Lauren E. Oakes's "Treekeepers"

Lauren E. Oakes is a conservation scientist and science writer. She has held various appointments at Stanford University over many years, as a researcher, a lecturer, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science. Author of In Search of the Canary Tree, she lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Oakes applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…data revealed that Aboriginal people were responsible for moving around Castanospermum australe, a flowering tree native to the eastern coast [of Australia]. After a careful treatment that removed toxins, the seeds of these “bean trees” could yield a ground meal for food. “Dreaming stories” of tracks were passed across generations to maintain knowledge of physical pathways that Aboriginal people had traversed. The researchers who discovered the species’ dispersal followed these physical pathways inland from the coast to the western ranges. The routes that had been shared through song and story revealed the intentional movement of trees along ridgelines to the various inland groves. Back then, people weren’t moving them to help the trees survive. They were moving those trees to grow them where they needed them most.

Strange as it seems, changing planting strategies because of climate change may be a modern-day extension of what people have been doing for quite some time.

It seems fitting to discover an historical example of people moving species around intentionally by page 99 of Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future. This excerpt might lead the reader to think the book is about the ways Indigenous communities have shaped and stewarded forests. Yet, the dispersal of bean trees along ancestral pathways serves as a brief example of how people have been transporting seed and planting species far from their original sources for millennia. As people now face hotter and drier climate conditions in many places across the world, planting trees ‘out front’ of climate change could help those trees endure future conditions.

In recent years, planting a tree has become a catchall way to ‘do something good for the planet.’ Despite the negativity and sense of doom-and-gloom surrounding climate change, outlets across the political spectrum have purported the same potential solution: planting trees. But to what extent can trees really save us, and how?

Treekeepers offers a critical look at how forests contribute to the fight against climate change, revealing the complex roles they can play in making the planet more habitable for life into the future. By page 99 of the story, it’s evident that a new movement to increase forest cover around the world is underway and that keeping trees is far more complicated than just planting them. But if you’re going to plant, considering what populations and species are more likely to cope with the future climate is one piece of the puzzle.

Our ‘treekeepers’ today include people caring for trees in remote forests and cities, in governments, organizations, companies and local communities. Without spoiling too much, the story leaves readers feeling like anyone can contribute, and there are also some ways we can collectively do this work better.

Visit Lauren E. Oakes's website.

The Page 99 Test: In Search of the Canary Tree.

--Marshal Zeringue