On Haida Gwaii, off British Columbia, a genetically rare and sacred spruce stood for centuries—until one night in 1997, when a skilled but troubled logger felled it in an act meant to protest the industry that made him. John Vaillant traces myth, history, and one man's unraveling.
Among countless identical things, the single odd one is the one people name, tell stories about and protect. The Haida named only one tree in an endless forest: the golden one, which they called Elder Spruce Tree. Even a timber surveyor felt too struck by its strangeness among the green trees to put an axe mark on it.
Protecting one beloved showpiece while the surrounding whole is destroyed preserves the symbol and gives up what it stands for. One reviewer reads the book this way: a single famous tree was cherished by loggers and environmentalists alike while the forest around it was cut. In that reading, nothing survives by keeping the icon and losing the cathedral.
A Sitka spruce can stay fertile for as long as 750 years, yet typically only about a dozen of its offspring survive to maturity. A single seed's chances are comparable to those of a human sperm. If more seeds survived, every parent tree would become a forest of its own.
Attacking a shared sacred object can bind a community together instead of breaking its spirit. The sudden destruction of the revered tree pushed the people around it into action. They then cast both the tree and their own culture as things to be brought back.
A trait that should doom a living thing can go unnoticed while it stays small and hidden in the dark. The golden spruce's odd needles were a well-kept secret in the damp, shaded undergrowth. Biologically, a tree like that should never have reached full size.