Books of the century

Once upon a time in 2014 – not long ago in ecological terms – a Scottish artist, Katie Paterson, planted the seeds of an idea designed to reimagine our relationship with nature and one another. The Future Library project, just outside Oslo, is the resulting century-long time capsule curated by urban developer Anne Beate Hovind. Every year, a different author is invited to contribute a sealed manuscript of a story, which will remain unread until the trees that will create the paper on which it is printed have grown to full height. The collective anthology is due to be revealed in 2114. Stories in-waiting include works by Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgård, David Mitchell, Han Kang and Elif Shafak.

On a midsummer morning, we are gathered in a Norwegian wood to witness the making of vows between the 2024 and 2025 authors – Tommy Orange and Amitav Ghosh – and the trees that will, in about 90 years of tree rings, become books. Books that most of us in the congregation of two to three hundred will never read. Spread out upon a carpet of blaeberry and sphagnum moss are writers, musicians, foresters and, like me, time-capsule enthusiasts.

Earlier, in the forever after-dawn of Nordic summer, I had joined a dozen other volunteers responding to a social media call to assist with ceremony preparations. We boarded the subway from central Oslo to Nordmarka, a 45-minute ride that ascends through a landscape of fjords and timber-clad grand designs. Among us were an Edinburgh school pupil researching her dissertation, an anthropology student from London with a hammock slung across her shoulder, a Swiss mother on her first solo outing postpartum and a German engineer. Some return year on year as though on a pilgrimage, joining a growing network of forest guardians. As one American volunteer put it: “We need this radical act of hope.”

In the UK, cultural volunteering is also on an upward trend – from taking part in the opening ceremonies of large sporting events like the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, to community tree-planting. Evidence shows that participation brings wellbeing benefits. As well as lessening isolation and boosting a sense of belonging, it teaches new skills.

My own forest skills this morning include dispensing black coffee and cinnamon buns, and laying a sawdust wayfinding trail, which Orange’s four-year-old delights in sweeping away. Sun rays from the European heatwave beat down hard while midges feast upon exposed limbs. As we proceed in one another’s footsteps, along paths fringed with cow parsley, oxeye and buttercup, the leaves on the surrounding aspen trees tremble like, well, pages torn from a book.

An alfresco wee in a quiet thicket (narrowly dodging a troupe of joggers) provided an inelegant, down-to-earth pause in which I could see the wood for the trees. I saw a project designed to outlive a human timespan but where everyone reached for a camera to put themselves into the frame. Likely some fir cones stashed in pockets too, because we can’t help but want more of it, time.

Now in its 12th year, the project’s first trees have reached gangly adolescence. Some are so tall that this year’s ceremony had to be moved to a new clearing in order that we might observe without getting jabbed in the eye by a spiky spruce, or accidentally trample a toddler-height pine. A privilege of setting out early means that I get to rest my weary body against a felled stump – probably of one of those trees that made the Silent Room, the vault within Oslo’s waterside Deichman Library that houses the sealed manuscripts.

As the ceremony gets under way, I am entranced by the sound of the traditional singing of the Sámi people – called joiking – reverberating with tuba and birdsong. The lead forester, who I had chatted to as he stirred water in a kettle with rowan twigs, gives an update on the forest’s progress. Like a headteacher at the end of term, he praises the progress of young saplings but warns about moose nibbling fresh shoots. And the biggest moose in the room, climate change.

The titles of the new works by Orange and Ghosh are read aloud. Orange speaks in his native Cheyenne before passing the mic to his teenage son, Felix, who implores there to be more kindness in the world. More young men like Felix in the world, I hope.

And just like that, I have become one of the faithful. By leaves we live, said Patrick Geddes, a Scottish conceptual artist from a century past. If this is collective worship at the altar of Mother Nature, I’m into it (and have a volunteering T-shirt to prove it).

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design