I just finished reading Ben Rawlence’s 2022 book The Treeline . It is a book that made me think. It made me cry. It made me despair. It also gave me hope.
I was gripped by this honest and unflinching exploration on the moving treeline with climate change and what it will mean for humanity. Beautifully written and rigorously reported, Rawlence invited me on a journey of all major treelines over the globe from Scotland, Norway and Russia, to Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Throughout his description of a warming world and a vanishing way of life, Rawlence meditates on the many repercussions on how humans live.
Rawlence aptly describes the forests of the world as the ‘heartbeat of the planet,’ the cycles of breathing and the pulses of life from the spike of oxygen in the spring when trees put out their leaves to the peaks and troughs over day and night that regulate plant photosynthesis and respiration. The peaks and troughs are getting shallower, he writes. With more carbon dioxide in the air the trees work less; they inhale less and exhale less oxygen.