The Trees Are Speaking
Dispatches from the Salmon Forests
Lynda V. Mapes’s probing nature book The Trees Are Speaking is about North America’s old-growth forests on both coasts, preservation and restoration efforts, and climate change.
Profiling dozens of researchers and activists, including some at Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest and Penobscot leaders restoring forestlands in Maine, the book emphasizes the urgency of preserving old-growth forests. A single stand of trees, it notes, can nurture more than fifteen hundred species. Interviews with ecologists, botanists, biologists, Indigenous elders, and expert tree climbers yield diverse, fascinating perspectives on the health of the forests, their importance to local ecosystems, and their roles in mitigating climate change.
Mapes climbed into the canopy of a four-hundred-year-old, twenty-story-tall Douglas fir near Eugene, Oregon, observing the tree’s complex texture and the diverse mosaic of life it supports. Elsewhere, an encounter on Vancouver Island with a leader of the Mother Tree Project is used to illustrate how scientists gather detailed data on soil quality in pristine forests. In the Northeast, where millions of acres of trees have been clear-cut multiple times over hundreds of years, the focus is on regenerating healthy forests, and Penobscot managers have made remarkable progress in cleaning up industrial pollution and reviving forestlands. The aggressive advance of invasive pests like the hemlock woolly adelgid is also considered.
The prose is crisp and engrossing, and the book includes dozens of photographs of forests and the people working to protect them. It also forwards a realistic assessment of public policy challenges and a discussion of government initiatives like the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1994, which was designed to encourage responsible land use.
The Trees Are Speaking is a timely survey of old-growth forests that are essential to North America’s heritage and key to survival.
Reviewed by
Kristen Rabe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
