Nicole Walker's How to Plant a Billion Trees gives me hope. It has resonance and life, and will always be on my shelf.

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene

Amazingly, Walker accomplishes the bold and ambitious challenge of telling her story of childhood sexual assault and a tumultuous adolescence alongside the turbulence of drastic climate change resulting from the pillaging of our planet. She exposes how the same forces that drive exploitation and cruelty are destroying the world's natural resources as well as our best human qualities. Bravely, she leads us through the grief and trauma of ruptured inner and outer landscapes towards resilient and sustainable new vistas and visions- and convincingly claims we can “plant a billion trees” as our resistance to destructive forces.

Val Walker, author of The Art of Comforting, 400 Friends and No One to Call, and Healing Through Wonder

If each of us is a forest, as Nicole Walker brilliantly contends, How to Plant a Billion Trees, exposes the myriad forces that conspire to interrupt that forest's course and path, to spoil and undo it, to mar and to scar it. The way back to nurture, renewal and remaking is in the stories we create as counter-narratives, our willingness to imagine, and our ability to listen. How to Plant a Billion Trees inspires the confidence we all need to “stay with the trouble” of climate change or personal trauma; it's a concatenation of radical change, radical optimism, and radical storytelling. A leading voice in the poetics of nonfiction and genre-bending prose, Nicole Walker makes lasting contributions to the life of our collective souls with every book she writes.

Mary Cappello, author of Frost Will Come/essays from the bardo

How To Plant A Billion Trees is the very embodiment of the deep weave between the abuse of children and the abuse of the land. In a story that most resembles tree rings, in its beauty as well as its accumulated strength and power, Nicole Walker reaches for loam and duff enough to repair, sometimes herself, sometimes the Earth, sometimes our broken, denial-ridden colonizer's hearts. Along with a billion trees we need a billion of these stories. But here is one, courageous, compelling, and unapologetic.

Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country