“The Trees Are Speaking” by Lynda V. Mapes
University of Washington Press – 248 pp - $29.95

In her new book, “The Trees Are Speaking,” environmental journalist Lynda V. Mapes makes an eloquent and urgent plea for the preservation of old-growth forests and the thoughtful restoration of deeply damaged, formerly forested lands.

Subtitled “Dispatches from the Salmon Forests,” this narrative begins by focusing on the tattered “green forest cloak,” as Mapes calls it, that runs along the western Cascade Mountain range.

Traveling between the Cedar Flats Research Natural Area downslope of Mt. St. Helens, to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene, and up to Nootka Island just off the west coast of Vancouver Island, Mapes considers the old-growth parcels that have managed to endure in the face of what she calls “freewheeling commerce and a cooked climate” – more than a century of rampant logging and now, an existential threat that some of our policy-makers have even yet to acknowledge: climate change.

The author consults with both scientists and Indigenous activists about the value of combining long-held traditional principles, such as the Nuchatlaht First Nation’s concept of hishuk-ish tsa’walk (everything is connected) with recent academic research by the likes of Jerry Franklin, Suzanne Simard and other Northwest ecosystem experts. They are in accord about the importance of deepening our understanding of the old-growth forests that remain and protecting them from further heedless human exploitation.

Mapes adroitly outlines the vital linkages that have been discovered between salmon, the embodied marine-derived nutrients they bring back to their home streams, and how that fortifies not just the wildlife that consumes them, but also winds up in the DNA of the trees themselves.

These “gorgeous interrelationships,” Mapes reminds us, are “refined over thousands of years of coevolution.”

But when we mess with the intricacies of the ecosystem by clear-cutting forests, burning slash heaps, and planting single-species tree farms, and when we further complicate that by damming rivers, installing insufficient culverts for salmon-bearing creeks, and introducing non-native pathogens – the sustainability of the entire ecosystem is imperiled.

To make her point, Mapes travels across the continent to the North Maine Woods, where centuries of logging have taken place, resulting in mono-crop tree farms and the associated side effects: soil loss, reduction of carbon-sink capacity, and the almost total loss of once-abundant native tree species (chestnut, elm, beech) that couldn’t withstand the accumulated disruptions.

The building of mills to process that timber also led to the straightening, damming and pollution of the Penobscot River and its tributaries, endangering a once-thriving Atlantic salmon run.

Yet a shift in awareness is occurring. Logging concerns, which now have only much younger, smaller trees to cut, are changing their practices out of necessity. Many mills have gone out of business, which is opening up opportunities for river restoration.

“The Trees Are Talking” demonstrates the living miracle of old-growth forests in the first place.

Writing with journalistic precision and poetic passion, Maple tells us that “every tree writes its autobiography” – in tree rings.

“These are epic memoirs, told in the quietest of voices: the cores of old-growth trees.” 

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com