Introduction: Tree

What have we learned and not learned from trees? A recent hypothesis suggests that human bipedalism emerged not with the retreat of forests as had long been assumed but, on the contrary, in trees. Walking on branches would have been an effective way of foraging in open-canopy forests, as well as of advancing otherwise—taking the “arboreal route”—through rocky terrain (Drummond-Clark et al.). And what if it were trees, this most intimate other, long our food and cover, that first invited us to stand up, perhaps even to think, and make, and write, and cry?

What stories would the tree tell us if we knew how to perceive its signs, decipher its alphabets, venture through its lines? If we only made the effort? If we gave ourselves that chance—le temps d’une lecture—to escape ever so slightly from the tumult?