Today we are facing an environmental crisis linked directly to our lifestyle choices. Decades ago, many youthful baby-boomers saw it coming, and struck out on their own to live in better balance with nature. Woman Who Speaks Tree traces the timely tale of how trees guided Linda Tatelbaum and her husband to Maine in 1977. They still live on the solar homestead they built, where they grow their own food. Woman Who Speaks Tree reveals where the wisdom of trees can lead us. With humor, love, magic, fury, her voice advocates for this planet earth and those who defend it. Here is a book by a woman who really does speak Tree, also Pear and Kale and Kankamangus Highway. Linda Tatelbaum is a thoughtful, funny, appealing writer who can build a house trebly once in a vision, once in fact, once in words who can think backwards and forwards on a trip that pivots on a conversation with Wendell Berry (he says, go home). Our trip, as it turns out, a mindblower in a Tatelbaum world, a magical place in which marriage does not mean knowing, in which giant corporations don t set the stakes, in which parents teach their final lessons, in which heaven does not mean perfection, but merely bliss. Every paragraph is a poem here, every essay an epic, every tree a prophet. Find a hammock under hemlocks or a seat by a fire of sweet maple logs, set the clock on slow, and let Linda take you home. --Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey To study trees is to study me, Linda Tatelbaum confides at the beginning of this engaging book. But though she can speak tree, she mostly listens to trees who choose their words carefully, whether saving her from a potentially deadly misstep in a stream, helping her through childbirth, showing her God through their branches, or teaching her to adapt to their own destruction. Carrying Water as a Way of Life introduced the author as a serious homesteader. In this rich accounting, she wanders back and forth through her life, finding her mate and their place, building their home and raising their son, rediscovering a nature-based Judaism, honoring her aging parents, and surviving into a century in which she is transformed in popular understanding from hippie eccentric to a model modern professor in a wood-heated solar electric home. I will not forget her passion for canning, or her basement collection of gold coins, canning jar lids dated 9-11-2001. A quietly inspiring read. --Joan Dye Gussow, author of This Organic Life To study trees is to study me, Linda Tatelbaum confides at the beginning of this engaging book. But though she can speak tree, she mostly listens to trees who choose their words carefully, whether saving her from a potentially deadly misstep in a stream, helping her through childbirth, showing her God through their branches, or teaching her to adapt to their own destruction. Carrying Water as a Way of Life introduced the author as a serious homesteader. In this rich accounting, she wanders back and forth through her life, finding her mate and their place, building their home and raising their son, rediscovering a nature-based Judaism, honoring her aging parents, and surviving into a century in which she is transformed in popular understanding from hippie eccentric to a model modern professor in a wood-heated solar electric home. I will not forget her passion for canning, or her basement collection of gold coins, canning jar lids dated 9-11-2001. A quietly inspiring read. --Joan Dye Gussow, author of This Organic Life To study trees is to study me, Linda Tatelbaum confides at the beginning of this engaging book. But though she can speak tree, she mostly listens to trees who choose their words carefully, whether saving her from a potentially deadly misstep in a stream, helping her through childbirth, showing her God through their branches, or teaching her to adapt to their own destruction. Carrying Water as a Way of Life introduced the author as a serious homesteader. In this rich accounting, she wanders back and forth through her life, finding her mate and their place, building their home and raising their son, rediscovering a nature-based Judaism, honoring her aging parents, and surviving into a century in which she is transformed in popular understanding from hippie eccentric to a model modern professor in a wood-heated solar electric home. I will not forget her passion for canning, or her basement collection of gold coins, canning jar lids dated 9-11-2001. A quietly inspiring read. --Joan Dye Gussow, author of This Organic Life Born in Rochester, New York in 1947, Linda Tatelbaum lives in midcoast Maine with her husband; they have a grown son. A Ph.D. from Cornell University, she left academia to become a back-to-the-land homesteader in 1977, and returned to college teaching once the solar house and organic garden were up and running. Professor (now Emerita) of English and environmental studies at Colby College, she is the author of three previous books the nonfiction C