In Search of the Canary Tree Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Lauren E. Oakes

  Cover design by Rebecca Lown

  Cover illustration by Nancy Diamond

  Cover copyright © 2018 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: November 2018

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  Part I epigraph from Rachel L. Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1956). Reprinted by permission of Frances Collin, Trustee. Part II epigraph from David Wagoner, “Lost,” in Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Copyright 1999 by David Wagoner. Used with permission of University of Illinois Press. Part III epigraph from Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Copyright 1994 by Howard Zinn. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Oakes, Lauren, author.

  Title: In search of the canary tree: the story of a scientist, a cypress, and a changing world / Lauren E. Oakes; illustrations by Kate Cahill & cartography by Erik Steiner.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Basic Books, Hachette Book Group, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018032911| ISBN 9781541697126 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541617421 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ecologists—Biography. | Oakes, Lauren.

  Classification: LCC QH31.O25 O25 2018 | DDC 577.092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032911

  ISBNs: 978-1-5416-9712-6 (hardcover); 978-1-5416-1742-1 (ebook)

  E3-20181009-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I THE SLOW BURN

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 Ghosts and Graveyards

  CHAPTER 2 Stand Still

  CHAPTER 3 Fear and Forests in a Changing Climate

  CHAPTER 4 Solving Puzzles

  CHAPTER 5 Countdown

  PART II BIRDSONG

  CHAPTER 6 Thrive

  CHAPTER 7 Coveted

  CHAPTER 8 Apart and a Part

  CHAPTER 9 Saturation Point

  PART III TOMORROW

  CHAPTER 10 Measured and Immeasurable

  CHAPTER 11 The Greatest Opportunity

  CHAPTER 12 The Sentinels

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Further Reading

  Notes

  Index

  For John,

  who fell in love with these forests

  and spent his life immersed in them;

  And you, little one,

  I tried to write quickly for you.

  Callitropsis nootkatensis.

  A truly noble tree,… undoubtedly the best the country affords, and one of the most valuable to be found on the Pacific coast… [W]hen these have reached the age of several hundred years the down-trodden trunk, when cut into, will be found as fresh at the heart as when it fell.

  —JOHN MUIR, 1882

  The Alexander Archipelago off the southeastern coast of Alaska. Boxes indicate general areas for research conducted in Parts I, II, and III.

  Detailed map for locations referenced in Part I. Light shading shows forests unaffected by the widespread yellow-cedar mortality. Dark shading reveals forests affected. (Data collected by the United States Forest Service.)

  Prologue

  I CAME TO Alaska looking for hope in a graveyard. Ice melting, seas rising, longer droughts—in a world seemingly on fire, I chose to put myself in some of the worst of it. The Alexander Archipelago in Southeast Alaska is a collection of thousands of islands in one of the scarce pockets remaining on this planet where thick moss blankets the forest floor and trees range from tiny seedlings to ancient giants. But I wasn’t loading into that Cessna four-seater to look for fairy-tale forests of spruce, hemlock, and cedar. I was flying in search of the forests I’d study—the graveyards of standing dead trees and the plants I so wanted to believe could tell me, through science, that maybe the world is not coming to an end.

  I tightened the seatbelt, tugged the straps on my orange lifejacket, and slipped the headphones over my ears to dampen the whir of the Cessna’s engine. Avery, our pilot, flipped a few switches, and then the audio crackled into static.

  “Let’s check the sound,” he said.

  “Pretty clear,” Paul reported from the copilot seat. “I can hear you.”

  “Got you both,” Ashley confirmed to my left.

  “Good to go,” I said, swinging my camera off to one side so I could see the laminated maps on my lap.

  I was five days away from spending the summer measuring dead and dying trees on the remote outer coast, where winds whip and whirl and ocean swells slam against the rocky shores. We were flying for science and flying for field logistics; I needed to finalize the practical stuff before it was really go time. The flight was supposed to confirm my sampling strategy for the forests with the two far more senior researchers present—Dr. Paul Hennon, a forest pathologist, and Dr. E. Ashley Steel, a statistician, both with the United States Forest Service. Any last decisions we made would determine the shape of my study—everything from which trees I included to the analyses I’d run years later. I could spend a summer on the coast and come back without enough data for statistical power. I could crunch my data for a year or two, and then realize I hadn’t collected all the data I needed to answer the research questions, that something was missing.

  The species is Callitropsis nootkatensis. (Botanists still argue over its genus, but more on that later.) Some people call it the Alaska cedar. Others call it the yellow cypress, or the Nootka cypress, named after Nootka Sound along Vancouver Island, where it was first botanically documented.1 Alaskans use the name yellow-cedar, but really, a name is just a name. What mattered to me from the beginning was that these trees are long-lived, and that, though they are coveted for their golden wood, and culturally revered for their majestic and mysterious ways, they are dying in our warming world.

  “Get ready to soak it in,” Ashley said as the floats lifted from the water. She wiggled her knees in anticipation. The plane swooped around to head west, and I watched the bright blue glacier outside Juneau shrink into the distant landscape.

  Basecamps, I thought. Eyes open for good basecamps—coves far from creeks to avoid the bears; big, sloping beaches for boat and plane landings. Safety was a legitimate concern out there. I could get stranded by a turn in weather, r
un out of food, or startle a bear, inadvertently inciting an attack.

  “Think stratified random sample,” Ashley said, snapping me back to scientific protocols.

  Two years into graduate school, I was finally accustomed to translating science. Stratified—meaning I needed forest sites I could categorize into specific groups based on the presence and severity of the tree death. Random—meaning I needed a way to select sites that could give every patch of forest an equal shot at getting picked.

  Patches, I thought, simplifying things. We’re looking for the large patches of dead trees.

  I looked down at the sea of whitecaps and wondered what we’d face in the months ahead. Then, after squinting at the green in an attempt to differentiate the tree species, I took the lens cap off my camera to snap a few photographs. I waited patiently and scanned the passing coastline for the cypress. Despite how much I had prepared, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into—scientifically, physically, or emotionally.

  In the maps I held, I’d traced black lines around the dead trees from various datasets. The plan was to fly over them. I’d confirm they were there in reality (and not just in pixels), dead by the telltale signs—brown foliage and leafless branches, limbs lost to decay. Then eventually—one week, two weeks, or even seven weeks later—I’d reach a subset of them by foot and kayak with my crew to measure the dead and dying and whatever we found still green.

  We had about thirty minutes until the plane reached Chichagof Island—the place where I really needed to pay attention. Testing my skills, I followed our flight path on the pilot’s screen, trying to match our location with the maps on my lap and then verify with the view below. I managed to keep up for a solid ten minutes, not because I was skilled at the task, but because we flew mostly over water. Pretty soon I was totally lost, unable to reorient from the screen, the maps, or the view, and feeling nauseous.

  I reached up and opened the small vent beside the window, angling the air toward me. Ashley’s face looked pale.

  “How ya feeling back there?” Avery asked through the audio crackle.

  “Just fine. Little air seems nice,” I said, hoping to avoid any mockery.

  “Like vomiting,” Ashley reported. “And I don’t see any patches yet.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply to calm the queasiness. When I finally opened them again, confident I wouldn’t hurl, I didn’t need to look at the maps or the screen to know where we were.

  “Whooaaaaaaa,” I exclaimed into the headset. We were flying across a long, narrow artery of salt water running into the forested land. “Peril Strait,” I said.

  “We’re in the heart of it now,” Paul declared. He sounded almost proud.

  To the left, the verdant coastline broke off into inlets and side channels. To my right, I could see the steep hillsides covered in white skeletons of dead trees—standing on end like telephone poles, leafless ghosts of the towering cypress. Boulder-sized rocks on the beaches looked like little specks in relation to the large tracks of terrain with dying trees, the canopies of foliage in faded sepia tone.

  I had been so focused on building a sound scientific study that wouldn’t get me or my crew killed that I hadn’t given much thought to what I would feel when I first saw the dead. From the bird’s-eye view, the giant trunks looked like thousands of toothpicks stuck in the earth. If trees were people, anyone would have called it a tragedy—an epidemic running rampant throughout the community in the largest remaining coastal temperate rainforest on Earth.2 I felt the tiny hairs on my forearms rise.

  Sampling, I thought, attempting to return to the task at hand.

  “Let’s get a little more perspective,” Paul said. Avery took us higher, enabling us to see farther inland.

  As we cut across the island toward the coast, my stomach tightened, not from the nausea, but from the shock.

  Random sampling?! The plan of picking random patches from the grid of latitudes and longitudes on my lap—a strategy that had seemed both feasible and logical back at the office—would never work. Even if I could manage to land my kayak at the closest beach, some of those forests—far from roads or even trails—would take days to reach. I simply didn’t have that kind of time. Similarly, the idea of classifying patches of dead trees into categories of stressed trees, recently dead trees, or long-dead trees was ridiculous. No way could we get that level of detail from our aerial perspective.

  Developing a new sampling plan at the last minute was potentially a huge setback, but I should have been more worried than I was. Instead, I was distracted by a knot, deep inside my stomach, pulling tight around a sense of loss and fear. It was that kind of terrible feeling that surfaces when you drive past a wreck on the highway and the ambulances aren’t racing anyone off to the hospital. You wonder who died, who’s gone forever, what loves or lives are cracked. Who’s left behind to begin anew? It could happen to any one of us. And then you drive on, because that’s all you can do.

  Except for me, for this, there was no driving on from the graveyards of standing dead, no going home, and no forgetting. I didn’t know it then, but those trees would change my life. In the moment, soaring above them, they made me feel vulnerable to our warming world in a way I had never felt before.

  There’s a limit to the change we can tolerate, I thought. There’s a threshold and tipping point for every species—humans included.

  I said nothing. I looked at the screen to confirm that the inlet before us was the one where I’d spend the summer. Slocum Arm—another artery of ocean, this one sliced into the edge of Chichagof Island from the north.

  Avery dropped down a bit closer. Even from the plane, the stark landscape felt eerie, as if the dead trees were signposts for an even greater tragedy to come.

  “Pretty calm in here,” Paul said with a reassuring tone. “This is about as protected as you can get from the open ocean.” I relaxed a bit, noting a possible campsite off to my right.

  “We have lots of dead trees,” Ashley reported, “but I don’t see any bands. It made a lot more sense in the office than it makes out here.”

  Before I ever set foot in the forests of Slocum Arm, so much had already gone wrong. But gazing down at the graveyards, I found myself thinking, I’m not backing away from this.

  “I’ll have to find a way to group the forests from the ground,” I said, “when I get there.”

  Static hit in the headsets again.

  “There’s a way,” Paul said. “Just not the one we thought.” Paul later told me he was a bit worried that seeing the massive scale of the landscape and the patches would make me back out—just days before my real work would begin.

  I agreed with Paul—I’d find another way to stratify the forests on the ground. I’d guided clients down white-water rivers, built trails in the Rocky Mountains, and backpacked alone in snowy winters. I could paddle. I wasn’t afraid of the rain or the grizzlies (too much), and I trusted I could resolve whatever scientific challenges arose with my team. I had volunteers packing food in metal, bear-proof boxes. I had a boat captain in Sitka lined up to take us out to the coast. I’d already spent thousands of dollars in grant money. How I’d stratify the forests was only the first of many problems we would have to solve in the years to come. I’d find my way through the obstacles to understand the impacts of these dying trees on the surrounding communities of plants and people, to uncover whether this species was the canary in the coal mine—calling out for our own inevitable demise.

  What I didn’t know then was that these dead trees would eventually give me more than just hope. They’d give me a sense of conviction about our ability to cope with climate change. They’d motivate me to do my part. They’d move me from pessimism about the outlook of our world to optimism about all we still can do.

  As we made our way back down Slocum Arm, I stopped focusing on the dead trees and started looking around them. I could see green peeking up and around the barren trunks. I wondered if there was a new forest forming and what individua
ls could survive amidst the changes occurring. They were there. I could see them reaching toward the light through the broken canopies. I was committed to finding an answer—but for more than just the fate of the trees.

  PART I:

  THE SLOW BURN

  One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself,

  “What if I had never seen this before?

  What if I knew I would never see it again?”

  —RACHEL CARSON

  Introduction

  ON MARCH 4, 2015, I stood before an audience of over a hundred colleagues, friends, and family members at Stanford University. It was my doctoral defense—the final hurdle to becoming a card-carrying scientist, to throwing Ms. and Miss (or Mrs. one day) out the door for Dr. I thought if I passed, an enormous weight would lift; I’d feel a great sense of freedom to launch into my scientific career. That wasn’t how it went.

  Long before our real, measured understanding of climate change began to emerge, the ecologist Aldo Leopold claimed that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”1 But today, the stark headlines in the news are doing the same for a much broader public as they paint a picture of a frightening future: “Climate Chaos, Across the Map,” “Greenland Lost a Staggering 1 Trillion Tons of Ice in Just Four Years,” “Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anyone Realized,” “Climate Change Is Killing Us Right Now.”2 But scientist or citizen, if you accept the reality of our current climate trajectory, I think we’re all wondering if there’s anything we can do and how best to live amidst this threatening sense of demise.

  I had never given much thought to what spending six years studying the impact of climate change—on forests and on the people who depend on them—would mean for me personally. I’d never considered what it might be like to join the tiny pool of highly trained scientists living in that world of wounds. And what it would take to find a way forward.