How to Plant a Billion Trees by Nicole Walker
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.
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 *
How To Plant A Billion Trees is the very embodiment of the deep weave between the abuse of children and the abuse of the land. In a story that most resembles tree rings, in its beauty as well as its accumulated strength and power, Nicole Walker reaches for loam and duff enough to repair, sometimes herself, sometimes the Earth, sometimes our broken, denial-ridden colonizer's hearts. Along with a billion trees we need a billion of these stories. But here is one, courageous, compelling, and unapologetic. -- Pam Houston * author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country *
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9798216278870 |
| Title | How to Plant a Billion Trees |
| Author | Nicole Walker |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing Plc |
| Year published | 2026-04-30 |
| Number of pages | 224 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |