Crosscut

A dramatic intertwined story about people and forests, tracing eighteen generations of the author’s ironworking forbears through centuries of destroying Europe and colonial America’s largest forests

While working in forest protection, Kathy Leonard Czepiel discovered a painful irony: that her ancestors, a dynasty of ironworkers, had destroyed ancient forests across Europe and America for wood to run their iron foundries. Upon learning this, she set out on a quest to find out what happened to the five forests linked to her family tree–from Normandy to the southeast of England and Wales, across the Atlantic to colonial Massachusetts and New Jersey–whether any of them survived, and if so, whether they’re in danger today. 

To tell this story, Czepiel dives into Medieval and colonial American history, urgently linking past and present, recreating the world her ancestors inhabited, thinking through their complex relationships with the forests, and a crafting a personal narrative of how she ended up working in land and forest protection generations later. The result is a unique exploration of the personal and environmental costs of losing the world’s greatest forests and what we should be doing to protect our trees today.