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Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future
How the path from climate change to a habitable future winds through the world’s forests
In recent years, planting a tree has become a catchall to represent “doing something good for the planet.” Many companies commit to planting a tree with every purchase. But who plants those trees and where? Will they flourish and offer the benefits that people expect? Can all the individual efforts around the world help remedy the ever-looming climate crisis?
In Treekeepers, Lauren E. Oakes takes us on a poetic and practical journey from the Scottish Highlands to the Panamanian jungle to meet the scientists, innovators, and local citizens who each offer part of the answer. Their work isn’t just about planting lots of trees, but also about understanding what it takes to grow or regrow a forest and to protect what remains. Throughout, Oakes shows the complex roles of forests in the fight against climate change, and of the people who are giving trees a chance with hope for our mutual survival.
Timely, meticulously reported, and ultimately optimistic, Treekeepers teaches us how to live with a sense of urgency in our warming world, to find beauty in the present for ourselves and our children, and to take action big or small.
In recent years, planting a tree has become a catchall to represent “doing something good for the planet.” Many companies commit to planting a tree with every purchase. But who plants those trees and where? Will they flourish and offer the benefits that people expect? Can all the individual efforts around the world help remedy the ever-looming climate crisis?
In Treekeepers, Lauren E. Oakes takes us on a poetic and practical journey from the Scottish Highlands to the Panamanian jungle to meet the scientists, innovators, and local citizens who each offer part of the answer. Their work isn’t just about planting lots of trees, but also about understanding what it takes to grow or regrow a forest and to protect what remains. Throughout, Oakes shows the complex roles of forests in the fight against climate change, and of the people who are giving trees a chance with hope for our mutual survival.
Timely, meticulously reported, and ultimately optimistic, Treekeepers teaches us how to live with a sense of urgency in our warming world, to find beauty in the present for ourselves and our children, and to take action big or small.
277 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 12, 2024
26 people are currently reading
407 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 27, 2025
This was a great overview of the efforts to protect and restore forests globally, largely as a means to sequester more carbon, but also to serve other ecological goals. The author did a great job conveying the complexity of these efforts — how to get local buy-in, whether to pursue assisted migration and other hedges against climate change, do monocultures and tree plantations “count”, how does the goal shape the approach, etc. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on urban street trees. The deep dives into specific projects around the world, taking very different approaches, were also fascinating. Very illuminating, and, I think ultimately, hopeful.
November 24, 2025
Not a big non-fiction person, but this was fairly narrative so kept my interest more than most. Plus the author came and talked to my class which was super cool!
March 1, 2025
DNF at 195 of 283 pages.
I realized I was forcing myself through every paragraph in this book, sometimes twice, because I couldn’t get myself to concentrate on it. Then I realized there was no reason I had to read it, or finish it, so I didn’t. But I am disappointed - I had such high hopes for learning about the state of the world’s forests, and planting efforts to reach 1 trillion trees, and whether that was succeeding or just a bunch of greenwashing. And that information is in this book, but the writing style, and the writer, well, I just couldn’t take it any more.
I have said this before, and it certainly applies here: as a non-fiction author, when you purposefully put yourself into your book, you run the risk of your reader not liking that… and not liking you. That definitely happened here. I get it: you know people who do this work, you have a stellar triple platinum education, you have a no-doubt charmed life in one of the most expensive places in America (no, not San Francisco, Bozeman, MT, and I feel entitled to mock, because I spent half a decade living in Montana, and listening to native Montanans lament the ruination of their state by transplants like me, and Bozeman most particularly), you’re married to a doctor and have a golden child full of wonder at nature, you’re a peerless mom, I’m sure. All of this combined just gives me the impression of a super type-A person who did this as a vanity project because saying she’s a stay at home mom isn’t good enough.
Anyway, I’m being uncharitable. But you do have to wade through all that garbage, and I don’t care. Then to counterbalance and add validity, there’s all the “I know so-and-so, and in our interview…” plus some references to academic papers to add legitimacy, presumably. But all I really wanted to know more about was information that only got addressed in one paragraph anecdotes: here are the people doing this work, here are success stories, and here are cautionary tales. Even when this is discussed, there are virtually no details, because it is literally one single paragraph about the projects in most places.
So, my irritation got the best of me, and it was not worth keeping on. I am sorry about that, because this is a topic I’d really like someone to write a GOOD book about, leaving aside all the self-congratulatory, tangential nonsense. Unfortunately, that’s not what Treekeepers is, so the search goes on.
I realized I was forcing myself through every paragraph in this book, sometimes twice, because I couldn’t get myself to concentrate on it. Then I realized there was no reason I had to read it, or finish it, so I didn’t. But I am disappointed - I had such high hopes for learning about the state of the world’s forests, and planting efforts to reach 1 trillion trees, and whether that was succeeding or just a bunch of greenwashing. And that information is in this book, but the writing style, and the writer, well, I just couldn’t take it any more.
I have said this before, and it certainly applies here: as a non-fiction author, when you purposefully put yourself into your book, you run the risk of your reader not liking that… and not liking you. That definitely happened here. I get it: you know people who do this work, you have a stellar triple platinum education, you have a no-doubt charmed life in one of the most expensive places in America (no, not San Francisco, Bozeman, MT, and I feel entitled to mock, because I spent half a decade living in Montana, and listening to native Montanans lament the ruination of their state by transplants like me, and Bozeman most particularly), you’re married to a doctor and have a golden child full of wonder at nature, you’re a peerless mom, I’m sure. All of this combined just gives me the impression of a super type-A person who did this as a vanity project because saying she’s a stay at home mom isn’t good enough.
Anyway, I’m being uncharitable. But you do have to wade through all that garbage, and I don’t care. Then to counterbalance and add validity, there’s all the “I know so-and-so, and in our interview…” plus some references to academic papers to add legitimacy, presumably. But all I really wanted to know more about was information that only got addressed in one paragraph anecdotes: here are the people doing this work, here are success stories, and here are cautionary tales. Even when this is discussed, there are virtually no details, because it is literally one single paragraph about the projects in most places.
So, my irritation got the best of me, and it was not worth keeping on. I am sorry about that, because this is a topic I’d really like someone to write a GOOD book about, leaving aside all the self-congratulatory, tangential nonsense. Unfortunately, that’s not what Treekeepers is, so the search goes on.
November 21, 2024
This is a very important read about the global effort to restore forests to help combat climate change. Oakes did exhaustive research to gather the complete picture of the ongoing work worldwide. It is very well-written and engages the reader instantly with a style that is thoughtful, elegant, sensitive and very readable. The work is a roadmap for those communities grappling with the loss of trees and eager to do something about it.
November 28, 2024
Even amidst all the past destruction, the clearing of forests, and the reshaping of the Earth’s surface, I’d like to believe that people have never truly lost that sense of awe, that wonder about and admiration for big trees. Perhaps people have always been drawn to them just for what they can tangibly offer and what we know at the time they might provide. Warmth, through fire. Transport, by canoe. Storage, with baskets made from bark. Eventually, the roofs over our heads and walls for shelter. The air we breathe. A diversity of life. And yes, the ability to suck up carbon, which most people might never have known we would need so desperately, had we not gone so far in reshaping our atmosphere.
Another study that assessed how many trees there are in the world. It estimated 3.04 trillion—about half as many as when human civilization arose.
Dense in detail about the work treekeepers are doing, it was a little hard to follow, so it didn’t quite work for me. I learned a lot. It was like a master course in forestry without the heart and soul.
“Restoration is about putting things back to the way they were,” she noted. “But do we even know what that looks like or should look like? Are we talking about putting it back before people were around? Or before industrialized society developed? Or are we trying to think about what the right types of systems are for future climate conditions?” Instead, she opts to use the phrase restoring tree cover because then it’s clear that you’re putting trees back where they were historically, but you still might not make the forest into what it was previously.
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum.
“I don’t think climate change is a product of people being intentionally bad,” Tom told me. “It’s a product of growth. If a swarm of locusts expands and eats all the plants, you don’t really blame the locusts. It will affect them in the long run. They’ll run out of plants, and their population will collapse, but it’s not because they were evil. It’s because positive feedback sometimes grows out of control and humans have been incredibly innovative, and those innovations have incrementally increased the chances of exploiting natural resources.” Now we need to course correct.
From the Latin carbo (“coal”) and fero (“to bear” or “to carry”) we get carboniferous, or “carbon-bearing.” The trees of these lost forests and a collision of many factors over millions of years gave this age its greatness. What we think of today as the green above became the coal deep below, to be discovered much later, then prized and pursued. We burned those trees—billions of them, maybe more—after they became coal. What a forest was then is not what a forest is anywhere now. Green stalks stood like colossal asparagus spears in a swampy landscape; they could reach over 100 feet in height and 6 feet in diameter at the base. These were the arborescent lycopsids, members of a group of the oldest vascular plants.
Between about 330 million and 260 million years ago, the highest rates of global organic carbon burial over the past half billion years occurred. That was due, in large part, to the accumulation and burial of peat—the rich, black and dark brown spongy material formed by partially decomposed organic matter in low-lying basins.ii For about nine million years, the bark of the lycopsids was the single greatest contributor to what became coal.
The trees didn’t all fall down for burial in one dramatic event and then (ta da!) there was coal. Instead ideal conditions came together repeatedly across time. Wet tropics fostered productive forests. There were rain and swamps and cool conditions. Glacial periods came and went, intermittently flooding and drying out the landscape. And the bark of those trees was like concrete, more resistant to decay than anything else. Bill DiMichele, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who has spent his career studying the Carboniferous, noted that the lycopsid bark was “the plastic of its day,” accumulating even when everything else was decaying away. During the wettest of times, what got buried below faced a waterlogged world and prime conditions for preservation. The configuration of the continents was also key. Lands that we know as separate today were contiguous as one massive terrestrial surface—Pangea, the megacontinent—creating opportunity for burial.
Whenever mountains uplift, basins form. So, there was this perfect intersection of climate and other factors that enabled tropical organic matter to be buried and preserved. The basins would fill up just as fast as they were subsiding. All of this happened very, very slowly in terms of human time (as opposed to geologic time). “It’s like you’re accumulating centimeters per century,” Kevin explained. “Basically, it would never look like anything at one point in time; there’s no hole to fill. It’s just the basin bottom dropping out as it’s filling at the top, so that stuff is accumulating rather than being eroded away. There are sedimentary basins in the world with ten kilometers of sediment in them, but that doesn’t mean there was ever a hole ten kilometers deep.”
We use what we can until it’s blatantly obvious that we need to make a worsening situation better. Now. Urgently now. In the time represented by that band, something dramatically changes in our human behavior, in our use and values, perhaps even in our relationship with nature. His ideas of how we deplete and then attempt to fix echoed back to other writings about environmental destruction from early in the twentieth century. Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and other Indigenous peoples have a long tradition of living sustainably with the natural world by preserving natural resources, avoiding overuse, and generally respecting the interdependence of living things. As the graph and discussion in Mather’s article suggests, every country, every place, every community has a resource extent that can vary in abundance, or “extent,” over time. In a more colonialist model, any unsustainable relationship with nature—or what most people commonly call “natural resource use”—drives depletion. Yet, perhaps in that low of the resource extent, there is a turning point where people change their actions. What was lost is still needed, but it’s not all gone forever. Recovery becomes essential.
Another study that assessed how many trees there are in the world. It estimated 3.04 trillion—about half as many as when human civilization arose.
Dense in detail about the work treekeepers are doing, it was a little hard to follow, so it didn’t quite work for me. I learned a lot. It was like a master course in forestry without the heart and soul.
“Restoration is about putting things back to the way they were,” she noted. “But do we even know what that looks like or should look like? Are we talking about putting it back before people were around? Or before industrialized society developed? Or are we trying to think about what the right types of systems are for future climate conditions?” Instead, she opts to use the phrase restoring tree cover because then it’s clear that you’re putting trees back where they were historically, but you still might not make the forest into what it was previously.
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum.
“I don’t think climate change is a product of people being intentionally bad,” Tom told me. “It’s a product of growth. If a swarm of locusts expands and eats all the plants, you don’t really blame the locusts. It will affect them in the long run. They’ll run out of plants, and their population will collapse, but it’s not because they were evil. It’s because positive feedback sometimes grows out of control and humans have been incredibly innovative, and those innovations have incrementally increased the chances of exploiting natural resources.” Now we need to course correct.
From the Latin carbo (“coal”) and fero (“to bear” or “to carry”) we get carboniferous, or “carbon-bearing.” The trees of these lost forests and a collision of many factors over millions of years gave this age its greatness. What we think of today as the green above became the coal deep below, to be discovered much later, then prized and pursued. We burned those trees—billions of them, maybe more—after they became coal. What a forest was then is not what a forest is anywhere now. Green stalks stood like colossal asparagus spears in a swampy landscape; they could reach over 100 feet in height and 6 feet in diameter at the base. These were the arborescent lycopsids, members of a group of the oldest vascular plants.
Between about 330 million and 260 million years ago, the highest rates of global organic carbon burial over the past half billion years occurred. That was due, in large part, to the accumulation and burial of peat—the rich, black and dark brown spongy material formed by partially decomposed organic matter in low-lying basins.ii For about nine million years, the bark of the lycopsids was the single greatest contributor to what became coal.
The trees didn’t all fall down for burial in one dramatic event and then (ta da!) there was coal. Instead ideal conditions came together repeatedly across time. Wet tropics fostered productive forests. There were rain and swamps and cool conditions. Glacial periods came and went, intermittently flooding and drying out the landscape. And the bark of those trees was like concrete, more resistant to decay than anything else. Bill DiMichele, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who has spent his career studying the Carboniferous, noted that the lycopsid bark was “the plastic of its day,” accumulating even when everything else was decaying away. During the wettest of times, what got buried below faced a waterlogged world and prime conditions for preservation. The configuration of the continents was also key. Lands that we know as separate today were contiguous as one massive terrestrial surface—Pangea, the megacontinent—creating opportunity for burial.
Whenever mountains uplift, basins form. So, there was this perfect intersection of climate and other factors that enabled tropical organic matter to be buried and preserved. The basins would fill up just as fast as they were subsiding. All of this happened very, very slowly in terms of human time (as opposed to geologic time). “It’s like you’re accumulating centimeters per century,” Kevin explained. “Basically, it would never look like anything at one point in time; there’s no hole to fill. It’s just the basin bottom dropping out as it’s filling at the top, so that stuff is accumulating rather than being eroded away. There are sedimentary basins in the world with ten kilometers of sediment in them, but that doesn’t mean there was ever a hole ten kilometers deep.”
We use what we can until it’s blatantly obvious that we need to make a worsening situation better. Now. Urgently now. In the time represented by that band, something dramatically changes in our human behavior, in our use and values, perhaps even in our relationship with nature. His ideas of how we deplete and then attempt to fix echoed back to other writings about environmental destruction from early in the twentieth century. Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and other Indigenous peoples have a long tradition of living sustainably with the natural world by preserving natural resources, avoiding overuse, and generally respecting the interdependence of living things. As the graph and discussion in Mather’s article suggests, every country, every place, every community has a resource extent that can vary in abundance, or “extent,” over time. In a more colonialist model, any unsustainable relationship with nature—or what most people commonly call “natural resource use”—drives depletion. Yet, perhaps in that low of the resource extent, there is a turning point where people change their actions. What was lost is still needed, but it’s not all gone forever. Recovery becomes essential.
January 8, 2025
I'm absolutely loving Treekeepers. The background on the reforestation movement and that sneak peek behind the curtain is fascinating. I'm finding it a rare glimpse of the people and passions who are changing the world, which adds a whole other dimension to science. Whenever I read a scientific paper, I imagine the story behind the data and that's what Treekeepers offers. Convincing scientists to a share a good backstory is difficult—they tend to prefer data and methodologies over narrative. Yet such forays into the personal is often what creates a connection between the public and research. Kudos to Dr. Oakes on accomplishing this so beautifully in Treekeepers and in her first book, In Search of the Canary Tree, too.
August 12, 2025
I had high hopes for this one but it was not for me. The author covered many important topics like deforestation, forest restoration, seed storage, the efforts of companies to help the environment, and carbon footprints. There were a few interesting anecdotes but mostly the writing was technical and lacking a compelling narrative arc. It may have been my timing, as I read it during the summer when my brain is not as sharp.
Also, one glaringly absent topic was factory farming, which destroys forests and accounts for a large portion of greenhouse emissions. There was one or two sentences about this but it was not explored in depth.
A worthy read for anyone who wants to read highly technical facts about the state of our forests.
Also, one glaringly absent topic was factory farming, which destroys forests and accounts for a large portion of greenhouse emissions. There was one or two sentences about this but it was not explored in depth.
A worthy read for anyone who wants to read highly technical facts about the state of our forests.
December 4, 2024
Lauren Oakes’ newest book, Treekeepers, is a phenomenal work by a new member of the women writing wild authors. So eloquently, she gifts you, in 326 pages (including 43 pages of notes and index!), a global report on the fate of our forests, supporting details at every turn from a plethora of projects and passionate people in the tree keeping trenches; as well as, sharing her own personal story as a wife and mother with a precious son looking together into the forest and into the future. You don’t want to miss this landmark work! It’s a keeper.
December 16, 2024
Overall a pretty great read. This book filled in a big gap in my knowledge about the forests and how we make it through the next couple centuries with them (and us) intact. Would recommend if you live in or near a forest interface or if you want to deepen your knowledge beyond the usual “trees=good” shorthand. Some of the science sections were a little dense but overall was glad to have them in there, skim if you want.
January 23, 2025
This book was fantastic. It gave a fairly comprehensive, high level overview of the issues facing reforestation and what angles of attack currently exist and may exist in the near future. It also delves into the drawbacks of our current system for dealing with climate change and ecosystem loss.
There is a significant amount of information in here that could be used for anyone who is particularly interested in getting involved in this field of activism.
There is a significant amount of information in here that could be used for anyone who is particularly interested in getting involved in this field of activism.
April 16, 2025
3.5 ⭐️
While I think this is an important topic and brought me some insights into the complexity of how the world can plant and introduce more trees, it was a hard one to push through.
“Instead of ignoring the degradation and leaving it for others to repair or endure its consequences, can we ever create a new normal where prioritizing and investing in nature is the standard?”
While I think this is an important topic and brought me some insights into the complexity of how the world can plant and introduce more trees, it was a hard one to push through.
“Instead of ignoring the degradation and leaving it for others to repair or endure its consequences, can we ever create a new normal where prioritizing and investing in nature is the standard?”
October 29, 2024
DNFed. I really wanted to love this but it was chaotic and just too jumbled for my little brain. Maybe I will revisit this at another time, but I need to be honest, it wasn’t for me.
Thank you to NetGalley for this book and I’m sorry that this is my honest review.
Thank you to NetGalley for this book and I’m sorry that this is my honest review.
December 5, 2024
I love how the author combines her journalistic approach with a personal one -- she incorporates stories of her young son throughout the narrative.
We need more great conservation writers like Dr. Oakes!
We need more great conservation writers like Dr. Oakes!
May 1, 2025
Wonderful writing. A little too technical for me in parts; but, overall I learned a lot more about trees than I have ever known and this new information has taken my love for trees to a new level. After all, "trees are the load-bearing walls of this house we call home."
February 19, 2025
Science communicators have the difficult responsibility of delivering accurate scientific information in an enjoyable, easy to understand way. Oakes does a great job most of the time but there were a few places where the science became more in depth than the average reader would understand.
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