»The Golden Spruce / albedo

John Vaillant's first long work of non-fiction, The Golden Spruce, tells the riveting story of Grant Hadwin, a renegade logger; the sad tale of the Haida and the Haida Gwaii, the Americans native to a gorgeous set of remote islands in the Pacific Northwest; and the epic of the majestic, luminous, and biologically unique golden spruce.

A fantastic set of circumstances produced the Golden Spruce, and an equally interesting set produced the man who swam across a freezing river, chainsaw on his back, to cut it down. We could not see the forest for the trees, he said: allowing lumber companies to clear-cut old-growth forest while leaving token, unique trees like the Golden Spruce was a hypocrisy. Why fetishize a single tree? We should preserve the entire forest, and not small stands: the massive ecosystem of a forest requires massive land.

Curiously, Hadwin the assassin might not have realised the strong connection the Haida have with the tree, which they believe to contain the incarnation of a boy who, fleeing his moribund village, looked back despite his grandfather's warning. The tree was itself several hundred years old, and a biologically admirable specimen. From Vaillant's book I learned the word albedo, "The fraction of incident electromagnetic radiation reflected by a surface, especially of a celestial body." (Alternatively, it's "the spongy white substance on the inside of a citrus rind" -- perfect! I can drop that in conversation quite nicely.)

Vaillant describes the proud history of the Haida, their ties to the land, and the recent revitalization of Haida Gwaii, their native islands (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). He discusses the social, environmental, and psychological factors that shaped Grant Hadwin, a rugged individualist who claimed to have cut down the tree -- and then subsequently disappeared. The story gripped me from the first I heard about it, almost a decade following the incident.