reciprocal nations of tied-together life that she has listened to all life long. She loves her own species, too—sneaky and self-serving, trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it—yet chosen by creation to know.
The judge asks her to elaborate. Dennis was right. It is like talking to students. She describes how a rotting log is home to orders of magnitude more living tissue than the living tree. “I sometimes wonder whether a tree’s real task on Earth isn’t to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on the forest floor for a long time.”
The judge asks what living things might need a dead tree.
“Name your family. Your order. Birds, mammals, other plants. Tens of thousands of invertebrates. Three-quarters of the region’s amphibians need them. Almost all the reptiles. Animals that keep down the pests that kill other trees. A dead tree is an infinite hotel.”
She tells him about the ambrosia beetle. The alcohol of rotting wood summons it. It moves into the log and excavates. Through its tunnel systems, it plants bits of fungus that it brought in with it, on a special formation on its head. The fungus eats the wood; the beetle eats the fungus.
“Beetles are farming the log?”
“They farm. Without subsidies. Unless you count the log.”
“And those species that depend on rotting logs and snags: are any of them endangered?”
She tells him: everything depends on everything else. There’s a kind of vole that needs old forest. It eats mushrooms that grow on rotting logs and excretes spores somewhere else. No rotting logs, no mushrooms; no mushrooms, no vole; no vole, no spreading fungus; no spreading fungus, no new trees.
“Do you believe we can save these species by keeping fragments of older forest intact?”
She thinks before answering. “No. Not fragments. Large forests live and breathe. They develop complex behaviors. Small fragments aren’t as resilient or as rich. The pieces must be large, for large creatures to live in them.”
The opposing counsel asks whether preserving slightly larger forest tracts is worth the millions of dollars it costs people. The judge asks for numbers. The opposition sums up the opportunity loss—the crippling expense of not cutting down trees.
The judge asks Dr. Westerford to respond. She frowns. “Rot adds value to a forest. The forests here are the richest collections of biomass anywhere. Streams in old growth have five to ten times more fish. People could make more money harvesting mushrooms and fish and other edibles, year after year, than they do by clear-cutting every half dozen decades.”
“Really? Or is that a metaphor?”
“We have the numbers.”
“Then why doesn’t the market respond?”
Because ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite. But she’s smart enough not to say this. Never attack the local gods. “I’m not an economist. Or a psychologist.”
The opposing counsel declares that clear-cutting saves forests. “If people don’t harvest, millions of acres will blow down or burn in devastating crown fires.”
It’s out of her field, but Patricia can’t let it go. “Clear-cuts increase windthrow. And crown fires only happen when fires are suppressed for too long.” She lays it out: Fire regenerates. There are cones—serotinous—that can’t open without flame. Lodgepole pines hold on to theirs for decades, waiting for a fire to spring them. “Fire suppression used to seem like rational management. But it costs us much more than it has saved.” The counsel for her side winces. But she’s in too deep for diplomacy now.
“I’ve looked at your book,” the judge says. “I never imagined! Trees summon animals and make them do things? They remember? They feed and take care of each other?”
In the dark-paneled courtroom, her words come out of hiding. Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the microclimate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.
The judge frowns. “What grows back after a clear-cut isn’t a forest?”
Frustration boils over in her. “You can replace forests with plantations. You can also arrange Beethoven’s Ninth for solo kazoo.” Everyone laughs but the judge. “A suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm!”
“How much untouched forest is left?”
“Not much.”
“Less than a quarter of what we started with?”
“Oh, heavens! Much less. Probably no more than two or three percent. Maybe a square, fifty miles