was ambitious in the witness tree which gets its sweeping ideas by looking at a one hundred year old oak tree in massachusetts among many other subjects forest regeneration a corn production pollen records made has plenty to say about our early spring climate change the trees streams and puddles and bird bugs and frogs attest it's not a matter of opinion or belief it is an observable fact what observable facts are they talking about this is the testimony of nature i'm a reporter at the seattle times and the environmental reporter and i set off to try to find a fresh way to tell the climate change story not about the hearings or climate marches or doing politicians i was seeking the quiet testimony of living things i wanted to see what nature showed us about how life on earth is changing because our climate is changing and the more i looked  found and the tree as it turns out is a very very articulate witness to climate change you went out and found a tree but not just any tree a very special tree this is so true i was at the harvard forest which is time massachusetts about an hour and a half west of cambridge and a lot of people even at harvard don't know that harvard has the harvard forest which was founded in one thousand nine hundred seven as a research forest and it is a department of harvard university like history or english or anything else and the harvard forest today is four thousand acres and it's a natural dative new england would and researchers scientists students artists writers come from all over the world to study everything you can imagine from landscape history to gas exchange in the tree canopy at the harvard forest and while it looks like a normal natural wood very quickly anywhere you go you realize this is a lot more than that it's an outdoor laboratory it's an outdoor classroom you'll hear a drone buzz overhead you'll see two bad p v c tubes sticking in the ground and someone will suddenly come along and take the end off and they'll shut the camera in there to see how their roots are growing or maybe you'll see what i saw which were bank security cameras on towers one hundred twenty feet in the air over the canopy and they're not looking for robbers they're looking for leaves and they're was a fellow in science journalism at mit and when i was in science journalism well you know i think it's a bit of a misnomer when we say investigative reporting or science journalism it i don't know i think it's a pretty  that really is just about a focus it's journalism like any other kind fact based interview based research based narrative but the focus is about science and in my work at the paper i cover the environment and a lot of that winds up having to do with science data knowing how to find and utilize research so for me as science journalism fellowship was a real opportunity to hook up with experts and pursue an idea my idea was looking climate change in the natural world and i found a professor at harvard university named andrew richardson who was interested in phonology which is the study of the seasons and never heard of before i needed to do what i want to up so that's one of the occurring events in nature on a seasonal timing croaking frogs migrating birds and the reason we care about phonology this is a very old practice that's probably one of our oldest biological records and it goes all the way back at least to the century in the monks of kyoto keeping track of when the cherry blossoms flowered come fast forward to england and the marshall marsh in the state keeping track of the arrival of the cuckoo and other signs of spring and the family kept that record for many many decades and in the united states of course thomas jefferson once a very famous cataloger observer of nature  keeping track of what was in blossom and which bird was coming and how the garden was going so this this practice of phonology has long been with us and it's global people always have always done it but it has a new application today because in th majority leader at that time i was going counselor and she said she hopes the state can still use the port angeles site and there was a quote from her on this and i wonder if she would say the same thing today i'm terribly conflicted on all of this i honor the tribe and their history but i still think compromise should be reached at that site we have dumped a lot of money in there and we're knocking on heaven's door with that bridge you know it's so interesting to read that quote today given the history we've just watched go by the dakota access pipeline i mean this this was a situation where you had a very different outcome from this bridge which was the canal bridge and in the end the state walked away from that site they did with the tribe asked and found another place and it care about it in a different way but there is a central attachment and i dented with the natural world that comes from spiritual teachings they regard and obviously and grossly generalizing here every culture is different each tribe each person but there is an overarching tradition of seeing animals plants trees as relatives living members and family and as teachers as a matter of fact and also providers of spirit helpers and so there's a very intimate relationship with the natural world it is not something out here we're distant it is absolutely a place in which life is and vetted and and you cannot do well you cannot be a successful person without a thriving and respectful relationship with the natural world and it isn't only about provision of food and material culture as it was it is truly a more holistic connection to the living world let's go back to the book then in curtis reviews from new york says this understanding tree simultaneously as utility and commodity as ritual and relic as beings with agency an alive the author linda mapes illustrates how they have found their waves in ways into our homes and memories our economies and language and she reveals their places in our entanglement future i never looked at a tree that way i looked at a tree as something to climb or something to you know get out of the harmful rays of the sun under or something to just enjoy never quite looked at it the way you're talking about it today i'll never look at trees the same way and my intention in focusing my story on a single tree was to let it organize a very rich exploration of a place and hundred years sweep of history over which time our relationship with nature changes quite a felled all around him as farmers were clearing the land and he complained about that he would say thank god they can't cut down the clouds and he lamented the loss of the nobler animals by which he meant the larger animals the fair that year moose in his day the biggest animal in the woods was a muskrat nobody had seen a deer in a generation to me to tell the story of the transformation of the new england landscape landscape a six state area cannot be overstated since the time of the road today we are seeing a fantastic unintentional rewilding of a vast sweep of country and with the return of trees and the return of the animals those animals through exist we can't it is all about how i mean the thing that was so revealing and inspiring to me in getting to know my tree getting to know this forest was to realize that this is possible look at and this getting rid of this dam is a multi species revival of the entire watershed three quarters of which is in the olympic national park taking down the two dams reopened seventy miles of some of the best spawning habitat for salmon the largest ever anywhere the three hundred twenty five peninsula what's happened up this is spectacular anyone who hasn't been there should go it is a transformation on a watershed scale first of all the fish are moving back we're seeing fish all the way up into the highest reaches the watershed for the first time in a century not only that but because the fish are back the birds are back people who have known the lower elwha since they were kids say they have never seen so many eagles in the lower river and that's because they're feasting the you look on the candle fish these wonderful oily forage fish that are back in the river now in the wintertime not only that but the birds dippers those magical aquatic songs birds unique to the olympic peninsula they i'll say this i think they're wrong and the reason i think that's wrong is because we need nature this is actually isn't optional you know this idea that if global warming happens in the planet cooks somehow will be magically ok i got news for you look the loves of physics apply universally and this is about physics pure and simple you add more c o two gas to the atmosphere guess what it's going to get warmer just because of the properties of c o two in the atmosphere and how it behaves and we now have the highest levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and eight hundred thousand years no human has ever breathed this atmosphere so no one should be surprised that we have for the mapes skillfully employs her oak as a human scale the entry point for probing larger questions i got to ask you this you start off your book by talking about your tree how did this mighty one hundred year old become this was an intimate exploration i climbed it i visited it in all seasons all times of day zero nights that i if i couldn't sleep i'd go out there and i'd land of the tree and just think watch the stars between the moving  watch the way the moonlight came between the trunks of the tree in the forest i got to know the trees so well that i would watch the rain pour off of its boughs and rainstorms and just let it tickle my face i would watch these insects on their urging aarons going up the bark with a little tiny him lens so i could really see their little tiny insect faces i would lie under the tree and just watch to see who would come along a chipmunk maybe some very not or perhaps a swallowtail butterfly it was exquisite you have to remember i'm a daily newspaper reporter so my daily life doesn't look a lot like that to have time to do this nothing that is everything that makes life worth living this is about one of those nights when i couldn't sleep and the moon was full so i just put on my slippers and in my night gown walked up to the tree here's what i saw more than a century stood here in the big oak thought of it shut down now for the night a solar powered miracle at rest during the reign of the moon could i sense the big oak and the lives all around breathing just like me what if the trees was visible diffusing into the night sky in a soft golden cloud perhaps then the interconnectedness of our lives easy to forget would be more visible our shared living breath and connection to this earth more apparent i had never realized the trees have daily schedules as surely as we do with activities particular to the hour and resting cycles that correspond to day and night gra paper a day in the life of a tree looks like a bell shaped curve from a quiescent dawn to its height of activity at noon winding down to its repose at sunset i lay under the tree to look up into it crown the leaves shut tight for the night like a house waiting for morning you asked in the book this question surrounded by trees in our lives what do we really know about what they're doing all day and as i asked that question i also want to take you back to your daily life which is not as mystical is that your daily life was spent in part at the dakota access pipeline and then you intimacy to get to know people places i'm a how does it know person how does it work person a how do i get to know them person and you know with the tree that was my approach i wanted to get to know it very deeply its function all the way to literally to the cellular level at the dakota access pipeline you know similarly my job there was to be embedded with the protesters and water protectors as they call themselves and deeply understand what they were going through what they were trying to make happen what this fight meant to them win or lose and similarly with the actually much larger tar sands pipeline not only proposed but approved right across the border here tkinter morgan's project to the transmission pipeline expansion that was really interesting to me because in canada it's a little bit different i mean the first nations there have ritual veto power over these projects and while some of the first nature have signed on as they've signed some kind of cooperative agreements i haven't actually read them so i don't know exactly what they say of the first nations tribes so a tooth right there outside of metro vancouver saying they'll lie down in front of the bulldozers they'll die before the let this pipeline looks like in rural north dakota i can't wait to see what it looks like in metro vancouver i mean there are already training camps underway for a direct citizen action in i don't know what's going to happen but it's not going to access pipeline in the protest and all the things that were going on and you know maybe it was bad of me to to turn out but i didn't even follow it what are they protecting you said in their water protectors are they protecting our environment and who's the bad guy here well this brutalized deliberately saw us because we wanted what they had from the black hills to all the rest of what we wanted to run the railroad through their territory and you know this history it's not a history a lot of us were taught in school and indian people were brutalized murdered i mean it's just was war it seems it's the right word and i think maybe we thought there were just a few of those you know he was there to be an american politician and a canadian politician come along and that we are damaging the ozone every single day why is that not a focus for me that it seems to me that to be completely commonsense i couldn't agree more i absolutely couldn't agree more and i was very aware in the writing of delight i wanted to open my eyes to the beauty of the natural world and its fragility really that what we see being disrupted are these delicate relationships of seasonal timing nothing in nature there randomly it is there when it is there for a reason the pollinator in the flower the insect in the bird they are there in a symphony of timing that matters and if those start to separate suddenly the bird on average spring is coming earlier fall is coming later and winter is being squeezed on both and everything in the woods reflected these changes from the level of water in the vernal pools and springs to when the black flies were fighting the ground frozen or leaves budding out or finally coming off the trees it wasn't a matter of conjecture in our political argument the discussions of who does and doesn't believe in climate change in editorial pages news reports and congressional debates framed this all wrong climate change the trees streams and puddles and birds bugs and frogs the test is not a matter of opinion or belief it's an observable fact leaves don't know why frost isn't running for office frogs don't fundraise pollinators don't put out press releases what o'keefe my collaborator in this project had compiled while taking all those walks in the woods was the testimony of an unimpeachable witness the natural world including the big here's what you're what i'm hearing you say i'm hearing you say look you don't need to read anything else are about it you just need to go and look for yourself and open up your eyes and you'll see that it's happening and that's why there was an article that you wrote and it was about i was going into the puget sound and it was kind of like but nobody saying anything and it's i'm wondering if you can't see it does that mean it's not there i think that's a really  powerful point people are very in the moment animals and with this terrible pollution in puget sound after the flooding of the westpoint treatment plant here's the thing you couldn't see it you i mean it was going out an emergency out fall in thirty five feet of water two hundred feet off shore a lot of it was going out at night in the wintertime there's a lot of very fast moving water and it's the sewage is very very diluted with rainwater and storm water so it's not like there was things on the beaches or floating or you know there was some transcendant spikes and bacteria that sort of thing water quality measuring tells us that those were some of the emergency moments you know there were three emergency bypasses in which the just totally untreated for also which spilled into the future sound about three hundred million gallons that's a lot right but then there was an ongoing impact every day amounting to hundreds of tons of solids going out through the larger deeper further away outfall disinfected but not treated in the way that they normally would be in fact normally they would not be dumped there they'd be going through secondary treatment going into digesters and being trucked away after being greatly sanitized in this case they're going into the sound they were going into the sound every single day for more than a month and they're still going into the sound it's things not fixed yet but tree culture i think look i mean i was so speired by the genius of this tree here it is for under two years in the same spot still productive still thriving still growing contributing to the community around it which by the way is a comp