4:42am January 6, 2012

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“There is a larger issue,” Sillett went on. “The redwood forests of California were the most beautiful forests on earth, and they’re almost totally gone. They were reduced to scraps by us. Our society – and I don’t mean just American society; I mean Chinese, Brazilian, European society, all of us as humans – we are homogenizing the earth’s biosphere. We don’t know what will happen to the biosphere or the forests.  I’m afraid that our work trying to understand the redwood forest might just turn out to be documenting something magnificent before it winks out.  This forest gives us a glimpse of what the world was like a very long time ago, before humans came into existence.  We are in one of the last great rain forests remaining in the temperate zone. These tiny pockets are all that’s left of it. We can talk about conserving biodiversity, conserving species, but that isn’t enough.  We could keep the redwood species alive as a bunch of little redwood trees, but this forest and all that it shows us will be gone.”

“What does it show us?”

“Maybe these trees can teach us about ourselves. Marie and I and you, we’re nothing. We’re little snapshots in time, and we’ll soon be gone. This grove has burned in huge fires in the past millennia. Redwoods don’t die if they burn. A redwood can be burned to a blackened spar, and afterward it goes ‘Wooah,’ and just grows back.  Look at Kronos. It’s been hammered. It’s dying. And it’s more beautiful than ever. These trees can teach us how we can live. We can be hammered and burned, and we can come back more beautiful as we grow.”

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