On Monday, March 7, at 2 p.m. in Essex Town Hall, the Essex Land Trust and the Essex Garden Club will be jointly hosting a lecture by author Eric Rutkow, whose book “American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation” tells the extraordinary story of the relationship of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of the nation’s history.

As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in America’s complicated history. Without trees, there would have been no cities, ships, railroads, stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles, or firewood.

In an entertaining and informative presentation, Rutkow re-conceives America’s historical relationship with the trees and forests that shaped the development of the nation.

Rutkow is renowned as a “promising young historian” and a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.  He has worked as a lawyer on environmental and corporate issues and currently splits his time between New York City and New Haven, Conn., where he is pursuing a doctorate in American history at Yale.  “American Canopy” is his first book.