Emergence Magazine: “When we think of migration, what often comes to mind is the seasonal movement of animals from one region to another: a repeated, patterned journey in which creatures are drawn in one direction toward a food supply or resource, and in the other direction toward breeding grounds. Humpback whales, for example, spend their summers straining krill, plankton, and small fish through their great baleen plates in the polar region of the North Pacific Ocean. Come winter, when conditions grow harsh and the food supply dwindles, the whales swim south—some as far as five thousand miles—navigating the vast ocean with incredible precision to breeding grounds in Hawaii, Mexico, Central America, and Asia, until cues from their environment beckon them north again. This pattern repeats every year of their lives. Thousands of species of migratory creatures—at least four thousand species of birds alone—embark on epic journeys across and around the world every year as they are pulled into flowing patterns of movement that correspond to the sun’s steady pull on the Earth. Birds, insects, mammals, and fish follow felt sensory signals in currents of air and water, changes in season, the planet’s magnetic field, the position of the sun and stars, subtle changes in temperature. Earth’s ecological systems, in this way, are woven together by intricate and far-reaching threads of movement. What about our rooted companions? The northeastern spruce-fir forests that the Bicknell’s thrush journeys to every spring, or the stands of jack pine where the eastern bluebird builds its nests? We often admire trees for their steady rootedness, their resiliency in the face of change; for the gift of shade and companionship that a single long-lived tree might offer us and then our children and our grandchildren, even our great-grandchildren. But trees—or, more appropriately, forests—are perhaps not so rooted, so reliably placed, as we might think. Right now, around the world, trees are on the move…”