https://medium.com/@frasersimons/greenwood-the-cloud-atlas-of-historical-climate-fiction-15838ebfbec6

“Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.”

In the year 2034 and only a few forests remain on earth. A blight called The Withering has already swept the world, annihilated whole eco-systems, and left families destitute. Conditions that are evocative of, and seem to parallel the experiences of people who lived through the Dust Bowl.

Canada, however, is one of only a handful of places that have some protection and seems to have become the most desirable place in much of the world— but it is only a matter of time before it too succumbs to The Withering.

Jake has amassed a hefty amount of student debt in her education as a dendrologist, and had planned on spending her life researching her passion: trees. But after The Withering the only job she can find is as a tour guide for the superrich on an isolated island in Canada, a job she is massively overqualified for but has no choice but to take.

“A person seldom knows they’re starved for something until they get a taste of it.”

Her life, it seems, has become a performance for the rich in order to survive.

But life takes a turn for Jake when an old flame comes to the island with a wild claim: she may be the descendent of the Canadian industrialist whose company owns this very sanctuary. If true, it would change her life. No more debt. No more tours. She could dedicate her life to combatting The Withering as she’d hoped. As proof of the claim, her ex gives her an old journal.

From there, the narrative begins its dive back in time. Each jump a story linked still further back in the connecting tissue of her family history. The stories begin to collapse into each other, then build-up and stretch into completion; finally returning to conclude Jake’s own story in 2034.

Eclectic people across history are drawn together in astonishing ways. This history begins to form a latticework as the multi-generational family stories are ferreted out and connected. A simple carpenter in Vancouver. A foresting super-magnate. A shell-shocked war hero, now transient with a baby he’d found in the woods, alone, hanging from a tree. The fixer of a wealthy patron. A single woman who starts a soup-kitchen and soon owns and operates her very own farm.

Time is a bridge for all sorts.

“What if a family isn’t a tree at all? What if it’s more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought… what are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason. And like all stories, families are not born, they’re invented. Pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.”

And this would have been a satisfying story in of itself. But what elevates Greenwood is how thickly intertwined the themes are with each individual story and the meta-narrative that engages in a push-pull exercise of whether or not Jake is a legitimate heir or not.

Multiple stories allow for a more nuanced telling than one story could have.

Generational trauma, ethical consumption, notions of justice, punishment, and penance, all pulse together within a realistic, but hopeful framework that depicts mankind as cyclical and timeless.
Troubles and perseverance, it seems, have always governed mankind. If only we had a more protracted memory.

Jake is waiting to discover what is true — and whether or not she will allow this information to alter her. What path is right? The culmination of all the choices of every character marks this as pivotal.

And yet this is just the vehicle that allows the exploration of how Canadians have allowed for the abundance of natural resources to be pillaged for the equivalent of the American Dream for the far-too-few.

If it’s true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary justice…then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip our the Earth’s most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheaply to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again — that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.

This prevalent notion Canada has cultivated as ethical and good is welcomingly contradicted — beginning with the story furthest back, as the family immigrated and the very first thing they need to do to prosper is to drive the First Nations people living there off of ‘their’ land.

Contrast that with what is happening today in Canada, where the country is still being auctioned off, and this becomes an incredibly prescient book with so much to say it is staggering to unpack.

“Time…is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates — in the body, in the world — like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light, then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done.”