In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,19

solitary strip of pavement.

When I returned to Toronto after my first trip to the area and tried to describe the Great Bear Rainforest—an environment so dynamic, so complex, and so possessed of intelligence that to be in it is to be subsumed into a living, breathing thing—I got mostly blank stares and perfunctory nods from my listeners. For most people, there was no comparable point of reference.

Maps, though useful for navigation, are crude approximations of reality, visual guides to only one aspect of spatial and temporal experience. To read a description of the Great Bear Rainforest as a wilderness extending 250 miles along British Columbia’s central and north coast, or to see it delineated on a map, may give some vague impression of its dimensions. But it won’t convey the area’s topography, its density of foliage, and its internal immensity. Even a flight over the region fails to reveal its hierarchal complexity. The Great Bear’s matrix of lakes, rivers, valleys, islands, mountains, and seemingly endless tracts of tangled forest is a universe unto itself. If longevity, sustenance, and the ability to swim in numbingly cold water weren’t an issue, a human could enter that wilderness and conceivably ramble through it forever. A winding trajectory would result in space turning in on itself, creating a kind of infinity for the wanderer.

The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest tract of intact coastal temperate rain forest in the world—one so rich and prolific that it supports more organic matter per square meter than any other place on the planet. Receiving as much as two hundred inches of rainfall a year, its most productive areas generate up to four times the biomass (the total quantity or weight of organisms in a given area) of the Amazon, the Congo basin, or the rain forests of Borneo or New Guinea. Wading through the fluorescent green of coniferous old growth, among trees both living and dead and thickly carpeted with mosses and lichens, must rank among the most stirring and profound of human experiences.

Some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world have grown here. Western redcedar, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, shore pine, and amabilis fir are the mainstays of a great blanket of green that, in times gone by, covered most of North America’s western coastline. Though many of their number have been lost to logging, these trees are capable of growing to a few hundred feet in height and can live well over a thousand years.

Those big trees are sages of the forest and veritable agents of planetary life support. They produce oxygen, sequester carbon, stop soil erosion, trap and distill rainwater, provide shelter and habitat for animals, create microclimates, foster decay that fertilizes the soil, and ultimately self-replicate—their inanimate poses belying all of this. Beneath these titans, stratified worlds and their creatures overlap and intermingle. Concealed by undergrowth and the detritus of the forest floor is the rain forest’s soil. It is a repository of nutrients and a seething cosmopolis of interactions. Ants, bacteria, fungi, and a host of microscopic entities churn and mince the carbon-rich soil that is the ecosystem’s pillar of health, facilitating the decomposition of organic matter and bringing rich minerals to the surface. In his book The Clouded Leopard, Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and author Wade Davis describes a square meter of productive rain-forest terrain as supporting approximately “2,000 earth-worms, 40,000 insects, 120,000 mites, 120 million nematodes and millions upon millions of protozoa and bacteria, all alive, moving through the earth, feeding, digesting, reproducing, and dying.”4

Between the timeless, slow-motion gyrations of the soil and the iron steadfastness of the giants that root in it is the tangle of wild undergrowth consisting of hundreds of plant species, including edible and medicinal herbs. A host of invertebrates and amphibians dwell and travel within it, from lungless salamanders to tailed frogs to slugs growing up to eight inches long, providing food for rodents and birds. Mammals like deer, porcupines, beavers, rabbits, elk, wild sheep, and mountain goats are preyed upon by the large hunters: grizzly bears, black bears, coastal wolves, and cougars.

This seemingly endless litany of terrestrial ecology is matched in the nearby ocean. For here land and water are extensions of each other. Old-growth conifers find their underwater counterparts in each vast, undulating kelp forests that give sanctuary to what Davis calls “the greatest coastal marine diversity on Earth.” Countless species of fish, marine invertebrates, and aquatic mammals—dolphins, whales, seals—rove, drift, and reside, sometimes within a stone’s throw of shore.