Tree
I’m not sure if the New Yorker website will ever include the full text of “A Death in the Forest” (December 10, 2007), but it’s worth the effort to track down the issue and read the article. It’s a strong piece of environmental reporting that tells the story of the failing Eastern Hemlock ecosystem.
Except for the fact that this is the state tree of Pennsylvania, I have no real personal attachment to the hemlock. However, this kind of stuff – bits and pieces of the puzzle that are simply disappearing – is happening all over, and that’s reason enough to care.
Nestled near the end of the article is this gem of a paragraph that takes a simple observation and makes it into a huge metaphor that speaks volumes about everything else:
From the top of Jim Branch No. 10, we could see that the forest canopy was a ruin. The crowns of the dead trees were still encrusted with living material – a hemlock rain-forest canopy without the hemlock. It was a scaffold of lichens and other organisms. The trees that harbored them had died so recently and so suddenly that they were all carrying on, for the moment, as if nothing had happened.
