How to Plant a Billion Trees
A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:30th Apr '26
£22.50 was £25.00
This title is due to be published on 30th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The author of the NY Times essay, “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life,” offers an urgent ecological message and a blueprint for emotional resilience.
When Nicole Walker was molested and had an abortion at age 11, the distance between her and the world grew until she couldn’t imagine a future place for her anywhere. In How to Plant a Billion Trees, Walker tries to understand why her whole life didn’t fall apart, as was predicted. As she pieces together her story, she finds that it was thanks in no small part to her mother, her sisters, her friends who did not let the sexual abuse to define her. In this candid portrayal of a young girl, Nicole Walker writes about how, thanks to her family, her friends, and the mountains of the Wasatch, Cascades, and San Francisco Peaks, she reknit herself into the fabric of a supportive culture.
Employing the forest as a model to understand how to reconnect her life with the world, Nicole studies the way that ecosystems anticipate, react, and support each small part of the whole. As she learns more about ecology, she discovers that in a healthy forest, even the gritty, decaying elements contribute to the health of the forest. The process of rebuilding the self into a community parallels the process of a forest’s growth. To apply that lesson to the human ecosystem, Nicole realizes that even the hard-to-stomach stories need to be told, and, with air, that grit is transformed into something alive and new.
Nicole Walker’s How to Plant a Billion Trees gives me hope. It has resonance and life, and will always be on my shelf. -- Luis Alberto Urrea * author of Good Night, Irene *
Amazingly, Walker accomplishes the bold and ambitious challenge of telling her story of childhood sexual assault and a tumultuous adolescence alongside the turbulence of drastic climate change resulting from the pillaging of our planet. She exposes how the same forces that drive exploitation and cruelty are destroying the world’s natural resources as well as our best human qualities. Bravely, she leads us through the grief and trauma of ruptured inner and outer landscapes towards resilient and sustainable new vistas and visions— and convincingly claims we can “plant a billion trees” as our resistance to destructive forces. -- Val Walker * author of The Art of Comforting, 400 Friends and No One to Call, and Healing Through Wonder *
If each of us is a forest, as Nicole Walker brilliantly contends, How to Plant a Billion Trees, exposes the myriad forces that conspire to interrupt that forest’s course and path, to spoil and undo it, to mar and to scar it. The way back to nurture, renewal and remaking is in the stories we create as counter-narratives, our willingness to imagine, and our ability to listen. How to Plant a Billion Trees inspires the confidence we all need to “stay with the trouble” of climate change or personal trauma; it’s a concatenation of radical change, radical optimism, and radical storytelling. A leading voice in the poetics of nonfiction and genre-bending prose, Nicole Walker makes lasting contributions to the life of our collective souls with every book she writes. -- Mary Cappello * author of Frost Will Come/essays from the bardo *
ISBN: 9798216278870
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages