Think Like a Forest

Climate change is an intergenerational issue: an existential crisis we are bequeathing to our descendants. Ben Rawlence’s letters to his daughters grapple with questions of injustice and adaptation - but also celebrate the joy and hope and wonder of small children. Beautiful and thought-provoking – Cal Flyn
A delightful and important book. Every parent should read this and consider it as a handrail for climate conscious and compassionate 21st-century parenting. Having loved every page I have now begun writing letters to my own young daughters to emulate Ben’s piercing insight and heartfelt example – Merlin Hanbury-Tenison
How do you find the right path when no one has come this way before? This book is a thoughtful, tender way to make a map of new and frightening territory. – Jay Griffiths
Humane, honest and painfully true, Rawlence’s letters to his daughters neatly encapsulate the systemic nature of our current crisis of values, while also shedding valuable light on where we might go and how we might thrive if we can only find a way to change them. – Owen Sheers
As moving as it is illuminating… a book like no other, a story told through letters written by a loving father to his young daughters as they grow up in an increasingly uncertain world. – Mark Lynas
These are beautifully written, endearing and hopeful letters which made me laugh and cry… It’s a book for all ages about conversations we all need to have – and if you don’t know how to start them, there’s a very helpful manual at the back! – Jane Davidson, author of #FUTUREGEN: Lessons from a Small Country
A great taboo of our time - how to talk with our children about the broken world they’re growing up into - is coming to an end. This book marks a notable moment in that necessary transformation. The sensitivity with which Ben Rawlence approaches the topic, in these letters, is lovely to behold. Not least, because he sets out here how this is very much about listening to the young, too. – Emeritus Prof. Rupert Read, author of PARENTS FOR A FUTURE
I loved this book. Really, really loved it. Not just because I also have two daughters (so I was feeling it, on every step of a typically troubled parent’s climate path), but because, magically, he turns this intimate story into an extraordinarily compassionate account of what it’s like to be living through the earliest stages of climate breakdown – regardless of whether or not you have children or grandchildren of your own. – Jonathon Porritt
The message running through the book is that adults have much to learn from children, not least their moral clarity about a climate problem that will be the defining challenge of their lives * Financial Times *
Told through a series of frank and heartfelt letters to his daughters… It is helpful to read that other parents find such mental conjuring overwhelming… What better ambition for a parent as we hold our children’s hands and walk towards the world that is yet to come? * Resurgence & Ecology *

Ben Rawlence is the author of Think Like a Forest, The Treeline, City of Thorns, and Radio Congo. Rawlence has written for publications including The Guardian, London Review of Books, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. He lives in Wales and is the founder and director of Black Mountains College, an institution dedicated to preparing people for the changes to come.

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