_Livestock accounts for roughly 14.5 percent of anthropogenic emissions worldwide.
However, if farmers fill their pastures with trees and shrubs—an ancient technique
known as silvopasture—their grazing land will absorb up to 10 times more carbon.for whom the reserve is named—saw no
inherent value in its quiet, needle-dusted
acres of firs and hemlocks and cedars and
alder, beyond their use in research. Accord-
ing to the orthodoxy of the day, old trees were
worthless and wasteful: effete, slow-growing,
and decaying relics that ought to be ripped
out and replaced with young and vigor-
ous plantations. “There is little satisfaction
in working with a decadent old forest that
is past redemption,” Munger told a confer-
ence of loggers in 1924. (He had a particu-
lar hatred for standing dead trees, known as
snags, which are a common feature in mature
forests. He once wrote an entire essay about
snags, in which he argued that they deserve
“outlawry”: “They stand, fringing the sky-
line like the teeth of a broken comb, in mute
defiance of wind and decay, the dregs of the
former forest, useless to civilization and a
menace to life.”) This general contempt for
old growth defined the field of forestry for
decades. “We grew up thinking of old forests
as biological deserts or cellulose cemeteries,”
says Jerry Franklin, a forest ecologist now
renowned as the father of a very different
school of thought. “We climbed over huge
piles of downed logs and woody debris, and
we didn’t think about anything other than
how to get rid of it, how to liquidate it.”
By late in the 20th century, the timber
industry and its methods were well estab-
lished and, according to the historians Mar-
garet Herring and Sarah Greene, Wind River
“began to become almost a backwater of
forest research, a museum of old experi-
ments.” A large tract of Munger’s old-growth
section was nearly clear-cut in the 1960s—
foresters agreed that its utility for research
was exhausted, and it was still understood
to have no other value—and the area was
again threatened in the 1980s, when Con-
gress decided it would be a good spot to test
whether a military surplus balloon, lifted by
four helicopters, could be used for logging in
remote areas. (The project was abandoned
when the contraption crashed during a test
flight in New Jersey.) The Doug stayed lucky,
and the forest stayed intact.the great forests of the Northwest into profit.
It was here at Wind River, on the slopes
of an ancient volcano above the Columbia
River, that Northwestern forest research-
ers began in the early 1900s to engineer the
protocols that would govern the industrial-
scale removal of the region’s trees. It was
here, in large experimental plots, that they
compared the merits of different timber
species and tree genetics, of novel methods
for replanting and spacing; here that their
experiments convinced them that Douglas
firs would be the cash crop of a new indus-
try and that the industry’s methods should
favor large clear-cuts and burns; here, too,
that more than 800 million seedlings were
reared to replace all the forests that would be
systematically logged across millions of acres
of the Northwest over the coming decades.
Those seedlings served to solve a problem
the industry would know not as “deforesta-
tion” but as “inventory depletion.” According
to the new protocols, the transplanted seed-
lings would be grown and harvested in plan-
tations where every tree was the same age.
Bible’s big Douglas fir, and the old-
growth acres around it, survived only
because one of those early researchers, a
Yale Forest School graduate named Thorn-
ton Taft Munger, insisted on establishing a
control for their experiments. The purpose
of research at Wind River was to improve
on the efficiency of nature by replacing
forests with human-engineered tree plan-
tations, he argued—so of course the experi-
menters needed to maintain a bit of nature
against which they could compare their suc-
cess. (The idea of the reserve nevertheless
seemed odd to at least one Forest Service
director, who responded with incredulity
that anyone would bother to protect some-
thing as mundane and inexhaustible as old
growth. “We’ve got 20 million acres of vir-
gin timber in the National Forests,” he wrote.
“Why set up this special area?”) In the end,
Munger got his permission and set about
measuring tree growth within the protected
forest as well as outside of it.
It was a visionary act, but even Munger—KEN BIBLE STEPS OVER A CARPET OF
bracken and vanilla leaf to get closer to the
big Douglas fir. He gives its furrowed bark
an affectionate slap, as if introducing a prize
racehorse.
“It’s about 70 meters tall and 2.6 meters
in diameter,” Bible says, leaning back to take
in the behemoth stretching above him. From
way down here on the shady floor of the for-
est, he has no hope of seeing all the way to
the tree’s top. But thanks to a 279-foot-high
tower that rises above the trees, Bible, who
helps manage this site on behalf of the US
Forest Service, has had the chance to know
this old Doug from above as well as below.
From hundreds of feet up, at canopy level,
he says, you begin to get a new vision of the
complexity of structure that defines an old
forest. “It looks like a mountain range,” Bible
says. “You’ve got ridges and peaks and val-
leys.” Singular trees like the big Doug reach
high over their neighbors. At around 500
years of age, it isn’t the oldest tree in the
forest, but a lucky location near a wetland
has made it one of the biggest.
The Doug is lucky in other ways too. Once
upon a time, its particular seed happened to
fall from a particular drying cone into what,
hundreds of years later, would become a
small section of protected old growth inside
the Wind River Experimental Forest, a
research area in southern Washington state
originally created to study the best ways to
exploit forests for human use. Just outside
the confines of this 1,180-acre remnant of
old forest, the trees of the Doug’s genera-
tion are long gone. Some were killed by fire,
others by pests, and others were removed
by foresters who, for more than a century,
had been using the area as a testing ground
in their attempt to find the best ways to turn