Listening to Trees
Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrived at the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern about their future. In this episode, she shares lessons learned from everyday tree lovers and women arborists, which would come to shape her latest book, Take to the Trees (Norton, 2025). Visiting Paris as a Reid Hall Faculty Visitor, she recounts how Paris’s long history of integrating trees into the urban landscape is evolving to combat climate change.
Atelier is produced by the Columbia Global Paris Center, a Columbia University initiative housed at Reid Hall.
Marguerite Holloway is Director of Science & Environmental Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has written for various publications, including Discover, the New York Times, and Scientific American, where she was a longtime editor and contributor. Holloway is the author of The Measure of Manhattan (W.W. Norton, 2013), the story of John Randel Jr., the 19th century surveyor who laid the grid plan on the island, and of the contemporary scientists who use his data. Holloway enjoys interdisciplinary teaching and often collaborates with colleagues working in documentary, photojournalism and animation — particularly in the realm of climate change storytelling. She has worked on several innovative interdisciplinary digital and data projects.
