By John Vaillant

Norton, 2005

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

A simple story: Grant Hadwin was an environmental wacko who had a mystical experience and then cut down a sacred tree to protest the logging of old-growth forests. A self-evident subtitle: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed refers to a symbolic tree, a crazed man, and a greedy company. So it would seem.

But The Golden Spruce is anything but simple and self-evident. The spruce had profound meaning to the Haida, a tribe of native Americans who shared a remote Canadian island with the tree. The spruce had a radically different meaning to Hadwin, who saw the tree as a freak show of the logging industry. This environmental tragedy would typically be presented in the facile terms of good-versus-evil to provide readers with immediate moral gratification. However, John Vaillant has given us a rich story filled with authentic ambiguities: a myth without a hero.

If “myth” is a pejorative term for untruths, then this book is laced with myths—which Vaillant debunks. The Haida people, whose ancestors likely inhabited the Queen Charlotte islands during the Pleistocene, have a legacy of ruthless warfare and slavery. The Haida were not tranquil stewards of Eden any more than the European explorers were rapacious fiends of hell. Rather, both were sophisticated, violent, proud, and bigoted people whose myopia sowed the seeds of their own demise.

When the Europeans arrived seeking wealth, the two cultures conspired in “a rapacious festival of unrestrained capitalism” that drove the sea otter to the brink of extinction. And as the Europeans turned from pelts to timber, the Haida greedily joined the fray. When spruce from the Queen Charlottes was found to be ideal for building airplanes during World War I, enough wood was harvested in two years to girdle the earth one-and-a-half times. Throughout the twentieth century, the native people were suspicious of claims that the trees could regenerate fast enough to keep up with the logging, but as a Haida logger admitted, “When you have that job, you forget about everything else for a while.”

Loggers are torn between a reverence for trees and the allure of lumber, and perhaps nobody was more torn than Hadwin. A prep-school refugee, he rejected a life of privilege and embraced logging. With a brilliant mind and a rock-hard body, he could lay out timber cuts and roads with incredible efficiency. More at home among ancient trees than among his contemporaries, Hadwin flourished—for a while. Over time, he sensed ever more deeply the schizophrenic nature of signing death warrants for the forests he loved.

Hadwin’s summary execution of the golden spruce catalyzed the surrounding community. Whereas greed drew together diverse cultures in the 1800s, what united contemporary loggers, Indians, and environmentalists was rage at the perpetrator of botanical butchery. Hadwin was mad, too—incensed and insane. Amid the forests he helped decimate, Hadwin suffered what psychiatrists call a “mystical experience with psychotic features.” But Vaillant asks the hard questions: Was Hadwin’s world view any less sane than the “common tendency to passively accept the abuse of the very systems that keep us alive”? Who is nuts—the reader with the SUV or the mystic with the chainsaw? Is it rational to vilify a man for cutting down a single tree in protest when there is no punishment for those who cut down entire forests for profit? To paraphrase the madman Joseph Stalin: the death of one tree is a tragedy; the death of ten million trees is a statistic.

The Golden Spruce is a wonderfully complex tale, but the book closes with Vaillant falling for the siren song of symbolic simplicity. He draws the obvious parallel between the tree and the Haida: both are being resurrected. The tree persists via scions taken from the felled spruce and grafted onto normal trees. And the Haida endure through off-island assistance and advocacy. However, the missing and more compelling similarity lies between the golden spruce and its killer.

Yellow trees are not terribly rare. The golden spruce was unique because such biologically flawed, chlorotic anomalies do not normally thrive. This tree flourished because the Yakoun River provided an exceptionally rich source of nutrients and an unusual source of light. Reflected from the glassy surface of the water, sunlight bounced upward into the tree. And tucked beneath the golden foliage were green needles that could use the oddly impinging light for photosynthesis. Likewise, Grant Hadwin was a freak, a mentally flawed social anomaly who, for a while, thrived.

Although Vaillant stops short of this interpretation, it seems to me that Hadwin euthanized the golden spruce. He merely finished what we had begun and then escaped authorities by disappearing into the misty waters of Hecate Strait. Perhaps the spruce will survive and maybe Hadwin made it to the coast. But I don’t think so.

With the decimation of the Haida, the tree’s message has become muddled. The elders say that the spruce warns us of hubris, but the spoken parables lose meaning when transferred to written text. And with the loss of Grant Hadwin, we have silenced another message: We can not survive by preserving an icon while destroying the cathedral. Hadwin saw that the once-glorious tree was a pathetic “pet” used by a consumer society to assuage its conscience and mask the hypocrisy of conservation. Hadwin and the Haida both had something to tell us. And we failed to listen. Perhaps one day we will heed the warning issued by Sophocles 2,447 years ago—don’t kill the messenger.

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Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World

By Yvonne Baskin

Island Press, 2005

Reviewed by Margaret Pizer

It’s an assertion that won’t surprise most ecologists—the little things living in the muck below our feet are important to ecosystem function and deserve our attention as conservationists. What is fascinating about Yvonne Baskin’s new book is her detailed description of how this basic idea applies to such a wide range of habitats in such a variety of ways. Baskin investigates the intricate ecological control that small and invisible underground organisms have over the large, charismatic inhabitants of the above-ground world. For example, bioturbating worms and shrimp make muddy marine habitats livable for fish and shellfish, and tiny soil microbes interact with bison, elk, and grass to keep heavily grazed ecosystems in Yellowstone National Park productive. Particularly interesting for conservation practitioners will be Baskin’s encounters with the biologists who, sometimes inadvertently, have become fascinated with underground creatures and who offer compelling scientific arguments for their conservation.

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Marine Conservation Biology: The Science of Maintaining the Sea’s Biodiversity

Edited by Elliott A. Norse and Larry B. Crowder

Island Press, 2005

Reviewed by Jennifer Hoffman

With huge expanses outside national control and with ecosystems that can move hundreds of kilometers in a day, marine environments present distinct conservation challenges. A slew of recent books on marine reserves, sustainable fisheries, and the demise of the oceans has admonished conservationists to get their feet wet. Now Norse and Crowder, veteran marine scientists and conservationists, have brought together information from diverse fields—population biology, policy, pathology, and sociology, to name a few—into a single scholarly book on marine conservation. The book is an excellent synthesis of and entrée into much of the literature; each chapter has an extensive reference list. The book highlights the numerous effects of fishing on marine ecosystems as well as the complex nature of balancing the demands of multiple users. There are some surprising gaps: climate change, nonnutrient pollution, and habitat destruction unrelated to fishing receive no significant attention. Still, this is the most comprehensive treatment of marine conservation to date. To paraphrase the editors: the book isn’t perfect, but it’s a good start toward giving marine conservation the attention it deserves.

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Tigerland and Other Unintended Destinations

By Eric Dinerstein

Island Press, 2005

Reviewed by Beth Duris
In his 30-year career as a conservation biologist, Eric Dinerstein has explored some of the world’s most remote landscapes, from Nepal to Costa Rica to East Africa, in search of rhinos, tigers, snow leopards, and a host of other creatures. As the book’s title implies, his scientific curiosity has sometimes led him in unexpected directions: an eight-week immersion course in the tropical biology of Costa Rica, for instance, transformed a phobia of bats into a study so impassioned that he eventually learned to identify many species just by their smell (“scents of ripe fig, chocolate, and old leather” mark the white-lined fruit bat). What unites all his adventures is an exuberant interest in “wild places and wild things” and a passionate commitment to protecting them. With Tigerland, the World Wildlife Fund’s chief scientist brings considerable storytelling talents to bear on the latter challenge, and it’s likely that more than a few readers will come away from this amusing, readable memoir with a reinvigorated commitment to conservation.

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United Nations Environment Programme, 2005

Reviewed by Margaret Pizer

Ever since Landsat began beaming them back in 1972, satellite images of the earth have awed us with their beauty and given us a new perspective on our planet. This book features paired images of 80 sites from around the world, showing the changes wrought on the earth by human activities over the past 30 years. The images are supplemented with descriptions, graphs, and diagrams illustrating the forces behind the changes shown. But ultimately, the photographs speak for themselves. (The atlas can be downloaded at www.na.unep.net/OnePlanetManyPeople/index.php)

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