Books / Trees
Henrik Dahle charts his year of climbing trees, completing his crowdfunder 12 years late
In his own brand of “gentle activism”, British-Norwegian and now Bristol-based multidisciplinary artist Henrik Dahle has finally completed a project that was 15 years in the making, delivering on his crowdfunder pledges 12 years late.
Since 2008, after watching the Al Gore climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth, he has devoted himself to raising awareness of the Climate Emergency and global biodiversity collapse.
Back in May 2010, he began a project to climb a tree every day for a year – all over Europe – inviting co-climbers to join him in the canopy where possible.
The results are documented in his newly published book, Art of Climbing Trees (A.C.T.), which emerged from “walkabout diaries”, as well as “research and reflections”, tree-top-based conversations, and “the art that unravelled from 365 starting points”.
Many of the trees were climbed in Bristol, where the project originated, as well as the south west, and the south coast, London and the Midlands.
Dahle also climbed trees in 10 countries across Europe, from a Scots pine at the holocaust memorial in Berlin, to the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree – an annual gift from Norway to Britain – before it was felled in the forest outside Oslo.
In reflecting on what the undertaking has given him, he surmises: “Climbing trees is fun, challenging, and exhilarating, and I recommend the simple encounter with nature”.
But as he is keen to point out, although tree-climbing was the starting point, the project soon became about so much more, spanning “art, freedom, responsibility, anthropology, science, life, play, death, time, family, story…”.
The trees provided “a journey, a structure, and a reason to learn and pay closer attention; they gave me a place to play and provided the perfect strange and nostalgic setting for conversations”.
The 464-page coffee table book documents the entirety of Dahle’s experience, from the very first tree, in Victoria Park – now sadly felled due to a fungal infection.
Illustration of background tree rings, from A.C.T
It charts 80 conversations in treetops with co-climbers, among them Bristol artist Luke Jerram, PRSC activist Chris Chalkley, and theatre director and actor, Angus Barr.
Other temporary co-occupants of the trees range from a band of touring musicians (travelling by bike) to an ex-gangster, a woman awaiting a heart transplant, environmental campaigner Rob Hopkins, and an astonishing 44 people at once – including a woman who was eight months pregnant.
For Dahle, the project has culminated in an ecological and political manifesto – or, in his words, a “Greenprint” for a more sustainable future built upon what he terms “a gentle, radical eco-socialist economy”.
In his own words: “the trees nearly ruined my life, as well as remaking it”.
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Art of Climbing Trees: A Book for Aspiring Eutopians by Henrik Dahle is available at www.artofclimbingtrees.net. Follow Henrik Dahle @artofclimbingtrees.
A list of the co-authors, artists, contributors and crowdfunders who helped bring A.C.T. to life is detailed here.
All photos: Henrik Dahle
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