The Trees are Speaking: Lynda Mapes’ Dispatches from the Salmon Forests

To be in an old-growth forest is to feel cloaked, as if walking in a living terrarium, padding around a soft kingdom of green. Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and cedars interspersed with bigleaf maples garlanded with ferns and swags of moss are the signatures of these forests. Some of the conifers can persist to great age: Douglas fir to five hundred, eight hundred, and even a thousand years, and redcedar even longer. These trees can tower as much as 250 feet in height and grow to 60 feet around. These are forests with dead and downed logs everywhere. Communities of mosses, tree seedlings, and fungi thrive in this dead wood, which is more alive than the living trees next to it, for sheer biomass. Small mammals, amphibians, birds, and bears all make homes in the cavities of these dead and decaying trees. For old-growth forests are places where everything is alive, even things that supposedly are not—from the rocks cushioned with lichen and moss to the snags and logs teeming with new life.

Jerry Franklin, the eminent forest ecologist and national authority on sustainable forestry practices, with his colleagues, helped reveal much of what we know today about old-growth forests. Over the course of Franklin’s lifetime—he is something of an old-growth tree himself—has been the stuff of breakthroughs, to understand that there is such a thing as an old-growth forest. That this very particular type of forest is without equal, not just a bigger version of a younger forest but unique in its attributes that are only gained over long cadences of time. Here is a diversity of structure and complexity and a completeness that takes centuries to form. Not only the gigantic trees but their shattered and broken tops, their cavities that shelter so much life; their streamers of bark that birds and bugs tuck under, their broad branches for forest birds that make no nest, such as the marbled murrelet, which flies all the way to the sea to provision its young. The flying squirrels and tree voles that thrive in the canopy and the spotted owls that used to—until we cut down so much of these old-growth forests and invited, with our many alterations of the landscape, the invasive barred owl. Here too is so much dead wood, lounging on the forest floor and standing as snags inviting roosting, nesting, and perching animals, and nurse logs, sprouting in their juicy rot a thick fur of tree seedlings. Here is a marvelous diversity of landscape: old-growth forests are not just comprised of big trees but open areas too, where an elder has crashed over, clearing the way for the next generation. There is a lot of food there, in the berries and young surging forest and thriving understory plants.

One day in particular that I spent with Franklin set the direction for this book. We had shared a morning exploring the Cedar Flats Research Natural Area, a spectacular old-growth forest in the southwestern Cascades, a place Franklin had taken students for decades, so textbook perfect is this forest’s splendor and old-growth attributes. Here was everything from the wizened mother cedars silvered with age and splintered tops, spearing the sky, to the Douglas fir with broad branches perfect for a murrelet nest and a trunk wide as a garage door. The delicate forest orchids, lush ferns, and sun shafting through clearings in the canopy and mossy nurse logs. We enjoyed all this together, and then Franklin suggested we take a ride down the road. He wanted to show me something.
Just a short distance from the magnificence of Cedar Flats was a sharp-edged clear-cut, set on the landscape with a surveyor’s precision. The rising green of the old-growth we had just explored could be seen in the distance. But here, where we stood among shattered stumps and searing sun where a few planted trees struggled to live, was an industrial clear-cut, just like so much had already been cut into this landscape.

In a world fraught with climate warming and species on the verge of extinction, Franklin said, this was the kind of thing we should not be doing any more. Places like this—doing nothing for biodiversity, for carbon sequestration, for water management, for growing the old-growth of tomorrow. No more farms like these should be made from natural forests anywhere, he said, and certainly no more old-growth anywhere should be lost. I was startled. The impetus for this book project, what I thought I was doing, shifted.

Under the hot sun in that cut-up landscape, my work of exploring old-growth forests, and their beautiful dynamics, also became a hard learning of the history of how we’ve lost so much of them. In addition to blowing up the topic, I exploded the geography. I had intended to journey the Pacific Northwest’s drip line of old-growth forests and be done. That didn’t happen. I could not help it, after the disruptive and perhaps inevitable experience of confronting the old-growth forests of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia—and seeing how little remains. On the United States side of the US-Canada border was a mother lode of big trees, fully a quarter of the old-growth left in this country. On both sides of that border, alongside the soaring grandeur, were tatters. Amid Native knowledge systems of sustained intergenerational management, where did the wholly alien idea come from to cut down—to annihilate—the living wealth of these forests and send it somewhere else for the mere ephemera of money?

The book therefore became a witness not only to the incredible ecological and cultural values of these forests but to the connected history of their loss, beginning on the East Coast in Maine and repeated across the United States and continuing over the border into Canada, even today. Along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts this was a ransacking of forests by people who had already cut down the forests of Europe. They arrived first along the northeastern coast of what is now the United States, timber-famished on verdant shores, claimed Native lands as their own, and set to them with saw and plow. By the time Captain James Cook showed up in 1778 at Friendly Cove on Nootka Sound, in what would become British Columbia, the logging of Maine’s old-growth white pine forests had been underway since the first cutting on Monhegan Island in the 1600s. Bangor, Maine, was well on its way to becoming the world’s largest lumber port. Much of New England had been cleared for agriculture or cut over before the US Civil War, before Washington was even a state.

On foot, by boat, by seaplane, by logging road and bushwhack, in the salmon forests of both coasts, I sought this story. I explored miles of forestlands, some cut to bits, some still intact, whole and wondrously alive, from the crowns of five-hundred-year-old trees to the depths of their interconnected roots. I talked with scientists, Native Americans, First Peoples, historians, loggers, and activists. I climbed a four-hundred-year-old Douglas fir, probed the sagas of salmon, Pacific and Atlantic, and rivers both dammed and finally running free. The only spotted owls I saw were stuffed. I witnessed forests in Oregon aflame that had not burned in five hundred years. I grieved just-logged old-growth trees on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, their stumps still wet with sap and wide enough to lay across.

Exploring all of this, I witnessed much that saddened me. But I also met brave people of every sort, deeply committed to healing their home. It was there, with them, even amid the unsolved problems and gnawing questions, that I felt hope. Neither they nor I can offer a sunbeam-gilded path to fixing it all. But I found people unafraid to create ways to persist in their chosen home. Their stories raised uncomfortable questions about this, our cutover land, in the four hundredth year of our unplanned experiment with the commodification of everything—even one another. The glorious salmon on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and all their cohorts—herring, lamprey, and all the rest—are gifts as gorgeous and essential as the forests that shelter and nurture them. Despite everything we have done to them, they are still here. So are Native Americans and First Nations people, many with knowledge of how to live among these landscapes that others among us didn’t even know to miss.

In this moment there is much work to do and even, to be sure, much to dread. But there’s also this, from which to take inspiration: the immense capacity for renewal within the lands and waters themselves. For here is the thing: if enough of their biological legacies are protected, and natural processes are allowed to revive, rivers and forests and the life they nurture can renew themselves. Emerge, along with us humans, to a new start. I saw it. I know this capacity for renewal to be true. As we confront biological impoverishment and climate catastrophe, this restorative power is what we must unleash. We must fix what we can, make space for Nature to renew, and stop wrecking more.

Lynda V. Mapes covers environmental and Indigenous issues for the Seattle Times. Her books include Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak and Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home, winner of the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award and the 2021 Washington State Book Award for nonfiction. Her journalism has earned numerous prestigious awards, including the international 2019 and 2012 Kavli gold award for science journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also an associate of the Harvard Forest of Harvard University, in Petersham, MA.
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Excerpted with permission from The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests by Lynda V. Mapes. © University of Washington Press.