One of former President Ronald Reagan’s more
notorious remarks concerned the grand California redwoods. There
was “nothing beautiful about them,” he said, “just that they are a
little higher than the rest.”
An inspiring corrective to
Reagan’s indifference is Richard Preston’s The Wild
Trees. The author of The Hot Zone
follows professional and bare-knuckled gonzo forest ecologists to
the “rain-forest valleys of the North Coast,” where the last
smatterings of redwoods reside. What they find at the tops of these
trees is a previously undiscovered ecosystem of riches.
On the scientific side is Stephen Sillett, now the Kenneth L.
Fisher Chair in Redwood Forest Ecology at Humboldt State University
in Arcata, who employs a rope-climbing method developed by
scientists in the 1970s. At the top of the swaying and often
decaying redwood crowns, Sillett discovers “one of the last unseen
realms of nature on the planet”: Fifty-five different species of
mites, massive fern gardens, the second-largest collection of
“epiphytes – plants that grow on plants – in any forest on earth,”
and a species of salamander previously thought to live only on
terra firma.
While Sillett was tree-walking, the
relentless Michael Taylor, an unconventional naturalist with a fear
of heights, was bushwhacking on the ground through the thick
understory of poison oak, looking for the elusive “Mount Everest of
All Living things”: “He had a strong feeling that the most
inaccessible parts of the redwood forest along the North Coast had
never been thoroughly explored. The world’s tallest living thing
was out there, somewhere, perhaps hidden in a lost valley.”
Taylor and fellow naturalist Chris Atkins would
eventually find that tallest tree, which they named “Hyperion.”
Sillett climbed it and measured its height at 379.1 feet and
growing.
Sillett and company may have just scratched the
surface of the critical importance of deciphering the secrets of
the redwood canopy ecosystem. They estimate the height limit of the
redwood – the world’s tallest plant – to be close to 420 feet. As
Preston notes, with most of this planet’s tallest forests now sadly
gone, the remaining ancient giants – the redwood, Douglas fir and
Australia’s soaring mountain ash – may “reveal clues about how
forests are responding to increasing levels of carbon dioxide
brought on by human activity, and the resulting global warming.”
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and
Daring
Richard Preston
320 pages,
hardcover: $25.95
Random House, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline In search of giant trees and unseen realms.
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