Appeared in Northern Woodlands magazine, December 2019

Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology, by Stephanie Kaza; illustrations by Davis Te Selle. Shambhala, 2019.

George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), writer, diplomat, linguist, and one of the progenitors of American environmentalism, described himself as “forest born,” in Woodstock, Vermont, where “the bubbling brook, the trees, the flowers, the wild animals were to me persons, not things.”
A view that the natural, material world is animate not inert, which is sacrosanct in many indigenous cultures, has long been viewed as heresy by conventional Euro-American theologians and scientists. But in our time, thousands of researchers are investigating complex interrelationships among humans and other-than-human “beings.”
By 1993, when Stephanie Kaza first published a collection of essays entitled The Attendant Heart: Conversations with Trees, ideas about the sentience of animals and plants had moved from the mystical hinterlands to be seen as worthy of study by biologists and botanists. In recent years, German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees has been an international bestseller, and David George Haskell’s The Unseeen Forest has been has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Still, even in a magazine such as Northern Woodlands, devoted to exploring all kinds of experiences in forests, the assertion that we converse with trees may strike some readers as fanciful.
Yet probably every reader of this review, in childhood and later, has had moments of what Kaza calls intimacy with specific trees and with communities of trees, including responses that could readily be called love.
Kaza doesn’t flinch from a skeptical response, and the new edition of her book repositions her earlier subtitle as the main title now: Conversations with Trees.
Having been a student at the Unitarian Universalist seminary Starr King School, Kaza trained in meditation at the Green Gulch Zen Center then studied with Thich Nhat Hanh and others. She also earned a PhD in biology and worked for twenty-four years as a professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont and co-founded UVM’s Environmental Council.
The manifold currents in Stephanie Kaza’s sensibility—as ecologist and Buddhist, teacher and wanderer, activist and contemplative—sometimes chafe but often combine. She acknowledges there can be tension in her efforts to find equilibrium with different species of intelligence. After describing a midsummer meadow “flamboyant with wildflowers,” she muses, “One part of my mind wants to identify each of these delightful beings scientifically by name; another wants only to gaze at their exquisite beauty. Two approaches to the marvelous complexity before me, two ways of rejoicing in form.”
She brings botanical, reverential, pedagogical, ethical, and lyrical responses to bear on her book’s premise, which she describes as “mutually respectful relations with trees,” and a “growing sense of moral obligation to forests and woodlands.” And along with a scientist’s painstaking inquiry, she embraces the Zen meditation known as shikantaza—just sitting—to spend time in silence in the company of trees.
While Kaza lived for many years in Vermont, the trees that are the focus of her essays are mainly in central California and the Sierra Nevada, along with Washington and Oregon. “The central coast trees are my backyard trees, loved through all the seasons as I walked the roads and trails of Santa Cruz, Mount Tamalpais, Skyline Ridge, Muir Beach, and Pepperwood Reserve.”
She writes about sycamores, alders, Douglas and red firs, redwoods, Monterey pines, bigleaf maples, pepperwood bays, manzanitas, madrones, sequoias, tan oaks, and a gingko. She also relates encounters while doing field research in the tropical forests of Costa Rica and Thailand and in the old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.
Sometimes Kaza’s prose seems fulsome. She frequently uses present-tense narration, which can seem impressionistic and transient, more like a personal journal than a fully formed essay. Another quibble is the way Kaza sometimes attributes speech to trees: “The redwoods that live in my memory are saying, Come, come be with us today, touch us, sit with us, listen to us, stay for a while, let’s enjoy each other.”
Research documents that trees communicate in a multiplicity of ways, but attributing human language to trees diminishes their many essential distinctions instead of amplifying the intricacy and wondrous strangeness of their ways, so different from ours.
At one point Kaza is in the woods with a pair of children. She points out to them that smaller trees are growing in a circle where a giant redwood had formerly grown. “When it died long ago, it left a ring of new trees that sprouted around the base.” Then she explains that “A baby tree living off a big tree can survive much better than one grown from a seed. . . . Seeds have to find their own water, while a stump sprout can draw water from the parent’s roots.” Her teaching is exciting and precise, thrilling in the details, yet the passage ends abruptly, as she says, “But that’s enough biology for now. The children need a chance to talk directly with these trees.”
That’s a rhetorical turn, but why make adversaries of analysis and empathy? The science she suddenly set aside hadn’t sounded disembodied or academic, and the scene was dramatically grounded, offering what Kaza elsewhere calls the “adrenaline charge” that comes with learning.
And often in Conversations with Trees the meditating scientist does enter into a whole-hearted and mentally engaged concentration. Her extended rumination on a solitary bay laurel or “pepperwood” tree that may be eight hundred or a thousand years old is especially involving, as the ecologist in Kaza comes to the fore, reflecting on the eras of storms, fires, clearances for vineyards, devastation of the grapes by aphids, then an onslaught of cattle and sheep ranches. All this the tree has withstood to be present in a moment she’s witnessing: “the full canopy stretches at least one hundred twenty feet across. Six large trunks grow out of a single bole, which is itself twenty-six feet in circumference, or the equivalent of ten eight-year-olds touching hands in a circle.”
Contemplation of a woodpile yields another of the book’s strongest pieces. Here Kaza wrestles with our reliance upon wood for so many products. She describes the contradictions she feels, harvesting firewood by chain saw. Personal reflection ramifies into speculations about the ways fear can be seen in the Europeans’ leveling of forests, superimposing orderly row crops on “overgrown” wooded lands.
For the new edition of Conversations with Trees, illustrations have been added, Davis Te Selle’s powerfully evocative lithographs, which deliver a visual and visceral counterpoint to Kaza’s prose.
The reissue of Stephanie Kaza’s book at this time is urgently right.
We will live, in whatever ways we survive, not just in proximity to trees but as their companions in existence. The ability of forests to absorb proliferating carbon and replenish the planet’s oxygen will be crucial to successes we achieve, locally and internationally, in contending with disruptions in global climate. These challenges require mutual caretaking.
On July 29, 2019, Ethiopians planted 353,633,660 tree seedlings in twelve hours. It’s not difficult to believe that many of those planters conversed with their trees as they placed them in the ground, wishing them health and long life.

Originally published in 1993 by The Attentive Heart, these essays by Stephanie Kaza, illustrated by wonderful line drawings by Davis Te Selle are just as relevant today as they were 25 years ago. And their message is just as strongly needed - if we take care of the needs of the trees, the people will live on.

Kaza moves me to tears in places. She brings into focus the wonder of these living, breathing plants that outlive us in some cases by centuries, requiring only water, nutrients, and carbon dioxide and a place in the sun. And we are killing them off, wholesale. To make toilet paper. And plant palm oil fields. What are we thinking?

I received a free electronic copy of this collection of essays from Netgalley, Stephanie Kaza, Shambhala Publications, Inc. Thank you for sharing your hard work with me. I have read and reviewed this publication of my own volition. This review reflects my honest opinion.

This was an interesting and very unique read. The idea of a whole book talking about the importance of trees spiritually might seem like a weird choice but it does have some very cool points that are made.

I've come away from the reading of this book feeling thankful to the author for sharing the experiences of just sitting with trees. As was pointed out, this is an opportune time while more of us have become keenly aware of the environmental devastation we have brought to the earth. More than a wake-up call, I like to call this reverent activism. When we think of activism, we recall images of angry people demonstrating, mainly because these are the images broadcast to us by the media. Conversations With Trees, invites us to approach activism with understanding and compassion, in a more reverent way.

I'm a tree gal.

I love trees. That said, Stephanie Kaza, she really, really, really loves trees.

And that works for me. Her prose is soothing and enchanted. I enjoy her writing, how she conveys to the reader the energy she shares with the alders, or how the porous leaves of sycamores call out to her soul.

This is not a book for everyone and to discredit it simply because you have never been anxious for the first bloom of a golden gingko would be unfair to the author and her beautiful writing.

If you share even a bit of love for woody plants, I say go into this with an open mind and you might be pleasantly surprised. The illustrations alone are worth a skim.

Oh my goodness, this book. First, I absolutely devoured this book. I stayed up way past my bedtime, burnt our dinner (#noreally) and was completely distracted for 2 days, as I couldn't seem to put the book down or get it out of my head. It spoke to me in ways that I wasn't expecting, and didn't know that I needed. If I could hug the author breathless, I would do so in a heartbeat. Conversations with Trees was healing for me on a soul-level, and I absolutely must get a physical copy of this book, just to be able to hold it in my hands. A definite recommend!!

An interesting collection of essays about trees. The author is a Buddhist and an environmentalist, an her love of nature shows through here quite well. An easy book to pick up and put down, as it didn't grab me as strongly as many other reviewers seem to do. Would recommend.

I blew thru this book because I really enjoyed it. The author is deeply in love with trees and it shines thru brightly in each page. These are timeless essays that are show lovely variety, intelligence, and craft. You'll learn new things about trees and expand your appreciation, regardless of mindset or knowledge on the topic. Like the author, I've (on occasion) spoken to trees. This book is pretty unique and that is what helps provide value. Highly recommended.

I'm very grateful for the advanced copy for review!