The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant (March 2019)
Longtime TOA readers will know that there are certain types of books I don’t read very often. The most popular of these ignored genres seems to be what I’ll call books about ‘extraordinary event that points to a rich, hidden world you’ll find interesting, or should at least pretend to, for three hundred and twenty-five pages’. I avoid them for an obvious reason (I don't really like them) but this one worked out a little differently for reasons I may or may not write more about later.
The short version of The Golden Spruce is that it’s about a huge tree out in the islands off the west coast of Canada. This huge tree was notable for its golden leaves, visible from miles away, and among other things it carried significant symbolic importance for the locals in the area (including indigenous tribes who had lived there for centuries longer than the white folks who surprisingly started cutting down all the trees). The book has been favorably included among the likes of better known works like Into Thin Air and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in stories about people battling nature or cultural collisions. It also has quite a bit of detail about logging, an industry I knew nothing about, and the information alone makes The Golden Spruce a worthwhile read.
This book had some very sharp insights about human nature interwoven into its descriptions about the events I reference above. Logging is an industry defined by one of the human race’s unfortunate misapplications of logic – if I don’t do it, someone else will. True, maybe... but not since we all think so! This results in a lot of initially hesitant onlookers becoming active participants in an ethically ambiguous activity. Further, in places like northwest Canada there are no obvious escape routes – a logger can’t just sign up for online classes and become a data scientist very easily. This leads people to become entrenched and eventually dependent within an ethically ambiguous profession, a reality some loggers deal with by keeping their minds distanced from the work. Others deal with this by looking for ways to bring change (and, spoiler alert, such a figure plays a central role in The Golden Spruce).
My remaining notes don’t fit so neatly into a single category. First, have you considered that a single Sitka spruce seed weighs 1/500th of a gram but it contains all the information required to become a three hundred ton tree. Imagine that, eh? I’m sure the machine learning folks are working hard on replicating it.
I also thought it was interesting to compare early boat journeys to space missions. I imagine this was probably true up until around the late 19th century – if something went wrong, no one was going to help the sailor. My final thought links up to this insight – the worst thing to do in an unexpected storm is to rush toward the destination. As certain great songs have said, just hold your head up high, and don't be afraid of the dark.
