Force Of Nature

摘要

KEN BIBLE STEPS OVER A CARPET OF bracken and vanilla leaf to get closer to the big Douglas fir. He gives its furrowed bark an affectionate slap, as if introducing a prize racehorse. "It's about 70 meters tall and 2.6 meters in diameter," Bible says, leaning back to take in the behemoth stretching above him. From way down here on the shady floor of the forest, he has no hope of seeing all the way to the tree's top. But thanks to a 279-foot-high tower that rises above the trees, Bible, who helps manage this site on behalf of the US Forest Service, has had the chance to know this old Doug from above as well as below. From hundreds of feet up, at canopy level, he says, you begin to get a new vision of the complexity of structure that defines an old forest. "It looks like a mountain range," Bible says. "You've got ridges and peaks and valleys." Singular trees like the big Doug reach high over their neighbors. At around 500 years of age, it isn't the oldest tree in the forest, but a lucky location near a wetland has made it one of the biggest. The Doug is lucky in other ways too. Once upon a time, its particular seed happened to fall from a particular drying cone into what, hundreds of years later, would become a small section of protected old growth inside the Wind River Experimental Forest, a research area in southern Washington state originally created to study the best ways to exploit forests for human use. Just outside the confines of this 1,180-acre remnant of old forest, the trees of the Doug's generation are long gone. Some were killed by fire, others by pests, and others were removed by foresters who, for more than a century, had been using the area as a testing ground in their attempt to find the best ways to turn the great forests of the Northwest into profit.