Dendrochronology

One August day ten years ago, my husband and I attended a celebration in Haida Gwaii, an island chain in British Columbia up near the Alaska border. It marked the anniversary of a historic agreement between the Canadian government and the Haida people to protect some of their last remaining ancient forests from being clear-cut. To honor the occasion, a new totem pole would be erected.

Our friend Doug had invited us to tag along with him on this trip. As the owner of a fine art gallery in Vancouver that represents Indigenous artists, he has spent a lifetime building relationships with members of the Haida Nation. I, meanwhile, was arriving in a state of almost pure ignorance. Like many Canadians, basically all that I knew about Haida Gwaii was that it was home to large expanses of old-growth rainforest and to an Indigenous people who, for many thousands of years, had been sculpting trees into masterful works of art. The site of the totem pole raising was called Gwaii Haanas, “The Islands of Beauty.” It seemed to me a fitting name, since it was the promise of great beauty—botanical, cultural, and, most importantly, the intertwining of those two—that drew me up north.

That morning, down at the docks in the village of Daajing Giids, my husband and I stepped on board a Zodiac and rode out across a jade sea. We both wore thick, green rubberized overalls and matching knee-length coats, like Alaskan king crab fishermen. The rain gear, which was foisted on us by our grey-bearded boat captain, turned out to be overkill: the sky was cloudy but dry; the sea spray, minimal. After less than twenty minutes, off the port bow, the captain pointed out the black, smooth, shiny bladed backs of three orcas arcing above the water. We all shouted and pointed and reached for our phones, but by the time we got them out, the moment had passed and the orcas were gone.

What I remember most vividly from that boat ride, though, was not the whales. It was a remarkably ugly hunk of land we passed known as Talunkwan Island, the hillsides of which were scarred with bare rock and black earth. Shouting over the wind, the captain explained that it had been logged so recklessly in the 1970s that ever since it had remained caught in a vicious cycle of landslides, since no plant roots had been left to hold the soil. One writer later dubbed Talunkwan “the worst environmental horror show in British Columbia.” The island’s name had even entered the common parlance: when a mountainous forest has been particularly devastated, it is said to have been “Talunkwanized.”

Much of the Haida archipelago had been similarly ravaged—the trees cut down, sliced apart or ground up, transformed into timber and paper, and then into money, most of which, like the timber products, flowed out of the islands to people who lived elsewhere. The scars of decades of this reckless style of logging were visible to us from our Zodiac as we bounced over the waves. (More—vastly more—was hidden from view.)

Reckless deforestation provides our most potent mythic image of how, in order to enrich ourselves in the present, we steal from the past and impoverish the future: trees that took centuries to grow are cut down in days or weeks, after which, through erosion or overgrazing or nonregenerative farming, the land degrades into a kind of wasteland. The sight of an old-growth forest razed to the ground, never to regrow, is disturbing to even the most hardened among us; I once spoke to a logger who, when suddenly faced with the sight of a clear-cut, broke down in tears. As the poet and composer Cliff Crego writes, “Conservation is a way of dealing with Nature’s basic asymmetry: that growth is slow, and destruction fast.”

At a certain point, our boat crossed an invisible boundary and the clear-cuts abruptly stopped. The captain announced that we had crossed the border of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve. He steered the boat into a cove at a place called Hlk’yah G̱awG̱a (Windy Bay). Hundreds of people were already gathered on the long rocky beach. We mingled among them. Our friend introduced us to some of the artists he represented, many of whom were in attendance. The mood was bright. An older Haida woman, who had just stepped off a little fishing boat, seated herself at the edge of the crowd, reached into a plastic bucket, and began pulling out spiny purple sea urchins. One by one she cracked them open with a knife, scooped out little orange clouds of quivering flesh, and offered them all around. I had tasted urchin only once, years before, in a sushi restaurant in Chicago, and found it repulsive: it had a flavor like tomalley and a texture like some kind of industrial by-product. But the woman was insistent, so nervously, I accepted a morsel and placed it on my tongue, where it melted into a sweet, briny, catarrhal richness—a distillate of pure ocean. I audibly swooned. The woman smiled.

There was an hour left before the totem pole raising, so Remi and I decided to go for a short hike, following a path lined with white seashells up into the forest. Noticing how soft the ground was, Remi took off his shoes, and urged me to take off mine. It had been a warm autumn day out on the beach, but amid the widely spaced trees the air was cool and damp. A shin-deep layer of moss covered everything—the ground, the rocks, even the branches of the trees—as if the whole place had begun to sprout a winter coat of thick green fur. In The Golden Spruce, John Vaillant describes the strange, almost magical sense of time these forests can inspire in newcomers. “You have the feeling that if you stop for too long, you will simply be grown over and absorbed by the slow and ancient riot of growth going on all around you,” he writes.

After walking less than a mile we reached the base of an enormous Sitka spruce. We fell silent, craning our necks to take in its full scope. I rested my hand on the knobby hide of its trunk. It felt geologic, both in scale and solidity. I later learned it was estimated to be about nine hundred years old. Hugging it, I suddenly felt like a child. If I multiplied myself by seven, even all seven of me could not have wrapped our arms around it.

A funny feeling overtook me. I looked around less in awe than in a kind of quiet perplexity. Having spent the past few days in the antiseptic, linear confines of airports and hotels, this forest struck me, in a preconscious kind of way, as remarkably messy. The shattered, bleached trunks of old cedars stood like ruined columns. Fallen trees lay everywhere, dissolving to dirt, and from them sprung rows of new saplings. An uncountable number of mosses, lichens, and fungi grew into and out of and over one another on the forest floor.

Looking around, I tried to take it all in with an artist’s eye. How would I paint such a scene? How would I describe it in words? The forest quickly began to overwhelm me. The closer one looked at any one thing, the more intricate it became, down to an infinite degree. And there were a seemingly infinite number of these infinitely complex things, in infinitely complex arrangements with one another. My eyes blurred; I was lost in a kind of green fog.

If we had walked into a house that looked this way, the sheer entropy on display would have horrified us. I could almost understand the impulse among foresters to wipe it clean and replace it with geometric rows of fast-growing pines or firs. But I had read enough forest ecology to know that this chaotic arrangement of forms—a density and diversity of shapes, sizes, and shades that no painter would ever even attempt to capture—belied a deeper order. I was looking not at a site of decay, but of growth—the luxuriant, slow accumulation of something at once resilient and frighteningly fragile.

While writing my first book, I had run across the fact that the east coast of the United States contains more forest coverage today than it did one hundred years ago, because so many old farms had been converted into forest land. “The only thing more beautiful than an ancient wilderness is a new one,” I’d written. I was trying to sound hopeful, forward-looking, counterintuitive. Now, I realized how foolish those words had been. There is nothing more beautiful than an ancient forest. It contains all the future a new forest does, plus the benefit of a deep past. We cannot plant it. Yes, we can steward it—as the Haida have stewarded this very forest—but, by its nature, temporally, spatially, and even conceptually, it exceeds us.

I realized that day, with a sense of retroactive sadness, that I had been to forests larger than this one, simply in terms of area, but I had never been in a forest this visibly full of time, which is to say, of uninterrupted growth. My mind was too small for it.

“We can never know time,” declares Nabokov in Ada. “Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it.” Instead, we are forced to access it indirectly, through technology—clocks, calendars, hashmarks carved into a prison wall. Standing there on Gwaii Haanas, the thought had begun to sprout in me: perhaps the conduits through which we perceive time shape our perception of it, and perhaps that perception shapes our lives.

What would our culture look like, I wondered, if in addition to marking time through calendars, we marked it through the growth and decay of trees? Trees, after all, are exceedingly time-ful beings: they record the passing of the years in their rings, mark the changing of the seasons with their leaves, trace the passage of the sun with their shade, and perhaps most importantly, span the distance between human generations.

In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit writes:

Reading this passage, I was reminded of a news story I once read about a very old but partially rotted maple tree on Vancouver Island that was slated to be cut down so that a parking lot could be repaved. In protest, a woman climbed into the branches of the tree and chained herself to the trunk. Others gathered around the base, supporting her in her vigil. One protester said that he had a special attachment to the tree because he had met his wife beneath it. “I don’t care if I have to sit in this tree for the rest of my damn life,” he said. “My son’s going to find his wife here same as I found mine.”

Trees live inside our memory, and we, increasingly, live inside theirs. The science of dendrochronology is, simply put, the study of tree rings; the succession of growth patterns from each year can be “read” in order to intuit data about past epochs. (It was in pursuit of such data that, in 1964, a man famously cut down a gnarled bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, only to find that it was more than 4,900 years old; he had unwittingly cut down the oldest known tree on Earth.) One of the disturbing findings of recent climate science is the degree to which we are now being perceived by the trees; all around the world, the warmer climate we’ve created in the past century is clearly represented in the width of their rings.

To divine the age of a tree, you typically take a “core sample” by drilling into the trunk. As the drill bit moves from the bark toward the heartwood, it moves backwards in time, from the newest tissues to the oldest. Most people know this. What many people do not know is that, in addition to these vertically aligned networks of tissues (which are used to transport water and nutrients up and down the trunk), trees also maintain a series of horizontal tubes, known as ray cells, which hold the vertical tissues together and transport fluids from the outer tissues of the tree to the inner ones—across time, as it were. So while trees divide time into discrete segments—years, decades, centuries—they also complicate those easy demarcations by allowing the present and past to bleed over to one another. Likewise, when one walks into an old-growth forest, the past becomes not just tangible—as it does in the presence of an old castle—but vitally present.

By the time we returned to the beach, the final preparations were being made to raise the totem pole. We watched the carvers making tiny, last-minute adjustments with their chisels. Once erected, it would be very difficult to make any more changes, so everything had to be just right. I wondered how long this particular pole would survive before it began to decompose. Fifty years? One hundred? Perhaps longer. Hilary Stewart writes that, because red cedars generate a toxic oil called thujaplicin that wards off rot, “the wood of a fallen tree often remains sound for a hundred years after it has fallen.” The pole’s lead carver, Jaalen Edenshaw, told me that, with a bit of care, a totem pole could easily exceed two hundred years. But they aren’t meant to stand forever, like marble statues. “The life cycle of a pole is like the life cycle of a tree,” the carver said. “It will be raised and it will come down.”

While we inspected the totem pole from a polite distance, our friend pointed out the finer points in the design. The object itself was gorgeous—a mammoth work of art carved from a single trunk, using the classic shapes known as formline, where one image is nested within another, which is bent around the next, much like the knots and rings in a crosscut of burl wood.

A Haida totem pole is meant to be “read” from the bottom to the top. It typically tells the story of a family’s history and clan affiliation, but this pole, Doug explained, told a more complex tale about the unique ecology and heritage of this place. It featured certain iconic figures—an eagle, a raven, a grizzly bear, a dog, a sea wolf, an earth-shaker, and a sculpin—but near the bottom of the pole was an unusual symbol: a row of five human figures standing together, wearing gumboots. These were meant to represent the Haida protesters who, in 1985, stood arm-in-arm on logging roads, in defiance of the police, to save this forest from being clear-cut. In 1993, the Haida and Canadian nations reached a truce: the federal government created a national park, which, uniquely in Canada, was controlled by a board made up of an equal number of Haida and federal employees. Along with park rangers, the land is now stewarded by Indigenous men and women, known as Watchmen and Guardians.

The Anishinaabe critic Gerald Vizenor, borrowing from Derrida, has written about a concept he calls survivance—a word that evokes the combination of “survival,” a barebones form of existence, with more expansive notions like “resistance” and “remembrance.” “Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion,” he writes. The Haida totem pole is a shining symbol of this concept. In the 1830s, the arrival of white traders introduced smallpox to these islands, which would eventually decimate the Haida population. As villages stood newly empty, their totem poles tilted, fell, and decomposed. In later decades, missionaries encouraged the Haida to burn their remaining poles. (According to one Haida elder, Joe Weir, the missionaries told them, “If they don’t get rid of these totem poles, you never go to heaven.”) At the same time, Haida children were stolen away to residential schools, where they were forced to forget their language and traditions. Many valuable poles were crated up and shipped off to faraway museums, where they were featured as curios of a bygone past. And yet, through all of that, the Haida managed to maintain their artistic traditions, and then, with the “Haida Renaissance” in the 1950s, to radically innovate upon those traditions. Today, Haida works are sold around the world. They are featured in art museums as well as museums of anthropology and precolonial history. A single totem pole by a renowned artist, Doug informed me, could sell for as much as a million dollars. Works of Haida art now stand in positions of prominence all over the island, including in a newly opened modernist-style heritage center located on an ancient village site known as Ḵay ‘Llnagaay (“Sea-Lion Town”), which Remi and I later spent an afternoon wandering through, marveling at its wonders, large and small.

The colonial powers had done everything they could to eradicate the Haida totem pole and all that it stood for. So it was especially poignant that today, under Haida leadership, for the first time in 130 years, a new totem pole was being raised on Gwaii Haanas.

Before the totem pole could be erected, a cleansing ceremony needed to be performed. An elder woman sprinkled water over the pole to purify it. Then a man wearing a grotesque mask and a coat of green ferns, depicting Gaagixiit—the wild man of lore who, in various tellings, either wandered off into the woods or fell into the sea and subsequently went feral—danced to menace away malevolent spirits.

By now, a crowd of hundreds had gathered on the beach. It included the future prime minister, Justin Trudeau, then in his early forties, a strikingly youthful man with tousled dark hair. At the time, he was already famous as a member of Parliament and as the son of a previous prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. He wore a tiny, porcelain smile—the expression one naturally acquires when one has spent one’s entire life being looked at by strangers. He was dressed in a green safari-style jacket, complete with epaulets; underneath that jacket, hidden from view, on his left deltoid, was a tattoo of a Haida raven, drawn in formline. The garbled yet instantly familiar semiotics of those two expressions, taken together—colonial-style jacket, Indigenous-style body art—more or less encapsulated his whole vibe.

The hour finally arrived. We bystanders were ordered to grab hold of one of six ropes attached to the top of the pole. A Haida elder orchestrated our movements. With a cry of “Ho!” we pulled and the pole rose, leaning slightly to the left; the elder shouted orders; we adjusted; and then the pole fell into its hole with a satisfying thunk. A cheer rose through the crowd.

Afterward, I stood off to the side and watched Jaalen, the lead carver, give an interview to a TV camera, with red paint daubed on his cheeks, a woven cedar bark hat on his head, and a leather medicine pouch hanging around his neck. His father is Guujaaw, the leader of the protest movement that ultimately protected these forests, as well as a skilled carver. “It’s such a powerful moment, watching the pole go up,” he said. “It shows that our way of life is continuing.”

Before we left Haida Gwaii, we were invited to attend a traditional feast, held in a local gymnasium. Seafood stew was served, speeches were given, songs sung, dances danced. In all, the festivities lasted more than five hours. Guujaaw made the night’s final speech. Amid warm words of gratitude for those who fought alongside him to save Gwaii Haanas and fiery denunciations of corporate capitalism, he paused to thank his ancestors, both human and supernatural. “The people that are described in our stories are as real as us mortals, and they have been here on this fight,” he said. “And all our old relatives, they all meant so much to this battle. Everything that happened, happened beyond us.”

At the end of the feast, a woman in a red and black button blanket walked around and handed each of us a cedar sapling, wrapped in clear plastic. We were instructed to take it home, plant it somewhere, and care for it. Before our flight home, we swaddled the tree in loose clothes and placed it in our checked luggage. Fearing the tree would die before we made it home—which would involve another day of travel by land and by sea—we went to Stanley Park, an incongruous pocket of wild forest amid Vancouver’s sea of cold blue-green towers, and planted it beside a running trail, in an act of what might be called guerrilla gardening. Our sapling stands not far from an array of totem poles, including a mortuary pole from Haida Gwaii, and flags commemorating the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, upon whose unceded territory the park, and the city around it, lies.

Each time we pass through the city, we make a point of visiting our little tree. In dry summers, we fill our baseball caps from a nearby drinking fountain and water its roots; in winter, we prune back encroaching shrubs to give it an edge over its neighbors. Even with all of our care—which we selfishly lavish upon it, to the exclusion of all the plants around it—our little Haida cedar still grows with excruciating patience. Ten years later, it is no taller than my knee.

When you really care about a tree, you are forced to consider hard questions about its future. I often wonder how tall this tree will be when I die. If it lives to see one thousand years, which red cedars can do, what will the city around it look like? Will all those glittering glass towers still be standing then?

If I had to bet on which will last longer, the towers or the trees, I would sadly put my money on the towers. Red cedars are especially susceptible to the hotter, drier summers that are increasingly becoming the norm in the Pacific Northwest. Stefan Zeglen, a forest pathologist who works for the provincial government, has predicted that the red cedar is “the first well-known species that’s likely to disappear” due to prolonged drought.

A similarly dark thought has passed through my mind in regard to our ancient forests: how much warming can these old forests survive? Oddly, though, such thoughts do not drive me to a state of paralyzed despair. Instead, they urge me to think and act on a bolder scale than I otherwise would. We are long past the illusion that we can stop global warming just by preserving forests. Now, as the warming climate incinerates ever more trees each year (releasing yet more carbon into the atmosphere, fueling yet more warming), we know that the equation is reversed: in order to save our forests, we must solve the problem of climate chaos.

Faced with the ultra-long-term effects of industrial pollution, some environmental philosophers have begun arguing that we need to extend our ethical obligations outward into “deep time,” which is to say, planning on the timescale of geology. Call me small-minded, but I find this concept somewhat too grandiose. With certain extreme exceptions (like the storage of nuclear waste), there is a reason why the adage holds that we should plan for the next seven generations to come, rather than the next seven hundred or seven thousand. As the philosopher Stefan Skrimshire notes in an essay on the ethics of long-view thinking, at a certain point, the existence of life on Earth becomes purely theoretical: if you make sacrifices on behalf of humans (and other species) many millennia in the future, you may be trying to serve beings that have already gone extinct. Building upon the work of Derek Parfit, he writes, “We ought not to be expected to care for those in 10,000 years’ time as much as we do those in 100 years’ time.”

Compassion radiates outward, organically, both in time and space; it can be widened to encompass strangers in other countries and future generations, but, unless one is a bodhisattva, it cannot be extended infinitely in all directions. It is worth noting that the lifespan of seven generations is equal to about 150 years. The average lifespan of a tree in an old-growth temperate rainforest, like those here in British Columbia, is 300 years. Those are time frames my mind can—just barely—begin to wrap itself around. The oldest tree in the province, a yellow cedar that was cut down in 1980, was 1,835 years old. Within that time frame, I have trouble envisioning what the future will look like. But it is very easy to envision that tree.

As someone with no kids, I often feel shut out of the public discourse about the future, which often centers on leaving behind a habitable planet for “our children and grandchildren.” I care, intellectually, about future generations, just as I care about strangers I will never meet, but the quality of that caring is not nearly as emotionally sharp as the care I feel for the people I know and love. But whether we have kids or not, the saeculum of trees creates a tangible bridge to future worlds—trees that I can touch today will exist long after I die, in a way no human will—and that fact forces me to feel truths I might otherwise only intellectualize.

Why does it pain me to picture the forests of Gwaii Haanas burning to ash in two hundred years’ time? I don’t worry that those trees will suffer. I do worry about overall damage to the ecosystem, and the animals that depend on them, but only somewhat abstractly. Most of all, if I am being totally honest, what pains me is the thought of the beauty that will be lost. One might argue that this is a petty reason, since it is based upon something as flimsy as mere aesthetics. But beauty functions by entwining us with the object of our appreciation. And when the source of something’s beauty stems from its age and perdurability, we then become emotionally tied up with its future. The horror we feel at the notion of clear-cutting an ancient forest—or bombing a museum, or burning a library full of rare books, or whitewashing the Lascaux Caves—nicely illustrates Wittgenstein’s maxim that “ethics and aesthetics are one.” Put plainly, we often speak of wanting to leave behind a healthy, functioning planet for beings not yet born, but we should not be afraid to also speak of leaving behind something beautiful, as well.

Historically, the image of future generations growing up with no ancient trees to enjoy has been one of the most potent images the environmental movement has drawn upon to combat the myopia of shifting baselines syndrome, the psychological theory describing how we perpetually normalize the ecological present and forget the past. In 2020, here in Canada—one of the world’s most carbon polluting countries per capita—a protest movement sprang up on Vancouver Island, in a place called Fairy Creek, to stop the logging of an intact old-growth watershed. The number of peaceful protesters who have been arrested there, totaling more than a thousand, far outstrips that of any other moment of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Fossil fuels still have us in their grip (for now). But old trees do, too—and I suspect they will continue to, long after we have weaned ourselves off of our addiction to oil.

A Pacheedaht elder named Bill Jones, who has gained national recognition as a leader at the protests in Fairy Creek, fights to preserve the old-growth forests on his ancestral land in part because of the land’s special relationship to time. “The forest,” he said, “is a place where our spirits, from the past, present, and future flow through each other.” This idea, which was passed down to Jones by his grandfather, is difficult for me to grasp. I don’t believe in the existence of spirits, and I was not raised within the Pacheedaht culture. But when I look at his statement through the lens of the land itself, it starts to make sense. In a forest like the one I walked through on Gwaii Haanas, you can touch a tree that was alive five hundred years ago, which is still alive today, and which might be alive five hundred years in the future. When one considers what to do with that tree, whether to cut it down or leave it standing, how much respect to afford it, the past, present, and future are tightly interwoven. This revelation—which feels somewhat remote and mystical on the page—is surprisingly easy to access on the ground. One need only go for a walk in the woods.