January/February 2025:

Greenwood by Michael Christie

For the new year 2025, we start our book club reading with a superb book titled, "Greenwood" by Michael Christie. This is the third year for our Words That Sustain Me bookclub as we began in March 2023. I look forward to another year of reading and sharing books with everyone.

The way that Greenwood come into my life is pretty cool. In March 2024, we read "Chain-Gang All-Stars" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Nana was the speaker at Texas Defender Service annual conference this past fall. TDS is an organization that helps in representing death row prisoners.

Our friend Kristin, who is the president of the Texas Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty, attended the TDS conference. She met Nana and told him about our book club and that we read CGAS and I also created some artwork for it. Nana was touched and this resulted in me connecting with Nana and I now correspond with him.

In our correspondence we share about life, writing and books. I recently asked Nana what he was reading? He replied that he had just read Greenwood and liked it a lot. I thought if Nana thought Greenwood was a good book, it was.

I mentioned this book to Ali my bookclub partner and she looked it up and told me that it was a story about a family whose story is told in different generations, trees and the logging industry. After hearing that, I knew I wanted to read this book. I love historical fiction and good books that teach me something.

I love trees. One of my dreams is to visit the giant Sequoias in California and be in their presence for a while. I want to spend time in the forest and be close to nature. My love for nature comes from my older brother Johnny. When I was about 12-13, and Johnny and his best friend Butch were about 21 years old, they let me go with them on a trip to San Angelo to go spear fishing.

The drive was two hours away from home, and when we got there, we parked Butch's International Scout on the side of a country road. We jumped a barbed wire fence and walked though a wooded area which to me being raised in desert like Midland, Texas with few trees, felt like a forest. The walk was maybe 15-20 minutes during which we even saw a deer run through the trees.

The stream seemed like a river to me, It was probably 20 foot wide and 12-15 foot deep. The water was crystal clear I was amazed at the source of this freshwater stream, coming out of the ground very cold and sweet tasting. We spent the day out there and while we didn't get any fish, I loved being near the stream, trees and wildlife. And today, I still love the outdoors.

The story in Greenwood is told in different time periods, 2038, 2008, 1974, 1934. In 2038, Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a story teller and am overqualified tour guide to super rich eco-tourists in one of the world's last remaining forests. In Jake's 2038, the world's forests have been destroyed by the Great Withering ultimately caused by climate change. The author's storytelling is amazing. His ability to create a future world that is experiencing an climate catastrophe scared me! I think it should scare everybody with vivid descriptions of the hellish future world will be like without trees.

A world without trees or grassland results in hellish dust storms that will act like sand blasters, scouring the paint off of homes and fences. Will get into livestock's stomachs causing them to die with mud in their bowels. Can you imagine what I will to to a human being? We know, it happened in the dust bowl during the depression area, and I'm almost afraid to read about now!

Reading about what our future world might be like touched me deeply inside. Greenwood was written in 2019, and since it was published climate change and global warming has only gotten worse. I think of the terrible wildfires in California and Canada and can see with my own eyes things are getting wore. Just last year, we had the worst wildfire ever in Texas.

I ask myself, how can our government leaders have a drill baby drill mentality that only enriches already wealthy people? How can we have individuals in power be deniers of climate change and global warming when we see the results manifesting in ecological disasters happening in our own back yard? We are destroying our planet and hastening climate catastrophe that will be our future if we do not act to change the situation today?

Greenwood is an essential climate change novel whose story resonated within me, making me consider things like the timber industry and industrial greed that continue to push us past the point of no return with regards to climate catastrophe. I believe our society would be a better place if everyone read this book and understood what is likely to happened if we do nothing.

Jake Greenwood is the first character we meet from the Greenwood family. Then the tale jumps back in time to 2008, and her father, Liam Greenwood and his story. Then 1974, to Liam's mother Willow Greenwood. Willow's history goes back to 1934 and to Harris and Everett Greenwood and a story of lies, betrayals, and half-truths that exist at the root of the Greenwood family.

Jake Greenwood's job is to escort the super rich ecoturists through the magnificent old growth trees and as she does this she puts these ancient trees age into perspective: "Many of the Cathedral's trees are over twelve hundred years old. That's older than our families, older than most of our names. Older than the current forms of our governments, even older than some of our myths and ideologies."

"Like this one," she says, patting the foot-thick bark of the island's tallest Douglas fir, a breathtaking tree that she and Knut have secretly named "God's Middle Finger." "This two-hundred-and-thirty-foot titan was already a hundred and fifty tall when Shakespeare sat down and dipped his quill to begin writing Hamlet."

Thinking about these ancient beings in this manner evokes awe within me. The worlds biggest tree is a North Californian Sequoia known as General Sherman. It is over one thousand years old and over two hundred feet tall. That's the height of a twenty-story building! That's the titan in California that I will one day visit, sit next to and meditate with.

This book made me feel closer to the trees in our forests, and care even more about the old growth trees like General Sherman wanting to make sure he will be around for another year thousand years to come.

I hope you enjoy Greenwood as much as I did and that it touches you as deeply as it did me. It is a superb book and I'm very happy and grateful our friend Nana recommended it to us! It is without doubt a book worthy to be read by the Words That Sustain Me book club!