BookBrowse Reviews The Treeline by Ben Rawlence

BookBrowse:

Part scientific treatise and part travelogue, The Treeline is a beautiful rumination on the impact of climate change on Arctic forests.

The relationship between humans and trees goes back as far as our earliest evolutionary developments. Our primate ancestors were tree-dwellers. Forests have represented both safety and menace throughout our history, as shown in fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel that we learn as small children. In The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, Ben Rawlence notes, "apart from the Inuit with their source of energy from the blubber of whales and seals, humans have never managed for long without a source of wood."

It's this interconnectedness, even dependence, between humans and trees that Rawlence thoughtfully explores in the book, traveling across the boreal forest at the edge of the Arctic to share what climate change looks like right now, and what it may be in the future.

With a reporter's eye for detail and a novelist's sense for storytelling, Rawlence traverses Scotland, Norway, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. He visits the forests and tundras of the far north and the sparse settlements within, centering his chapters on one species of tree that is integral to each place. Every species provides a background and structure to the narrative, serving as a springboard to discuss the significance of ecological connections, and how nothing in any ecosystem stands alone, including humans.

Rawlence begins with pines in Scotland and the effects of anthropogenic (human-led) land-use changes, notably the introduction of certain deer species and the damage they cause to forests by eating the vegetation and young trees. He meets a land manager trying to balance deer and tree populations who is caught between competing desires from different groups of humans — some want to maintain deer populations and others want to return the landscape to forested wilderness.

People's relationships with trees and animals are on full display in northern Norway, where warming temperatures are changing the reindeer herding that is vital to the indigenous Sámi. In this region, the problem isn't too few trees but rather an overabundance of them creating chaos. Warmer temperatures are causing the treeline to expand into what was the open tundra where the reindeer grazed. Rawlence captures the cognitive dissonance happening as Sámi see the ecosystem changing firsthand, yet some insist that climate change isn't real. The author isn't judgmental or preachy — he maintains empathy with his subjects and dispassionately lets those on the front lines of climate change speak for themselves.

These layers of complexity are explored further in Siberia, where the permafrost — soil just under the surface of the Earth that stays frozen all year long — and the seminal larch trees are changing in increasingly radical ways. The permafrost is melting and releasing greenhouse gases that have been trapped for millennia, which will increase global warming as those gases trap more heat, warming more permafrost. This is a devastating feedback loop that scientists are only now beginning to understand. Rawlence travels to the farthest reaches of northern Siberia, staying with Indigenous families and various Russian scientists along the way. We meet residents who think climate change is a hoax and that oil and gas are the route to prosperity, as well as experts developing models and leading data collection that paint ever-more-dire pictures.

The Faustian bargain of hydrocarbon wealth and its environmental consequences also dominates the chapter on Alaska, while in Canada Rawlence travels with Indigenous groups who are aiming to establish restorative relationships with the natural world, as opposed to extractive ones. Here, Rawlence veers a little too closely to "noble Indian" stereotypes, but it's difficult to doubt his commitment to learning from his subjects and intimately experiencing the forest ecosystems he seeks to describe.

He ends his travels in Greenland, where attempts to plant trees are accelerating because the natural re-foresting of the island since the last ice age is moving at decidedly slower scales than humans want. In this chapter, as in others, Rawlence skillfully lays out potential anthropogenic changes — planting more trees in some places, reintroducing grazing animals to reduce trees in others — without hailing these interventions as surefire ways out of the climate crisis. He describes how humans modified ecosystems in the distant past and explains the challenges and potential positive effects of doing so again (see Beyond the Book).

With this nuanced approach and beautifully descriptive language, The Treeline is a moving meditation on what climate change truly means for ecosystems and their human inhabitants in a rapidly evolving, ecologically unique part of the world. Rawlence brings the reader directly to the stunning vistas he finds in the boreal forest, and shares the visceral, breathtaking beauty of glaciers and tundras. A river is described as "easing itself into the sultry sea with a minimum of effort."

He addresses the dislocations and disasters that will ensue, and indeed already have begun, but it isn't with hopeless fatalism. Instead, he ends with a call to action for humans to adapt and survive. Through scientific lessons, anthropological accounts and lyrical language, The Treeline is a valuable addition to the growing canon of climate change writing.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2022, and has been updated for the January 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.