The Great Tree Migration

Coming to a Forest Near You (& on June 18)

You, like me, may be noticing a few changes in your home forests: more “greening up” earlier in the spring; more deciduous trees mixed in with the evergreens; more undergrowth beneath the tree canopy; different plant species you haven’t seen before at your latitude; wide-spread effects of new-to-the-area critters on tree bark; or other levels of noticing that you might not yet have language for—yet are sensing, seeing, and wondering.

Being back home in the boreal forest in Alaska where black spruce trees center the landscape, these changes are tangible, visible, and dramatic—certainly multi-factoral, yet most scientists agree these shifts come primarily from rising temperatures and the related impacts of climate change.

Most of us were not taught to think of trees “migrating,” yet now we’re being asked to wake up to the current science that points to their own form of movement. Basically, trees have been “on the move” for generations, though at this point may not be able to “move fast enough” to keep up with the planetary changes. Check out this snippet from an interactive article on Emergence Magazine’s website by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder & Jeremy Seifert:

And back in 2022, Emergence Magazine published a podcast by Chelsea titled They Carry Us with Them: The Great Tree Migration. It was of the pieces that startled me into “waking up” around this reality of tree survival. Take a listen at your convenience—I know when I did, I could not stop “seeing” this phenomenon everywhere, and eventually this poem came out of my living concern:

This poem is one of the fifty in my book, and as part of my process of acknowledgements in the back of the book, I tracked down that dedicated journalist Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder to let her know of the poem’s “existence” and to thank her for her journalistic inspiration. We both delighted at the connection and soon discovered we both had debut books coming out in the spring and both had launch events supported by Point Reyes Books. A new seed of connection was born through this shared devotion to forests and truth-telling.

Chelsea & I have our first chance to be in live conversation with each other—and have our new books (her essays & my poems) be in conversation with each other—and be in conversation with those of you who are able to join us—on Wednesday June 18th at 4pm AK / 5pm PT / 6pm MT / 7pm CT / 8pm ET. Registrer for free here at least an hour before the event to get the ZOOM link and join us in community conversation.

Just FYI this will be my last online “Words for Wandering” event with my devoted environmental publisher Dede Cummings & Green Writers Press before “summer break”—and my first chance to be “live” for a reading from my 12x16 cabin in eastern Alaska, where most of the poems in the 61N Latitude section in Between Latitudes were written.

All of this, long-planned, is now unfolding in a week where civic life in many communities has been particularly complex and demanding. Gathering together at a community event next week around words, nature, climate, bodies, ancestry, and the more-than-human world may not be for everyone… different people need different tools at different times. *And* it’s important to remember that in the way we gather together at these events, it is not a bypass—it is another way “in” to building capacity, interconnection, and shared humanity. You are so welcome if that resonates, and you are welcome to share with anyone else who may benefit from this type of coming together amidst all.

Lastly, I want to share a “bonus” sidenote related to The Great Tree Migration. As I wrote about in an earlier newsletter, I’d been feeling self-conscious about joining social media and “promoting a book” (still ;>) and my brilliant poet friend Nan Seymour gave me a fierce “talking to” on a precious 3-hour layover in Salt Lake City. Basically she said “these poems have work to do (aka it’s not about you) and it’s your job to get them out into the world to do that work—and sometimes if you’re lucky, the poems will come back and tell you the work they’ve done.”

I’ve had a few magical experiences with this already—surprising, mysterious, & delightful—including last week when a relative of Pete’s, who’s a devoted 4th grade teacher, posted this “random tidbit” to me on social media:

Suffice it to say this made my day (week-season-epoch!) to know that 4th graders in Cleveland Ohio were studying my poem as part of their science and ecosystem unit—thank you, Missy Russell!

May these poems keep doing their precious work in the world, and may they sometimes come back to tell me that work.

May all of our actions contribute to a better world.

Much warmth - m