A Forest Reading Room
Finding a quiet place in the woods to read a book is one of life’s great pleasures, isn’t it? Or listening to an audiobook on a hike through a forest? We at Our Forest Fund are avid readers of books about trees and forests. Here are some of our favorites:
Perhaps #1 for all of us is Peter Wohlebenn’s Hidden Life of Trees. This German forester has written a number of books on trees, and the Hidden Life of Trees was translated into English in 2016. His writing is informative, thought-provoking and very accessible.
An abridged but beautiful hardcover version with lots of gorgeous photos of trees and forests is also available, and makes a terrific gift for any forest person you know. The audiobook version is a great listen on a walk or a roadtrip.
“Soon after we begin to recognize trees for what they are—gigantic beings thriving against incredible odds for hundreds of years—we naturally come to ask, ‘How do they do it?’ This charming book tells how—not as a lecture, more like a warm conversation with a favorite friend.” —Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl
A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
The Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant (2005), tells the true story of a rare, golden spruce in the wilds of Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and about Grant Hadwin, the unbalanced man who cut it down.
“…The extraordinary tree stood at the intersection of contradictory ways of looking at the world; the conflict between them is one reason it was destroyed. Taking in history, geography, science and spirituality, this book raises some of the most pressing questions facing society today…
…Vaillant describes Hadwin’s actions in engrossing detail, but also provides the complex environmental, political and economic context in which they took place. The Golden Spruce forces one to can the damage our civilization exacts on the natural world be justified?” — from the Amazon book description
I listened to the audiobook version while on a camping trip on Vancouver Island, and it was an immensely appropriate soundtrack to the landscape, excellently narrated by Eduardo Ballerini.
The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees
While on that same camping trip, we made a point of seeking out the star of Harley Rustad’s 2018 book Big Lonely Doug.
“On a cool morning in the winter of 2011, a logger named Dennis Cronin was walking through a stand of old-growth forest near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. He came across a massive Douglas fir the height of a twenty-storey building. Instead of allowing the tree to be felled, he tied a ribbon around the trunk, bearing the words “Leave Tree.” The forest was cut but the tree was saved. The solitary Douglas fir, soon known as Big Lonely Doug, controversially became the symbol of environmental activists and their fight to protect the region’s dwindling old-growth forests.” –From the Amazon book description
