Friends suggested having a child on my own but that was not something that I wanted, having grown up in a home where my father was often absent, even before my parents divorced. I married at the age of 39, still hoping for children. But that wasn't to be. I carry the grief, but I have not sat with it, held it. I have shied away from it. It is not a grief that is acknowledged in society, and I have not faced it. Instead, I have numbed my heart. Yet this story of the baobabs has stirred emotion deep inside me.

On my list of trees to visit, the baobabs are first. The tree of life, which is now dying.

Then there is the eucalyptus. I breathe in the word. The name itself opens my lungs. And brings back memories, from the eucalyptus trees in Malawi to when I finally met them many years later on their home territory in Australia.

The oak. The iconic tree of England. A feature of the landscape in which I had grown up.

The giant sequoia. These massive, ancient beings, natives of California, where my father was from. I had visited them in their homeland when I had gone to visit my father there when I was a teenager. And there had even been one in the garden of my childhood home in Derbyshire.

The silver birch. The tree of Finland. The backdrop to childhood summers, and long days spent by the lake, and of countless walks since then through the woods near my mother's house.

Each of the species is already being affected by climate change. Not necessarily in such a dramatic way as the baobab, but the impacts are happening.

My mind is made up. This is a now-or-never moment. I am so taken aback by the directness of the call to listen to the trees and the stories they have to tell, I feel I have no choice but to say yes. It is as if the baobabs had spoken to me. I have to make this journey to the trees. Who knows if I will get another invitation? The trees aren't going to ask me twice.

Three days before I heard the call of the baobabs, I'd been surrounded by tall, dense trees, old-growth hemlocks, covering the steep sides of the Catskill Mountains. I was at Menla, the cultural centre of Tibet House and the Dalai Lama. I was attending a deep ecology weekend course, the simplified meaning of this being how we are all interconnected, human and non-human beings. I had signed up wanting to understand more about the theory and have the opportunity to be in this place, among these trees and mountains, instead of in the urban forest.

On a break, in the afternoon of the second day, I was sitting by a large pond in the centre of the grounds, looking out across the water to the mountainsides and forest. A tall, elegant, young Black man drifted down the hill to the water's edge. He pulled two wooden flutes from his bag.

'Do you mind if I play?' he asked.

'No, of course not.'

He turned...