to the eggs.
The press loves her enterprise, so desperate and doomed. “The Woman Who Saves Seeds.” “Noah’s Wife.” “Banking Trees Away for a Better Day.” She has the world’s attention for fifteen minutes. If she’d put her bank in one of those fortresses deep underground in the arctic, she might have rated half an hour. But a boxy bunker in the upper foothills of the Front Range is barely worth a video.
Inside, the vault feels like a chapel crossed with a high-tech library. Thousands of canisters, ordered and labeled with dates, species, and locations, lie in indexed drawers of sealed glass and brushed steel, like a real bank’s safe-deposit boxes, except twenty degrees below zero. Standing in the vault, Patricia gets the strangest feeling. She’s in one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, surrounded by thousands of sleeping seeds, cleaned, dried, winnowed, and X-rayed, all waiting for their DNA to awaken and begin remaking air into wood at the slightest hint of thaw and water. The seeds are humming. They’re singing something—she’d swear it—just below earshot.
The reporters ask why her group, unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet, isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She wants to say: Useful is the catastrophe. Instead, she says, “We’re banking trees whose uses haven’t been discovered yet.” The journalists perk up when she mentions all the hot spots of forest decline, each with its own proximal cause: acid rain, rust, canker, root rot, drought, invasives, failed agriculture, boring insects, rogue fungi, desertification . . . But their eyes glaze over when she tells them how all these threats are made fatal by one single thing: the ongoing overhaul of the atmosphere by people burning once-green things. The monthlies, weeklies, dailies, hourlies, and minutelies each write her up and proceed to the next newer thing. A few people read and send her twenty dollars. And she’s free to search the next vanishing forest for the next failing tree.
IN MACHADINHO D’OESTE, in western Brazil, Patricia learns what a forest can do. Shafts of sunlight cut through the vine-covered trunks, the wildest engines of life on Earth. Species clog every surface, reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment. All is fringe and braid and pleat, scales and spines. She fights to tell trees from lanyard strands of liana, orchid, sheets of moss, bromeliad, sprays of giant fern, mats of algae.
There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nuts. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad. One swing of a net suffices to fill it with two dozen kinds of beetles. Thick mats of ant attack her for touching the trees that feed and shelter them.
Here, the week is seven long days of census. Dr. Westerford’s team counts from dawn to dusk, a workday that should drain any woman in her sixties. But she lives for this. Yesterday they counted 213 distinct species of tree in a little over four hectares, each one a product of the Earth thinking aloud. In so dense a living mass, it’s risky to rely on anything as capricious as the wind. Most flavors of tree have their own pollinators. The flip side of this insane diversity is dispersal. The nearest recipient of pollen might be a mile or more away. Every other day, they run across species that none of the team can identify. New and unknown forms of life: There goes another Lord-knows-what. Thousands of ingenious kinds of trees spread up the branching river basin. Any one of these disappearing chemical factories might make the next HIV-block, the next super-antibiotic, the newest tumor killer.
The air is so wet it soaks Patricia from the inside out. Walking is hard, in the vine-covered coverts. Every cubic inch is busy converting soil and sun into thousands of volatiles that chemists may never have the chance to identify. Her squad of rubber tappers fans out around her in a police dragnet, to search for the eight thousand Amazonian species that may disappear before