Book Review

The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods
by Julia Butterfly Hill
Review by Jake Aryeh Marcus

As I first sat down to read The Legacy of Luna, my three-year-old son snuggled up, mesmerized by the photograph on the book's cover. In it, Julia Butterfly Hill is wrapped around the top branch of a redwood, looking wistfully off into the distance with her dark hair flying in the wind, attached to the tree by what appears to be the lightest of touch of her two hands and one bent bare foot. Where she stops and the tree begins is clear only because of our visual programming - the ability to separate human from non-human. Otherwise she and the tree are one. My son asked me immediately who "the girl" was. I told him her name was Butterfly and for two years she lived in a tree. He made me go through the pages of the book, looking for more pictures of her and of "her" tree. His eyes opened wide when I told him that her tree had a name. "What is the tree's name?" he asked. "Luna." "Like the moon!" he cried. And ever since, he has been asking me to tell him stories about Butterfly, the girl who lived in the tree named Luna.

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Julia Butterfly Hill approached her mission to save a tree with the same fairytale romance that drew my three-year-old to her story. For Hill, however, it became complex and grueling work for a cause that was simple - protecting the right of one tree among many to survive the threat of a huge corporation that had the full support of the United States government. Hill also battled the misguided opposition of local community members who could see only as far as the next paycheck, but not that their future paychecks were in jeopardy. The Legacy of Luna is the story of one very young woman who went to California to do something - she wasn't sure what -- and found herself in a tree. When the fate (life or death) of this tree fell into her hands, she decided to risk everything to save it.

The story of what a person is willing to sacrifice to do what is right is an important one, both for children and for adults. But the two years were much more than self-sacrifice for Hill. She was transformed from an idealistic and relatively ignorant child to an educated activist who was capable of enduring enormous amounts of physical hardship, yet savvy enough to juggle the demands of a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week press conference. Hill did all this while forming a relationship with a tree that was more intimate than many of us will ever know with our own species.

The Legacy of Luna could definitely be a more substantial book. Hill seems so intent on promoting the important political message of redwood conservation that she skimps on the details of her awe-inspiring experience. Or perhaps her private time in Luna is too personal to share. Hill need not have worried that the reader would miss the point of her mission had the book been less business-like. The book contains a few of Hill's sketches and some of the poetry she wrote while living in Luna, but the poems are trite and provide no insight. It may be that Hill is not a sufficiently experienced writer, and the book then could have benefited from a co-writer to help Hill balance her political agenda with her extraordinary years on a platform in the sky.

Despite its weaknesses, The Legacy of Luna is an interesting book about the great fight of an extraordinary woman. Perhaps its finest quality is the message that all of us can push ourselves beyond what we thought were our limits in order to do what is important. My three-year-old son will never forget that a girl named Butterfly lived in a tree named Luna for two years in order to save it.

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Jake Aryeh Marcus is a lawyer, freelance writer and editor, and work-at-home mom to unschooling sons Luca, Nicky, and Aidan. Jake's writing has appeared in The Compleat Mother, The Family Life Journal, and elsewhere. Jake and her family live in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

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