the spruce tops, white-capped eggs that forgot to fall. Juniper grows right out of the raw, unbroken rock. Spruce elders stand in judgment over him.
He wanders to the escarpment for a better look, and what he takes for solid ridge collapses beneath him. The first snow-covered rock on the vertical drop bounces him into the air onto the lip of a thousand-foot tumble. He swings out one foot and clips a cylinder of spruce before smashing his way down the snowy talus. Two hundred feet of scree drop off in front of him. He screams and manages to snag a savior trunk. For the second time, trees save his life.
Blood freezes on his abraded face. The air is so cold it electrocutes his nose. His arm twists outward from his shoulder, wrong. Snow blankets him. He lies still, knowing nothing more than a snow-skirted spruce. The sky darkens. What seemed cold gives way to professional subzero. His brain flickers and he opens his eyes on the white that wants to kill him. He looks back up the ridge and, beaten by the sheer rock face, thinks, Let me just rest here a little. In the end, it’s the dead woman, kneeling beside him and stroking his face, who gets him up. You’re not just you.
The sound of his own voice—“I’m not?”—brings him to. The dead woman’s stroking fingers turn into a bough of the spruce that he wrapped up on in his fall. His nose is broken and his shoulder dislocated. His old wounded leg is worthless. Night and cold are dropping fast. The bluff rises a steep eighty feet above him. But facts count for nothing. She tells him as much, in four more words. You’re not done yet.
. . .
PAST RETIREMENT AGE, Patricia works like there’s no tomorrow. Or like tomorrow might yet show up, if enough people dug in and worked. She has two jobs, each the other’s opposite. In the one she hates, she stands behind podiums begging for money, stuttering like a black-backed woodpecker pile-driving a pine. She trots out a small stable of dog-and-pony quotes. Blake: A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Auden: A culture is no better than its woods. Ten percent of her audience gives her seed bank twenty dollars.
Her staff tells her not to, but she cites the numbers. Wasn’t Shaw right about how the mark of true intelligence is to be moved by statistics? Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees. Half the woody species on the planet, gone by this new century’s end. Ten percent of her audience gives her twenty dollars.
She argues economics, good business, aesthetics, morals, spirit. She tells them stories, with drama, hope, anger, evil, and characters you can love. She gives them Chico Mendes. She gives them Wangari Maathai. One in ten gives her twenty bucks, and an angel gives a million. That’s enough to keep her working the job she loves: flying around the world, pouring unconscionable volumes of greenhouse gas into the air, speeding the planet’s doom, collecting seeds and starts from trees that will be gone in no time at all.
Honduran rosewood. Hinton’s oak in Mexico. St. Helena gumwood. Cedars from the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty species of monster kauri, ten feet thick and clear of branches for a hundred feet and more. An alerce in southern Chile, older than the Bible but still putting forth seeds. Half the species in Australia, southern China, a belt across Africa. The alien life-forms of Madagascar that occur nowhere else on the planet. Saltwater mangroves—marine nurseries and the coasts’ protectors—disappearing in a hundred countries. Borneo, Papua New Guinea, the Moluccas, Sumatra: the most productive ecosystems on Earth, giving way to oil palm plantations.
She walks through the bleak, manicured remnant woods of overharvested Japan. She walks across living root bridges deep in northeastern India—Ficus elastica trained to span rivers by generations of Khasi hill people—into forests where the natives have been replaced by fast-growing pines. She walks through former expanses of Thai teak, given over to spindly eucalyptus harvested every three years. She surveys what’s left of countless acres of Southwest pinyon plowed up to plant wheat. Wild, diverse, uncataloged forests are melting away. Always the locals tell her the same thing: We don’t want to kill the golden goose, but it’s the only way around here to get