The Greatest Climate-Protecting Technology Ever Devised

Ken Bible steps over a carpet of bracken and vanilla leaf to get closer to the big Douglas fir. 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. 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 industry 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. 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 Thornton Taft Munger, insisted on establishing a control for their experiments. “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.