Revied Nature Writing

In an undisturbed ecosystem, populations at the edges of species' ranges are less dense and more variable in space and time than at their centre, a vast environment where the sky is covered by a canopy of redwoods blocking the sunshine. Steve Sillett’s decisions while scaling the redwoods are always borderline of dangerous and risky, but that doesn’t stop his inhibitions to voyage up the trees and discover new plant life. He and his group of canopy voyagers get the trill and excitement of scaling the trees and the rush near death and it is essential for them to live: "at the outer limit of biology, on the edge of the possible."

They all share a sense of interest in the passions of individuals pursue a unique personal or professional life path -- in this case, exploring and climbing the world's tallest trees in forgotten canyons and back roads of remote areas of Northern California and Oregon. Leftover Oregon hippies, frustrated academics, lone eccentrics working in convenience stores, all joined in the quest to find and climb some of the world's most incredible living things, and uncover the ecology that survives hundreds of feet up in the forest canopy.

The thick cluster of ancient California redwood was always there and many a thousands observed them daily as they drove through the highway. But Richard Preston saw something special and fascinating in them. He saw the giant whales in them. A mesmerized Preston writes, ``in order to see a giant tree you need a magnifying glass” the biosphere of the redwood kingdom was a wonderland for him. Part of that big appeal is the redwoods, utterly epic giants of trees that are so big they become your environment rather than just part of it. Even though they are ancient in the extreme, the redwood forests are delicate environments, and human presence is the most perilous threat the trees have faced in perhaps twenty centuries of existence. No one had suspected, before people started climbing in the canopy and spending time there, that there was "what amounted to coral reefs in the air". Not just redwoods are up there, but whole ecosystems based upon the trees, consisting of plants and animals that never come down, or that die if they do come down. There are ferns, huckleberries, earthworms, and salamanders up there, and even other trees; hemlocks, laurels, spruces, and Douglas firs have all been found growing with roots hundreds of feet in the air. He's clearly awed by the redwoods, but avoids too much new-age tree-hugging sentiment in favor of letting the facts speak for themselves: "Botanists think that the oldest redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old. They seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon." And estimates are that since people began buzzing around, about 95 percent of the coast redwoods are gone.

Sometimes they fall, but the risk of the endeavor does not seem to the attraction. They have a romantic obsession with the big trees; some of them have harnessed the obsession into academic papers and college careers, but others just climb to do so. The tree canopy sounds like an enticing place, as Preston describes it, "a world between the ground and the sky, an intermediary realm, neither fully solid nor purely air, an ever-changing scaffold joining heaven and earth, ruled by the forces of gravity, wind, fire, and time." Understandably, most of us aren't going to visit there, and most of us aren't going to meet the climbers who are smitten by the canopy just because of the dangers and risks of scaling a tree without ropes or harnesses.