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With the news yesterday that greenhouse gas emissions are breaking records -- and not in a good way — there is cause for alarm. The World Meteorological Organisation has stated that CO2 levels have continued to increase. Levels of other warming gases have also surged. And in the last 30 years, there's been an increase of 43% in the warming effect on the climate of long lived greenhouse gases. We live in a carbon economy. Most energy production — for fuel, industry, transportation — emits carbon. Carbon — with its associated emissions and concentrations and gasses — has contributed to higher global temperatures, leading to climate change and rising seas. So often, in the face of undeniable impact of climate change, what happens is we see people arguing over which response is better. The human desire to win becomes more appealing to us in the face of something catastrophic: climate refugees, dying coral reefs, oceans polluted by plastic islands bigger than Texas. Trees might be part of the solution; that won’t heal all the damage done by carbon emissions, but could help slow things down. Trees have been important for as long as we have — things of timber, and paper, and fuel, and boats, and lodging have been a necessary part of human existence and economy for millennia. Our Mythologies, too, have centered around trees, and not for naive purposes. The Garden of Eden was planted with trees that — the story says — had the knowledge of good and evil, and contained life within them. Trees, the narrative implies, contain power, and our relationship with them should be guarded, in all the senses of that word. It’s not just the Hebrew Bible that pays attention to trees. In Babylonian mythology, a community of gods fight and kill one of their group; from the body of this dead god grew two trees. They’re everywhere in the Epic of Gilgamesh too. Trees have held our imagination for millennia. And, today, in both political and environmental circles, they’re getting more of our attention — for good reasons. As Martha Kearney has been finding out the Antarctic peninsula is warming faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, and while that’s far away, the impact will be global. This must be met with global policy and behaviour change. Boglands and seas both absorb carbon. Forests — through their photosynthetic capacity — also absorb carbon, store it, and turn it into oxygen; woodland contains — and sustains — life. While looking to save nature, nature is also saving us. The poets who wrote mythologies were not making political points. They were making a deeper, more intuitive point. They saw trees as the source of healing for the nations. They were right. And we should listen.