Would I be right to guess that this is the first time tree rings have been in the Rolling Stone?

“It was like looking through a telescope into the future to see how forests would respond, and it felt awful,” Williams says. “The result was totally unimaginable: wildfires, bark beetles, a huge reduction in forest growth, massive mortality. In the afternoons, I’d go on jogs on the trails outside my office and take mental inventory of who was dying and who was living. All over New Mexico, trees keeled over. It was like they’d been transported onto a new planet where climate is entirely different than what they were evolved for.”

Except I realize on second reading that, despite being essential to the story of Park Williams’ groundbreaking work on climate and our future forests, tree rings didn’t get a direct mention.

So you should probably still click on this link and buy my book.