And in this closeness, some loggers came to revere them.Įnvironmental groups built trails and marketing campaigns around the last giants standing to help average citizens understand the stakes, winning protections in the process, but also alienating First Nations by acting without regard for their deep knowledge of place. The trees’ size and steep footing meant that they could only be cut by hand with saws. The loggers who worked the region’s forests, meanwhile, became as familiar with them as any treehugger. The Pacheedaht First Nation both defends its ancient forests and logs parts of them for the economic benefit of its people. So was born Big Lonely Doug, a nickname that Rustad adopts as the title of his book - a sweeping natural and human history of logging on Canada’s Vancouver Island, and the movement to save its vastly diminished woods.Īs Rustad’s protagonist and carefully researched prose show, the battle lines in such fights are rarely clear. On impulse, he wrapped it with a ribbon that spared it as the rest of the trees fell. Dennis Cronin was marking a grove for harvest in 2011 when he came upon the giant, 217 feet tall. Journalist Harley Rustad centers his exploration of this theme on an unlikely catalyst: a single logger meeting a single Douglas fir. And forming a relationship with trees, two books by first-time authors suggest, can lead people to help do the same on a grand scale - from stumping on behalf of old-growth temperate rainforests, to fighting climate change. Trees, in other words, embody the power of relationships to sustain life. They nourish and house countless creatures, which nourish them in turn. Through a network of roots and fungal threads, they can warn each other of danger and even feed a lopped stump. A big tree can seem monolithic and solitary - several armspans of girth, a towering crown.

All things left wild