How Forests Can Help Us Heal a Fractured World
In recent weeks, I had the chance to stand before a full room and share my passion for trees. Their quiet strength, existence across deep time, and role as living elders shape us all–though most don’t know it. What follows grew from that talk—a weaving of science and story, a call to remember what trees have always known: that we belong to the living Earth and to one another.
We are living through turbulent times. The world feels splintered, yet beneath our feet the forest still holds fast—roots touching roots, sharing, and trying to endure despite us. I believe we all need to come together around nature and stewardship and this is one way I see it happening: by walking among trees, listening, and letting them teach us how to love this place again.
You can watch the full presentation at the end of this post. May it invite you, too, to find hope in trees.
A walk among ancient foxtail pines, where wind sculpts the forest, twisted trunks gleam, and the thin subalpine air whispers ancient secrets.
Down below, the world feels louder: division, anger, disconnection, and the weight of relentless news cycles pressing like smoke. It is easy to feel small and powerless.
But the late Barry Lopez, beloved nature writer and cultural guide, offers another way. In his essay Love in a Time of Terror, he urges us to respond to hatred not with more power, but with love — fierce, rooted, enduring love for the Earth and for each other.
“ In this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
— Barry Lopez
What if trees could show us how to love in this fractured time?
What Trees Remember That We Forget
Trees measure time in rings, not headlines. Coast redwoods can live over 2,000 years, giant sequoias more than 3,000, and bristlecone pines nearly 5,000. They endure droughts, fires, storms, and return each spring with quiet determination.
In a world of instant outrage, trees remind us to slow down and listen. They hold a kind of patience we’ve nearly forgotten — and desperately need to refind.
Finding Hope in Trees
Beneath the forest floor, mycorrhizal fungi weave an underground web—sharing nutrients and sending signals from root to root. Science has only recently named what Indigenous cultures have long understood: a forest is a community.
Diversity makes that community strong. Mature, mixed forests withstand fire, disease, and climate extremes better than monocultures.
When human communities fracture, forests remind us that connection is not optional.
Trees as Common Ground in a Divided World
California holds more native tree species than any other state. From the tiny Tecate cypress clinging to the dry southern ranges to the ancient bristlecone pine enduring wind at 11,000 feet, this place is a living gallery of resilience.
These trees belong to no party, no ideology. Standing beneath them, differences blur; awe replaces argument. I’ve seen families picnicking under valley oaks, schoolchildren planting coast live oaks, and Tribes revitalizing black oaks with cultural burning.
In their shade, we remember: we belong to something larger than ourselves.
Choosing Love, Not Power
Lopez’s call echoes through the canopy: choose love, not power.
This is not a soft love — it is active and rooted. It looks like picking up litter on a trail. Planting a street tree where none has stood. Teaching a child the name of a Douglas-fir.
A Call to Belong
Start close to home. Learn your local trees—their names, their stories. Notice their buds, cones, bark, and shade.
Then widen your circle: join a tree planting day, support urban forestry, speak up for old-growth protections, and bring others with you into the forest.
My new book, California Trees, was born from this desire to belong. It is more than a field guide—it’s an invitation to meet our living neighbors, and through them, each other.
Knowing the trees is another way of knowing ourselves.
An Invocation of the Forest
Even in fractured times, the forest endures. And when we walk into it together, so might we.
Here is a full presentation from September 10th, 2025 that I created for the North Coast Chapter of the California Native Plant Society.
Thank you offering that to us!
I often turn to the image of trees that grow in improbable places, no matter what, they must grow, and live. And that image also came to me with this quote that perhaps you will enjoy, that feels like an unspoken part of your essay:
“Probably of all our emotions the one that isn’t uniquely or truly human is hope. Hope belongs to Life, and is Life defending itself.”
“Probablemente de todos nuestros sentimientos el único que no es verdaderamente nuestro es la esperanza. La esperanza le pertenece a la vida, es la vida misma defendiéndose.
-Julio Cortázar
Jessica, That is beautiful — thank you for sharing it. I love how the image of trees in impossible places becomes a metaphor for hope itself.
Cortázar’s words deepen that connection: hope as something larger than us. In those trees, in the roots cracked through concrete, in the buds pushing out after drought or frost — you see not just human hope, but life insisting on itself. Hope isn’t a luxury; it’s more like a force of nature.