When Nicole Walker was molested and had an abortion at age 11, the distance between her and the world grew until she couldn''t imagine a future place for her anywhere. In How to Plant a Billion Trees, Walker tries to understand why her whole life didn''t fall apart, as was predicted. As she pieces together her story, she finds that it was thanks in no small part to her mother, her sisters, her friends who did not let the sexual abuse to define her. In this candid portrayal of a young girl, Nicole Walker writes about how, thanks to her family, her friends, and the mountains of the Wasatch, Cascades, and San Francisco Peaks, she reknit herself into the fabric of a supportive culture. Employing the forest as a model to understand how to reconnect her life with the world, Nicole studies the way that ecosystems anticipate, react, and support each small part of the whole. As she learns more about ecology, she discovers that in a healthy forest, even the gritty, decaying elements contribute to the health of the forest. The process of rebuilding the self into a community parallels the process of a forest''s growth. To apply that lesson to the human ecosystem, Nicole realizes that even the hard-to-stomach stories need to be told, and, with air, that grit is transformed into something alive and new.

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Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story (2019) with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013) with Margot Singer. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.