Many native tree species across America are under threat from pests, diseases, extreme weather and saltwater intrusion — threats exacerbated by climate change. My guest this week, science and environmental journalist Marguerite Holloway, gained perspective on the destruction forests are facing when she learned from arborists how to climb into the canopy of trees.
418-Recognizing and Confronting the Threats Facing America’s Trees 418-Recognizing and Confronting the Threats Facing America’s Trees
Marguerite is an accomplished writer and teaches science reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. Hew new book, published this month, is “
Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America’s Imperiled Forests.” The book is part science reporting, part memoir, as she shares what she learned from tree climbing about the state of forests and about herself. She also details the existential threats that native trees are facing in a changing climate. “Take to the Trees” was selected as one of Heatmap News’s
18 Climate Books to Read in 2025 and one of Apple Books’ most anticipated spring non-fiction titles
Marguerite Holloway is a science and environmental journalist as well as the author of “Take to the Trees.”
Photo Credit: Alex Hodor-Lee
“I’ve always felt and been very, very connected to the natural world,” Marguerite says. “It was a very big part of my growing up. It was a very big part of my connection with my mother and my brother. We spent a lot of time outdoors and my mom in particular really was sort of an amateur naturalist.”
Her mother introduced her to the awareness of nature and the ability to look at and be at nature.
“I feel my best and my happiest when I’m outside,” she says.
After her mother passed, Marguerite found her mother’s tree journal — a journal Marguerite hadn’t been aware of before. “It was a big surprise,” she says.
Her mother kept that journal for about 11 years, beautifully describing encounters with trees.
“She writes about their natural history, and she’s taping down leaves, and it’s really like a field journal that a naturalist would keep,” she says. “Ever since I discovered that it has been in my mind that I wanted to do something, write something about that journal, and in particular a kind of mystery that she left me in the journal that I wanted to answer.”
Years went by. Then in 2020, Marguerite was working on a story for The New York Times on the toll climate change was taking on New England’s forests, and writing many other stories as well. A friend pointed out, “Those things are all connected.”
Sometimes it takes people who know you well to see things and make connections in your life that you haven’t made yourself, Marguerite points out.
“It all sort of came together, and it felt like it was supposed to happen,” she says.
Her mother’s journal was always sitting with her. “It was in my office, and I would look at it and I would think about it …” she recalls.
Because her writing and training have been classical in terms of science journalism, it took her some time to find an approach to writing about the journal.
“My way of connecting to it personally just took a long time to come to the surface,” she says. In fact, this new book is her first time writing in the first-person perspective.
The book is part memoir, braided together with science journalism.
She says writing this felt hard, unusual and very uncomfortable at the beginning, but by the end felt completely right.
“Take to the Trees” by Marguerite Holloway is memoir blended with environmental journalism.
Seeings What’s Happening to Plants and Trees
“Many people sort of move through the world not seeing plants and trees,” Marguerite says.
She had felt that she could see plants and trees, because of her love of the outdoors and the connection she’s always felt with nature. But there was more to see.
“I realized in reporting the stories that I was working on that I was not seeing very well at all, and arborists and foresters and researchers really showed me that the trees are in … very bad shape. They are really suffering from these extremes of weather. And the abrupt move from heat to cold, the abrupt move from wet to dry, the long droughts, the diseases and pests, that this shift in temperature and in weather patterns is making into a much bigger threat for these trees.”
“Once you start talking to these people and seeing things through their eyes as the book tries to do, you really begin to see that trees are in peril,” she adds. “They’re really in peril. … They’re so resilient and so adaptable and have been for an enormous amount of earth’s history, but we are just doing things at a speed that is making it very difficult for them to respond and adapt and catch up.”
She says the scale of the bad news is mind-blowing.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species has identified 35% of tree species as at risk of extinction, a percentage that has only grown.
“The damage is accelerating,” Marguerite says. “I think the book also very much wanted to emphasize that we have control over this and that there are lots of people who understand the complexity of forests and the resilience of forests and trees and who know how to make sure that we do a lot to keep them as resilient as possible.”
She reminds us that we have agency, and we can use that agency on the scale of helping a street tree or by going out and supporting scientists and researchers and arborists.
“There is a lot of hope because people love trees so much,” she says.
Whitebark pine is designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Photo Credit: Marguerite Holloway
A Great Dying
“A great dying is underway in forests the world over,” Marguerite writes in her book. “There are, by one reckoning, 3 trillion trees, half as many as there were at the end of the last ice age. Some 15 billion are lost every year. More than 17,500 of the estimated 58,000 tree species are threatened and heading toward extinction. In North America, between 97 and 141 of the 881 native trees are threatened and at risk of disappearing; 6 may already be extinct. These species are not all rare or obscure. Some pines and ashes are among them. Most of the global loss is driven by deforestation for agriculture, logging, and development. But pests, diseases and climate change are increasingly having profound and cumulative effects. The scale of death and disease is unimaginable in extent and speed.”
Becoming a Tree Climber
The tree climbing workshops were core to “Take to the Trees.”
“There would be no book without them,” Marguerite says.
When Marguerite was reporting on the effects of climate change in New England forests, she met twin sister arborists Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll and learned about a workshop they had been teaching for many years, the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop. Arborists, writers, artists, photographers and scientists have taken the workshop to learn how to reach the canopy of trees.
Marguerite attended the workshop at Camp Hi-Rock in Mount Washington, Massachusetts, and in her book she traces the story of how she went from not being good at climbing, to improving tremendously, to coming to experience trees in a completely different way.
She followed the workshop around the country and witnessed trainings in Colorado and North Carolina.
“It’s an incredibly transformational experience, and no matter … what you’re going to use these skills for, it seems to really change people to be up there and to be learning in this way,” she says.
The workshop changed and strengthened Marguerite in ways she perhaps never saw coming. She overcame physical weaknesses and phobias and learned to trust herself in new ways and to rely on others. She also came to terms with the tragedy of the loss of her mother and brother.
She expected that learning tree climbing would help her overcome a fear of heights and to see what is happening to trees. “All these other things happened up there that I had not expected,” she says.
She adds: “I came to understand so profoundly how confronting climate change is really in many ways also about … the aspect of confronting fear and confronting loss, because we’re losing so much.”
The tree climbing instructors fostered a sense of hope and community to face fear and loss — then to do something proactive.
Marguerite Holloway learned how to climb trees from the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop.
Photo Credit: Wenda Li
Plant Blindness and What We’re Missing
“Plant blindness” is a term that many researchers, arborists and others in the plant world repeated to Marguerite often.
“Many people — and I think myself very much at the beginning of this process — just see green,” she says. “We don’t see the individuals. We don’t see the particulars of the forest. We don’t see the species, and we don’t see sort of the nuance in that green, how maybe things don’t look so great even though they’re green. So it’s sort of like plants are just there, but we don’t really focus on them and we don’t foreground them.”
When we don’t see plants and trees clearly, we don’t readily recognize troubling signs.
David Wagner, an entomologist and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, has said, “We notice the losses. It’s the diminishment that we don’t see.”
From year to year, people don’t notice differences. But 20 years out, people may finally realize what’s been lost, like the June bugs that used to cover windshields on a road trip. I remember my family pulling over to clean the windshield. Today, it’s not an issue because of insect population decline.
Groundies
A groundie is a tree worker who assists the climbers from the ground and is helping the climbers stay safe. They help lower limbs and branches, and they pass up water and equipment.
The term “groundie” was so resonant, Marguerite says. “It seemed to capture something about the way many of us who don’t get up into trees, see trees — sort of from this very limited perspective. We’re looking up, or we’re looking at the bark around the base, but we don’t have that full sense of the tree. So groundie seemed to me just almost like this poetic word that is a technical term, but it has so much poetry to it and resonance and metaphorical power.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get all the groundies up into the canopy?
Aspen
“There are so many aspects of climate change that are hitting simultaneously, and any tree can pretty much tell any one of those stories and can probably tell all of those stories at different times,” Marguerite says.
Marguerite writes about drought in a section on aspen trees. The North American native aspen trees are bigtooth aspen (Populus grandidentata) and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides.)
“Aspen were dying off in these huge swaths, and a silviculturist and several people who do research for the Forest Service were really setting out to solve the mystery of what was happening to the aspen,” Marguerite says.
Ultimately, they figured out that the problem was drought. Drought was allowing pests to thrive that wouldn’t normally thrive, and it was hampering regeneration.
“Every forest is different, every situation is different, but there are these patterns that we’re beginning to see broadly across landscapes and across the world,” Marguerite says.
Atlantic White Cedar
Atlantic white cedar tells the story of changing hydrology, Marguerite says.
“Ghost forests” — stands of dead trees — are forming along the coastline, where saltwater is getting into the groundwater or encroaching as sea level rises, particularly in the Northeast, she says. Atlantic white cedar trees, among others, are dying.
Atlantic white cedar trees have a tiny remnant range, she points out. “When you lose any more Atlantic white cedar habitat, you’re getting closer and closer to losing Atlantic white cedar.”
I recall as a child driving up for our annual summer vacation into the Smoky Mountains and stopping at an overlook we had visited many times before. But on that occasion, the trees we were used to seeing had been devastated. It was, essentially, a ghost forest. It was traumatic, and I’ll never forget what I saw.
“Many people who have experienced that, it just sticks with them,” Marguerite tells me. “And several of the researchers in the book talk about going back to forests like you’re describing and just seeing the devastation — and it’s excruciating.”
You’re not plant blind when you get hit between the eyes with a site like that.
Ash
“The emerald ash borer is just laying waste to ash all over the country,” Marguerite says. “It moves very quickly. It is spread very, very rapidly.”
Climbing ash trees has become dangerous for arborists. “You’ve really got to be careful,” she says.
Marguerite writes in her book: “One expert described it as the most destructive and costly invasive forest insect in North America. The speed with which the beetle can kill is staggering. A seemingly healthy tree can be here one year, dead the next. More than 100 million ash have died so far, and observers anticipate that ash may become extinct in North America. And the International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed five of the 16 native ash species as critically endangered, including white, black and green ash.”
Marguerite says she hopes the book, by providing a survey of all the threats to trees that are happening simultaneously, will help people come to understand the scale of what’s happening.
Return to Camp Hi-Rock
When Marguerite returned to Camp Hi-Rock after three years, trees that had been healthy the last time she had seen them were now in trouble.
“If you’re watching closely and if you develop a relationship with a particular tree or a particular set of trees, you can start to see these changes in human-scale time. Not tree time, our time,” she says.
There are other emerging threats to trees, like beech leaf disease — which is, in fact, a nematode. As dangers mount, the federal government has been making cuts to forestry programs and personnel that have been in place for decades to protect woodlands.
Marguerite says it’s been devastating and shocking. She says that silvaculturalists, foresters, arborists and people working in labs or at the Park Service and Bureau of Land Management are the people who are trying to do right by the forests and the trees. They see the profound connection forests have to people and our well-being.
“The cuts to the Forest Service, the cuts to the Park Service, to this incredible research and vital research that is going on is very scary. It is very, very scary,” she says. “And it could have a devastating and very long-term impact at exactly the moment that we should be doing the opposite, that we should be flipping our sense of stewardship and values to just give even more support.”
When Marguerite Holloway went back to Camp Hi-Rock three years later, she saw how formerly healthy trees had declined.
Photo Credit: Roxy Siebel
Closing Message
Marguerite says if you connect with trees and plants in a way that allows you to really see them, and you care for them, you are needed more than ever. This can happen on any scale, from supporting organizations or supporting science that is funded by the federal government, doing your own caretaking, or getting up into the canopy with the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop.
Among some people, the excitement is palpable.
“There’s this group in New York City called Citizen Pruners that is run by Trees New York,” Marguerite notes. She tried to sign up to become a citizen pruner and learned that if you don’t sign up within 30 seconds of it opening, you can’t get in. “Everybody wants to be out helping trees,” she says. “There’s some enormous number of citizen pruners around New York City.”
“I get chills when I think about the fact that people want to engage like that. And I think that’s happening all over the place. And I think this book is a lot about foregrounding and backgrounding, and I think we really need to foreground all of the instances that we see of those kinds of happenings and engagement. And they really are everywhere.”
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Marguerite Holloway on recognizing and confronting the threats facing America’s trees. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
