On 7 February 2022 we held our first hybrid book club discussion. With a limited number of carefully masked and distanced people in person and the rest online, our hybrid event went reasonably well. I was most concerned that the people online wouldn’t be able to hear the people in the room easily, but our discussion worked pretty much as usual. One comment from an online participant was that the in-person people didn’t show up on my computer camera so they “appeared” as disembodied voices.

We began the year with the novel, The Baron in the Trees. Written in 1957 by Italo Calvino, it is the story of a boy, Cosimo, who would not eat his escargots and took to an aerial life in the family forest, vowing never to set foot on the ground again. The boy’s father being a Baron, the family had rather extensive grounds and resources. It is well imagined and a fun read.

Our February book, The Legacy of Luna, on the other hand, is the true story of Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a coastal redwood tree, Luna, without coming down from the tree, from 10 December 1997 to 18 December 1999 – a bit over two years. Like Cosimo, Julia depended on people to provide her with the necessities of life. Unlike Cosimo, Julia recounts the difficulties and dangers of living in a tree. And, of course, in her case, there was the continual threat posed by the lumber company intent on cutting down Luna.

A quick check of “tree sitting” on Wikipedia indicates that tree-sitting pre-dated Calvino’s novel and even was used at least once to protect a tree from being cut down. The more common use in the 1930s appears to have been as a sort of endurance sport. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s tree sitting was used as a form of protest to protect trees from being cut down. The most recent tree sit listed in the Wikipedia article ended in 2021. While some tree sits have successfully resulted in protection of the trees and surrounding environment, it does seem that many have ended in the protesters being “extracted” and jailed.

Read more about our meeting and the information we discussed here.