Saving trees to save ourselves
A weekend with Diana Beresford-Kroeger
In the world of systems change, it’s easy to focus on the big picture–headlines, global trends–and miss the often revolutionary work being done at the local level by individuals and communities. Today, we wanted to share the first in a series of personal profiles of people doing important but sometimes lesser-known work in the climate world. First up is Diana Beresford-Kroeger, an advocate and writer whose lifelong mission to preserve rare tree species has taken her to every corner of the world.
There are not many people who can be said to walk between worlds, but Diana Beresford-Kroeger is certainly one of them. A scientist, seanchaí (traditional Gaelic storyteller), inventor, celebrated naturalist, and bestselling author, she is one of those rare individuals who can be truly called a polymath. She also happens to be a dear friend.
I was lucky enough to be invited by Diana last year to stay at her 200-acre property near the town of Merrickville, Ontario, where she has spent decades saving endangered trees from all over the world. It is one of her life’s missions to build this botanical Noah’s Ark, creating an oasis of biodiversity in a world of climate disruption. It is also an inspiring example of cathedral thinking, or the urge to act in a way that transcends a single lifetime. “Blessed is she who plants trees under whose shade she will never sit,” goes the Indian proverb–a dictum which Diana takes quite literally.
One of the most striking things about Diana is her prodigious memory. At 79, she can still rattle off the polysyllabic Latin names of countless plant species and their medicinal properties without missing a beat. Carya laciniosa, also known as the shellbark hickory, is her all-time favourite tree, once used by Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island as a rich source of protein and fatty acids that are essential for brain development. Then there’s Magnolia acuminata, the magnificent cucumber tree, or Catalpa speciosa, the cigar tree, with its protective powers to ward away lice and fleas. On her property every tree has its own story, and in a way, its own soul.
She calls her home Carrigliath, which means ‘Greystone’ in her native Irish Gaelic language. Diana is one of the last voices of ancient Ireland, having been raised by village elders in the Valley of Lisheens after being orphaned at a young age. She was schooled in the Brehon Laws, learning ancient Celtic wisdom which survived only by oral tradition. According to her family’s banshenchas (literally “woman lore”), her pedigree goes back nearly 3,000 years, with her mother’s family being among the last descendents of the Kings of Munster. On her father’s side–the esteemed Beresford lineage–she hails from a long line of lords, earls, and viscounts whose aristocratic stature dates back to as early as 1228. In her living room I leafed through her coffee-stained copy of the quarterly Beresford family magazine. “They never liked me much, a girl who bothered to get educated,” she said with a scoff.
To say that Diana is ‘educated’ is quite the understatement. The procession of letters after her name is a veritable alphabet–BSc. med. biochem., BSc. bot., MSc., PhD., PhD., Dipl surg., LLD. She has a myriad of honorary degrees from universities all over the world, due to her path-breaking innovations in a variety of fields. She is almost as knowledgeable about the human heart as she is about the world of plants, having invented a type of artificial blood for hemodilution that is used in hospitals everywhere. Her first master’s degree studied crop resilience to temperature change, driven by her desire to understand how climate change would affect the plant kingdom. This degree was earned in 1965, the same year that a US president was first informed about the effects of anthropogenic climate change. At every step of her journey, Diana has been decades ahead.
Diana has also been one of the foremost global voices raising attention to the role that forest ecosystems play in regulating human health. “Take a breath and thank a tree,” she often says, referring to the astounding fact that trees and rainforests produce 28 percent of the world's oxygen. She has done pioneering research to understand the role that tree-borne aerosols play in disease prevention. Some doctors now even prescribe “forest bathing”-the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku–as a prophylaxis against cancer. She cites Akira Miyawaki, the celebrated Japanese ecologist and long-time collaborator, as one of her dearest friends, along with Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, brilliant scientist and popularizer of the “half-Earth” concept. “And now I stand alone,” she confided in me plaintively. (Both Miyawaki and Wilson passed away in 2021).
Diana also served as a source of inspiration for the character of Patricia Westerford, a main protagonist of Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. In the novel, Patricia is a forest ecologist who uses modern science to prove what ancient peoples have always known–that the forest is alive, with trees communicating through mycorrhizal networks in the soil, and towering “Mother Trees” sending nutrients to their offspring. (Suzanne Simard, the UBC forest ecologist who discovered the Mother Tree phenomenon, is Powers’ main source of inspiration). “An Irish woman in slang is called Patricia,” Diana said in an interview during the New York Times Climate Week event. “The only problem with poor old Richard,” she riffed, is that “he should’ve blinking well interviewed me.”
This bristling sense of humour is one of Diana’s hallmark traits. She has a heart of gold, but be careful not to get on her bad side. At one point during the weekend, on a stroll through the garden, my friend almost hit a rare shrub species. Diana screeched and gripped their arm–“If you break that plant, I’ll bloody kill you!” For such a loquacious speaker, “bloody” is one of her favourite words. She also has the “gift of gab,” offering her extemporaneous opinions on everything from smartphones to David Suzuki to the healing power of garlic. “The internet is stopping us from being subjective judges of the world,” she lamented. “Children are losing the ability to think.” Such assertions are hardly a surprise coming from a woman who is proud to have never owned a computer or a cellphone.
Diana is also quintessentially Irish. There is something about her irascible charm and voluble speech which immediately commands peoples’ attention. She also does not mince words when discussing Ireland’s suffering at the hand of English oppressors–a subjugation which was, in many ways, the laboratory for European colonization. A deep aversion to systematic imperial violence forms the core of her pacifist worldview. The decimation of the Celtic world at the hands of successive waves of invasion is a topic that we often discuss–“The Romans were the first ones to put a price on nature,” she claims, while the English saw Ireland only as a resource to exploit. “The forest was money to the English,” ushering in an imperial drive which brought 500 years of penal laws designed to forbid the transmission of the Irish language or the knowledge of the Druids, the great sages of the Celtic peoples. The penal laws were designed to force the Irish into a position of servitude, with arbitrary rules about not being able to own horses, sing songs, gather food, and on and on.
The ecological devastation caused by imperialism is in some ways what Diana has devoted her life to remedying. Alfred Crosby, one of the world’s foremost environmental historians, writes about how European colonialism negatively affected global biodiversity in his seminal book Ecological Imperialism. The Columbian exchange was a process of “biological globalization” which occurred as a consequence of the conquest of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, in which new diseases, animals, and plant species were introduced rapidly in places where they were not endemic. Some 50-95% of the Indigenous population of the Americas died over the period of just a few decades due to the introduction of smallpox, measles, influenza, and more. Nick Estes, in a superb essay for The Baffler, writes about how disease and systematic violence fed on one another in a maelstrom of destruction.
Diana does not shy away from discussing the barbarities of British colonialism in North America–“They literally raped the country,” she says. The physical and cultural genocide perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island was organized around the drive to extract value from the continent’s natural resource wealth–a process which still reverberates into the present. Many treasured tree species were lost during these years. A significant part of Diana’s work has been to track down these trees, valued by First Nations across these lands, and rescue them from the brink of extinction. “I've gone out and found the rarest of the food-producing trees, the anti-inflammatories that the First Nations called Medicine Trees,” she explains. One particular species, the Ptelea trifoliata cressidifoliata, is a rare variety of wafer ash which she believes might be useful in cancer research. Harnessed to a helicopter in a mountain valley in Texas, she located the last surviving specimen in North America, which is now protected around the clock by armed guards.
The desire to bridge Western science and ancient wisdom is Diana’s central calling. “I was told to carry the wisdom of the Celtic world and bring it into the present,” she told me, discussing a prophecy given to her by the elders of her community. Part of the problem, she explains, is that our culture has lost the ability to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. We have more and more knowledge, but we are spiritually adrift. Her life philosophy is written down in her book The Sweetness of a Simple Life, a short text which extols asceticism and frugality in the face of hedonistic consumer culture. “You don’t need three cars,” she said to me. “You don't need a huge company. All you need is a roof over your head, some laughter in the family, a bit of food on the table, and a bit of fun.”
Diana and I don’t agree on everything. She has a hostility towards institutions, proudly claiming to be a member of only a single organization: the Irish Garden Society. Long since having given up on governments and corporations, she believes that only regular people have the power to change the world. This is also perhaps why she has attracted some pushback for advancing mass tree-planting as a solution to the climate crisis. She is skeptical of mass political movements, which is our main difference. What we do share, however, is a common commitment to democratic principles. “The power of the public is enormous,” she reminds me. “The power of the public is paying for our politicians and our governments. Never lose sight of that.”
There is an almost religious aspect to Diana’s teachings, one which conveys a deep spiritual connection with the Earth and with each other. She talks often about the importance of belief, how modern culture has stripped people of our ability to find a sense of meaning in our lives. “There needs to be an appraisal of the value that religion provides,” she says, “because religion is an anchor for people.” When I ask about how she manages to stay positive in the face of so much loss–both the early loss of her family, and the gradual loss of the Earth’s natural wonders–she gives the same reason: her reason for being is larger than herself. Her worldview is based on compassion and a reverence for life, which is also what gives her hope. “Compassion, for the human family. That's all you have.”
It is tireless advocates like Diana, fighting on in the face of so much loss, who inspire me to keep going. She is painfully conscious, perhaps more than anyone, of the richness of nature that diminishes with each day. But I have also never met someone so tenacious, so single-minded, in their quest to build a better world. She simply won’t give up. “I will look into a young person's face, and tell them I have done all I can possibly do to stop climate change.”
As a young person, I can only say–thank you Diana, for showing us the way.
Diana’s newest and perhaps final book will be released on September 3rd of this year. It is called Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of the Forest, and in Diana’s words it is her “Bible for the future.” Her other books include To Speak for the Trees, The Global Forest Arboretum America, and The Sweetness of a Simple Life, among others.
The Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees is a documentary which follows Diana to Japan, Ireland, California, and Canada as she explains the history and legacy of the ancient forests of the northern hemisphere.
The Overstory by Richard Powers is a Pulitzer prize-winning novel about a series of disparate characters whose lives intertwine in the campaign to protect a tract of old growth forest.
Finding the Mother Tree is a book by Suzanne Simard, UBC forest ecologist, about her work discovering the crucial role that mother trees play in forest ecosystems.
Talking with the Botanist Who Talks to Trees is a series of articles written by Andrew Nikiforuk for The Tyee which profiles Diana’s work and home in close personal detail.
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You couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate article to publish on Earth Day. Diana is truly a one of a kind individual. Thanks for sharing about her brilliant work and legacy.