How to Plant a Billion Trees: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature

In recent years, environmental groups have proposed planting a billion trees to avert the climate crisis. That number of trees would make a dent in the carbon dioxide refracting sunlight through our atmosphere, but not enough to stop rising temperatures. Yet such a project meets the absurdity of climate change with hope that the trauma we've done to the planet can be healed. By weaving together personal and environmental traumas, How to Plant a Billion Trees shows how vulnerable people, communities, and ecosystems react to trauma by providing workable and even sustainable recoveries.

My babysitter raped me when I was 11 years old. Then I had an abortion. In How to Plant a Billion Trees, I consider the damaged ecosystem of my body, my family, my town, and our earth. As an adult, I've struggled to rebuild community, after a childhood of displacement in elementary school and church. How did my unhealthy childhood ecosystem perpetuate further disease? And how did that same childhood teach me about developing community? Just as trees communicate through the ecosystems they've built, I explore my ecosystem to understand how to build community and belonging, from looking for a gifted class to accepting my own mother. Yet climate change, which affects all ecosystems, threatens to make each of us insecure misfits, even the trees, who once felt like never leaving home.