The writer TC Boyle (whose novels include The Tortilla Curtain, a story about walls and immigration that Donald Trump might benefit from reading) spends several months every year in the Giant Sequoia National Monument in California, a park containing the only extant groves of the world’s largest tree. There’s a mountain there that he’s come to consider his own. “Note the possessive. It’s not actually mine — it belongs to all of the citizens of the US and, beyond that, to all the citizens of the world — but it holds such a powerful grip on me that I can’t really think of it in democratic terms.” In The Guardian, he explains why.