Articles by Climate Solutions Fellow Syris Valentine

The old tree spoke:

Burr of blade and crash of trunk broke embraces held for centuries. My grove — seeded ere memory — found itself emptied of life by the sound and fury of saw.

Alone, I watched seasons grow erratic. Alone, I watched frost whip rathe flowers. Alone, I watched heat deepen and linger. Alone, I lost the hope to restore the grove.

Then, the humans returned. With spade in place of saw, they broke the ground again. In wounds reopened, they sowed you whose roots embrace all mine, you who taste of lands unknown.

Together, we might withstand these changes.

— a drabble by Syris Valentine

On a near cloudless August day, I arrived at a waist-high iron barrier gate in Washington’s Marckworth State Forest, accompanied by staff from the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, a Seattle-based nonprofit that conserves and restores land from the easternmost edge of the Cascade mountains to the Puget Sound — an area known as the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area. In 1900, Weyerhaeuser — the second lar... Read more