National Geographic 2022.05

05.
2022
SPECIAL
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THEY’RE KEY TO PROTECTING THE PLANET.

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FURTHER M AY 2 0 2 2
S AV I N G
120
How to Fix Them
Move trees, plant
more, alter their DNA,
or leave them alone.
What are the best ways
On the Cover
In California’s Sequoia and
to help our carbon- Kings Canyon National
absorbing forests? Parks, research on the
BY ALEJANDRA effects of climate change
B O RU N DA , A N D R E W involves climbing up and
C U R R Y, S A R A H G I B B E N S , into the towering giants.
AND CRAIG WELCH KEITH LADZINSKI
C O N T E N T S
6
P R O O F F E A T U R E S
The Future
of Forests
Around the globe,
climate change and
other human distur-
bances are fueling
threats to trees.
But we still have time
to limit the damage.
74
B Y C R A I G W E L C H . . . . . . . P. 34
Still Standing Tall

From beeches in Italy
to laurels on Madeira,
a photographer
highlights the many
wonders of European
old-growth forests.
STO RY A N D P H OTO G R A P H S
B Y O R S O LYA H A A R B E R G
E X P L O R E
THE BIG IDEA
Fighting Fire
With Fire
Lives Depend In Australia, Aboriginal
on Forests people follow a
Why we, and all life cultural tradition to
on Earth, need trees. help conserve their
BY S U Z A N N E S I M A R D ... P. 15
ancestral homelands.
BY KYLIE STEVENSON
DECODER
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
The First Forests M AT T H E W A B B O T T
A discovery in China
96
reveals clues about
arboreal evolution.
BY MONICA SERRANO
A N D S C OT T E L D E R .... P. 24
ALSO
• Seeds That Need Saving

• Trees and Earthquakes A Fragile Refuge for
• Minnesota’s Lost 40 Forest Elephants
• How to Be an Arbornaut
28
Already imperiled by
poaching and habitat
loss, the critically
endangered animals
in Gabon now face
a shortage of food.
BY YUDHIJIT
B H AT TA C H A R J E E
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
JASPER DOE ST
FREE POSTER
The Phantom The World’s Forests

Redwood With our detailed
The albino variety is charts and maps,
rare and mysterious. discover how decades
BY NADIA DRAKE of change have trans-
P H OTO G RA P H S BY formed these vital
K E N N Y H U R TA D O hubs of biodiversity.
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FORESTS, FOR LIFE
SPECIAL ISSUE: S AV I N G F O R E S T S
DESPITE SEEING the forest for the trees,

Suzanne Simard once faced harsh crit-
icism for her groundbreaking work.
The professor of forest ecology at the
University of British Columbia bucked
the prevailing theory that a forest’s
trees were isolated individuals. Her
experiments showed that trees live NORTH
interdependently, sharing resources
via belowground networks. Simard’s AMERICA
essay “Lives Depend on Forests” (page
15) emphasizes how ecosystems rely on
those connections, a truth that’s at the
root of this special issue.
Forests keep our world in balance.
They’re the “lungs” of the planet, draw-
ing in carbon dioxide and breathing out
oxygen. They provide habitat for count- TROPIC OF CANCER
less species. And in a warming world,
they’re our best chance for survival.
Yet our forests are at risk. “It’s a
tough time to be a tree,” senior envi-
ronment writer Craig Welch notes on
page 50. “Earth has lost a third of its
forests over the past 10,000 years, half
of that just since 1900. We logged them
for timber. We cut them to make way
for farms and cattle. We cleared land
to build homes and roads.” Extreme
conditions related to climate change
also are killing trees worldwide.
But it’s not too late to do something.
In an encouraging sign, last fall more
than a hundred world leaders promised
to end global deforestation by 2030.
In this issue we highlight how Aus-
tralia’s Aboriginal people are renewing AMERICA
their homelands through the ancient
practice of planned burning. We offer
strategies to help save forests. And you’ll
find stunning photographs, graphics,
and maps—opportunities to learn about
and appreciate the forest and the trees.
Thank you for reading National
Geographic.
David Brindley
Interim Editor in Chief
4 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Today, forests (shaded green on this
map) cover one-third of Earth’s land
surface, more than 15.6 million square
miles. Each year, forests and other
vegetation absorb up to a third of the
CO2 released from burning fossil fuels.
ARCTIC CIRCLE
EUROPE
A S I A
A F R I C A
EQUATOR
TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
AUSTRALIA
Tree canopy height

Shortest Tallest
Measuring trees via satellite
helps scientists map how
forests are changing.
MARTIN GAMACHE AND MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: FOREST LANDSCAPE INTEGRITY INDEX; GLOBAL LAND ANALYSIS AND DISCOVERY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
A Norway-based photographer ventures into the
P R O O F woods to document the beauty, value, and fragility of
Europe’s old-growth forests.
N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C STORY AND PHOTO GRAPHS BY O R S O LYA H A A R B E R G
VO L . 2 41 N O. 5 L O O K I N G AT T H E E A RT H F R O M E V E RY P O S S I B L E A N G L E
Italy’s Abruzzo, Lazio,
and Molise National Park
STILL STANDING TALL

is home to some of the
oldest beech forests
in Europe. Thanks to a
location that’s difficult
to access, these trees
have escaped felling
for centuries.
M AY 2 0 2 2 7
P R O O F
In the Abruzzo region of Italy, these beeches (top) are bedecked with abundant lichens, a characteristic of old-growth
forests. Like fallen snow, Cladonia lichens blanket the ground beneath mountain birches in Norway’s Rondane National Park.
String bogs in northern Sweden feature ridges that link small islands of coniferous forests (top). Laurel forests—found in
Madeira, the Canaries, and the Azores—are living relics of the southern European stands that thrived millions of years ago.
M AY 2 0 2 2 9
P R O O F
The laurel forest of Madeira, a Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic, is inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List
in part because the trees support many endemic species, including more than 70 plants and the Madeira laurel pigeon.
Growing at an altitude ranging from about 1,000 to 5,000 feet, the laurels are found in the ribbon of mist that
frequently wraps the upper ranges of the islands, creating the cloud forests of the temperate zone.
M AY 2 0 2 2 11
P R O O F
THE BACKSTORY
O L D - G RO W T H F O R E S T S A R E E U RO P E ’ S N AT U R A L H E R I TAG E .
M O ST A R E P ROT E C T E D, B U T A R E T H E Y SA F E ?
I A M D RAW N TO T H E serenity and sheer Roaming the intact Scots pine

beauty of pristine nature. Being in it forests of northern Sweden and the
heightens my perceptions and narrows mountain tree lines of southern Nor-
my focus. As I concentrate on the sur- way rewarded me with the sense of
roundings, an inner stillness fills me freedom I always get in the Scandi-
and helps me capture a sense of place. navian wilderness. The beech stands
This was the case when I packed my rising from the steep slopes of Italy
camera equipment and ventured into kept me in awe of the power that for-
some of Europe’s old-growth forests ests shielded from exploitation can
to highlight these unique environ- possess. I feel privileged that I was
ments that have remained intact for granted access to explore and photo-
centuries, despite recurrent threats of graph these wonderlands.
human disturbance. Excluding Russia, only about 2 per-
The visits were often challenging cent of the forest areas in Europe are
because of unfavorable weather con- primary, or have never been cleared,
ditions and the distances I had to cover reflecting a dazzling richness of life
while going multiple times to the most that once filled vast wooded ecosys-
photogenic locations. But the joy of the tems. Most of the areas are now pro-
experience always prevailed. Hiking off- tected, but as the human population
trail through the foggy laurel forests of continues to grow—with devastating
Madeira, I was enveloped by trees that impacts on the planet and its living
may have been up to 800 years old and creatures—the future of these forests
whose trunks provided me with shelter is far from certain. I, for one, hope that
when clouds released a sudden down- they will still be standing for many
pour. It felt like entering a holy space. centuries more.
In this spot in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, the tree line is marked with Norway
spruces, which are sculpted in winter by the forces of wind and snow.
IN THIS SECTION
Seed Bank Alarm
E X P L O R E The First Forest

Take to the Trees
Ghostly Redwoods
I L L U M I N AT I N G T H E M Y S T E R I E S — A N D W O N D E R S — A L L A R O U N D U S E V E R Y D AY
N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C VO L . 2 41 N O. 5
LIVES DEPEND
ON FORESTS
AMID TREES MARKED FOR FELLING, A SCIENTIST SPELLS OUT FORESTS’
V I T A L R O L E I N S AV I N G W I L D L I F E , H U M A N I T Y, A N D A W A R M I N G P L A N E T.
BY SUZANNE SIMARD
T
VA N C O U V E R I S L A N D, B R I T I S H C O LU M B I A
of the ancient yellow

T H E H O L LOW E D - O U T T RU N K
cedar felt like a cocoon with its soft floor of bark
strips. A mother bear had molded this bed when she
came each year to hibernate and to birth her cubs
inside the 2,000-year-old tree. In the depth of winter,
the shell of sapwood had protected them from the
bone-chilling cold and blowing snow.
A decade earlier, the mother likely had been born
in this same den, near the headwaters of Fairy Creek
on Vancouver Island, off the coast of British Colum-
bia. She would have returned each fall, fattened on
berries and salmon. I picked one of her hairs from
the grain of the wood, the scent of wet grass merging
with the citrusy heartwood and fresh Pacific rain.
I was here with several environmental activists.
Their opponents call them radicals, even eco-
terrorists. They call themselves forest defenders,
M AY 2 0 2 2 15
E X P L O R E | THE BIG IDEA
This multigenerational grove

had survived millennia of climatic
variation. Its experiences were
encoded in trees’ seeds and rings,
and the information passed
from tree to tree through
belowground fungal networks.
and they work to fend off the timber company aiming

to clear-cut this forest. Half a dozen young men and
women had greeted me on the newly blasted road
and ushered me over huge logs and deep ravines to
this wizened tree. They spoke excitedly of seeing
screech owls and of marbled murrelets nesting in
the canopy of the cedars, and pointed to specklebelly
lichens draping the smooth bark of amabilis firs.
Those birds and lichens, and many other at-risk
species, live in a community of more than 325 plants,
algae, mosses, and mammals, and untold numbers
of fungi and microbes, in the Fairy Creek watershed.
Without these trees, the defenders knew no
cubs would be born, no lichens would capture the
mountain mist, and no old-growth fungi would
link the matriarchs with their offspring. Huddled
inside the den, the defenders worried about the
impending fall rains and quietly hoped for early
snow to delay the felling.
I GREW UP IN THE FORESTS of British Columbia. My

uncles and grandfather logged with horses, cutting
down trees so selectively you had to hunt to see
where they’d taken one. Grandpa taught me about
the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how
my family was knit into it.
I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. I studied
forestry and took jobs in the Canadian Forest Service
and lumber industry. Soon I was working alongside
the powerful people in charge of the commercial
harvest. But I found the extent of the clear-cutting
alarming, and I felt conflicted by my part in it. On
top of that, the spraying and hacking of the aspens
and birches to make way for the more commercially
valuable planted pines and firs were astounding.
It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless
industrial machine.
So I went back to school, and I studied forest sci-
ence. Researchers had just discovered that one pine
seedling root could transmit carbon to another
pine seedling root—but this was in the laboratory.
I wondered, Could this happen in real forests?
I thought, yes, that trees in real forests might also
share information belowground. This was contro-
versial, and some people thought I was crazy, and I
had a really hard time getting research funding. But
ILLUSTRATIONS: ANTOINE MAILLARD M AY 2 0 2 2 17
Defenses that evolved over millions

of years helped these trees withstand
temperature extremes and fend off
herbivores. But these defenses were
no match for the chain saws.
I persevered (see “The ‘Wood-Wide Web,’ Explained,”

on this page).
I asked nervously.
“ D O YO U H E A R T H U M P I N G ? ”
“Helicopters!” whispered a woman next to me
inside the den. We emerged to see the metal dragonfly THE ‘WOOD-WIDE
WEB,’ EXPLAINED
churn over the ridge, men staring from tinted win-
dows. Under the swirl of blades, the cedar matriarch
stood at about 115 feet; her family encircled, as if
telling the story of their origin and protecting her.
When Suzanne Simard began
This multigenerational grove had survived mil-
working in forestry after college,
lennia of climatic variation, insect infestations, and conventional theory held that trees
windstorms, and had been fed by centuries of salmon were isolated loners engaged in a
runs. The experiences were encoded in their seeds cutthroat Darwinian competition for
and tree rings, and the information passed from water, sunlight, and food. Timber
tree to tree through belowground fungal networks. companies planted rows of the most
lucrative species and eradicated
Defenses that evolved over millions of years helped
most of the competition—a “plan-
these trees withstand temperature extremes and tation” approach that Simard felt
fend off herbivores. They also enabled this forest to ignored the messy genius of nature,
accumulate as much carbon—580 tons per acre—as with its many interwoven species.
a tropical rainforest. But these defenses, we knew, In a series of breakthrough exper-
were no match for the chain saws. iments conducted while dodging
grizzly bears in western Canada’s
We ran and slipped across the steep slope to the
rainforests, Simard discovered that
small clear-cut carved out of the mountain, where trees are connected through vast
the helicopter now hovered over a makeshift helipad. fungal root systems known as mycor-
One of the defenders climbed up the platform and rhizal networks. Via this subterranean
waved his arms as if to repel the aircraft. pipeline, they share carbon, water,
The differences in worldviews between the loggers and nutrients. The fungi extract
sugars from the tree roots that they
and the defenders suddenly were clapping like thun-
can’t produce on their own, and
der. Everyone needed these trees, yet for different in return the fungi ferry water and
reasons. People pitched against people over an indus- nutrients to the tree roots and even
try that no longer serves most well. Then abruptly the farther, from tree to tree.
machine turned and flew down the valley. The journal Nature published
Simard’s revolutionary findings
in 1997, with the cover line “The
where the ground was
W E C R O S S E D T H E C L E A R- C U T
wood-wide web.” Though her work
littered with lettuce lichens that fell with tree crowns, provoked harsh criticism, Simard
depriving the forest of crucial nitrogen. On the lifeless persisted, demonstrating how trees
bark of fallen giant trunks, we saw drying speckle- communicate and even cooperate
belly lichens—a species considered vulnerable in between species, relaying distress
the province—but the laws were too weak to protect signals about drought and disease,
and trading minerals through a com-
them, even if the loggers had noticed.
plex circuitry that she compared to
Following a faint trail into the trees, we passed neural networks in the human brain.
ankle-high largeflower fairybells, western rattlesnake Simard has also identified “mother
roots, and little prince’s pines, all species I suspected trees” that act as hubs for these net-
were linked into the fungal networks of the old firs works. They can recognize their own
and receiving nutrient subsidies in the deep shade. offspring and shuttle extra resources
to them. When these elders die,
The rare plants themselves provided an additional
they “dump” carbon and defense
source of carbon for the fungi. compounds into the network,
Old-growth forests like this one store twice as uploading food and information for
much carbon as century-old forests and six or more future generations. — K E R RY B A N K S
times as much as clear-cuts. As the old trees age,

they continue to store carbon in their boles and We need to shift away
sequester it into soils where it is protected. Added
all together, the world’s forests and their soils store from a detached, exploitive
about 90 percent of global terrestrial carbon. relationship with nature
Soon we stepped into another clear-cut, where toward one that is close,
the sun had burned and dried leaves of the tiny, old-
growth-dependent plants. The fallen ancient trees protective, and regenerative.
were lying in parallel, pointing toward the mill, where
they’d be turned into shingles, sawdust, the odd
soundboard. Studies have confirmed that logging A month later, the rains started and the ancient
old-growth forests releases 40 to 65 percent of eco- cedar matriarch and her forest were felled.
system carbon to the atmosphere (even when off-site The rains continued. After one more month, the
storage of carbon in wood products is factored in). soils—denuded of trees—eroded, the rivers swelled,
The young defenders were already on the gravel and in parts of the province, towns flooded.
when I crawled up the final pitch onto the road-
bed. I was shaking, not just from the exertion, but W H AT C A N B E D O N E so that next time this story ends
from the trauma of what was to come. Our police differently?
escort was waiting. As I walked toward the truck, I First, we must stop converting natural forests to
noticed the chocolate brown humus layer revealed industrial plantations and agricultural fields. The
by the roadcut, six feet thick and rich with carbon. commitment by governments to end global defor-
About half of the carbon in this forest was stored estation by 2030 is a good first step—but the pledge
in this layer, the other half in the trees. Once the needs to include ending industrial forestry practices
forest floor is pushed around by the clear-cutting too. Corporations need to take responsibility for the
machinery and exposed to the air, about 60 percent damage and emissions they create in pursuit of profit.
of the carbon is lost through displacement, erosion, Second, we can take immediate action to protect
and decomposition. My research also suggests that and restore old-growth forest ecosystems.
ultimately 90 percent is lost when the replacement Third, we can press for land management policies
tree plantations are logged again. that restore plantations back to natural forests, where
we selectively harvest at a lower rate to preserve bio-
BEFORE THE POLICEMAN pushed one of the defenders diversity, water supply, and carbon storage. By taxing
into the cab, he muttered that he was saving her forest carbon emissions, we could restore cultural and
from her own stupidity. I knew better than to argue. social equity to rural and Indigenous communities,
But as we rolled down the mountain, I started to rewarding the stewards with what the polluters pay.
explain that it takes decades for clear-cut forests This is an easy tool to bring about a just transition.
to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester Fourth, we need climate policies that put as
and centuries more to recover the sink strength of much emphasis on protecting forest carbon sinks
the original tree stands. That we don’t have decades and preventing emissions from logging as they do
for these forests to recover from clear-cutting. That on preventing fossil fuel emissions.
in the hundred years it takes for a forest to mature, And finally, we need to shift away from a detached,
our planet is projected to warm by upwards of five exploitive relationship with nature toward one that
degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), eliciting is close, protective, and regenerative.
mass diebacks, pandemics, and starvations. We all can learn from the Indigenous Coast Salish
I don’t know if the cop heard, but I kept talking, people of the Pacific Northwest, who have long known
because our lives depend on scientists speaking that trees are our kin and that the forest is made of
out and people taking action. In British Columbia, many nations living side by side in peace. This com-
we have only 3 percent of iconic valley-bottom old- munal spirit will be essential for building alliances,
growth trees left, and we are gunning to log those forming a web that binds us, makes us stronger, and
too. The same story is playing out worldwide. helps us protect our forests for future generations. j
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at
the University of British Columbia and the author of
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom
of the Forest. She wrote the foreword for the new
National Geographic book Into the Forest, available
wherever books are sold and at books.disney.com.
BREAKTHROUGHS | E X P L O R E
Saving Seeds, by More Means

An estimated 8 percent of plant species—
including about a third of endangered and
D I S PAT C H E S vulnerable ones—have recalcitrant seeds
that won’t tolerate drying, says a study in
FROM THE FRONT LINES
the journal Nature Plants. That means typical
OF SCIENCE seed bank processes won’t work for those
species, so experts urge additional measures,
AND I N N OVAT I O N
such as cryopreservation, to guard against
their extinction. — H I C K S W O G A N
From trees,
a new way
to pinpoint
earthquakes
In Chile after a
magnitude 8.8
earthquake, a team
of scientists from
U.S. and German
research institu-
tions noticed that
streams in their
valley work site
had sped up. It’s
known that earth-
quakes make soil
more permeable
and increase the
downhill flow of
groundwater.
When the
researchers later
took core samples
from pine trees in
CENTURIES-OLD SURVIVORS
valleys and along
ridges in a Chilean
mountain range,
measures of the
I N T H E L AT E 1 8 0 0 S A N D E A R LY 1 9 0 0 S , L O G G E R S tree rings’ cells
C L E A R - C U T P I N E S I N M I N N E S O TA’ S N O R T H W O O D S — (left) confirmed
B U T S O M E R E M A I N , T H A N KS TO A M A P P I N G E R RO R . that valley trees
with extra water
spared a patch of old-growth
A S U RV E Y I N G S L I P U P 1 4 0 Y E A R S AG O after the earth-
pine forest in northern Minnesota from the saws and axes of the quake had seen
region’s logging boom. Now the trees—the kind that once filled the On this confocal temporary growth
laser scanning spurts and that
area’s famed North Woods—are estimated at up to 400 years old. image of cells higher, drier trees
Most of the region’s forests may look mature, but many trees are from a pine had grown more
less than a century old; settlers and lumber barons clear-cut much in the Chilean slowly. In this way,
earthquake the earthquake
of the forest between the 1890s and 1920s. So how were more than zone, the orange
30 acres of old-growth pines missed? According to U.S. government outline shows
had left an imprint
roughly the on trees.
records, in the winter of 1882, four surveyors headed into the thick
quake time span; The research-
forests to inventory land features. Cold and living roughly, they afterward, extra ers also have made
apparently rushed the job and made a mistake, categorizing as a water caused a mark: The tree-
lake the area that was actually forest acreage. Later, when loggers growth spurts ring technique can
that affected potentially date
were bidding on that land, it was listed as being underwater and
tree-ring growth. a seismic event to
so was not pursued for logging rights.
within weeks of its
That’s a boon to modern-day hikers. They can wander through
occurrence, more
what’s now called the Lost 40 and gaze up at the towering pines— precise than the
one of which is the state’s largest living red pine at 120 feet tall and usual metric, the
nearly 10 feet around. — K AT I E T H O R N TO N nearest year. — H W
PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP): ZOONAR GMBH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; CHRISTIAN MOHR; DEBORAH ROSE
E X P L O R E | DECODER
THE FIRST FORESTS CHINA

Beijing
Guangde
County
TAIWAN
Researchers in China have

discovered fossils of the
oldest forest ever found in Asia,
a 62-acre stand dating back
some 365 million years. The
newly unearthed genus, named
Strobilus
Guangdedendron, lived when
trees were starting to put down
roots around the world. The rise Megaspores
Actual size shown
of forests permanently altered (1/25 inch
in diameter)
Earth’s atmosphere and climate.
BY MONICA SERRANO
SEEDLESS SPREAD
AND SCOTT ELDER Guangdedendron repro-
duced by dispersing
snowman-shaped mega-
spores, held in its crown’s
arched branches.
Atmospheric CO2 (parts per million)

Guangdedendron era (372-359 MYA)
Major volcanic activity
1,969 ppm
Current
level
413 ppm
420 MYA 250 MYA Present

(million years ago)
CHANGING THE CLIMATE

During the Devonian period,
primitive mossy plants evolved
into trees, which gradually grew
bigger and more abundant.
Juvenile Mature
They collectively removed ever
tree Guangdedendron
greater amounts of CO2 from the
3.6-25.3 feet
air, causing an “anti-greenhouse”
effect that cooled the planet
and expanded the polar ice caps.
Crinoid Clam shrimp
Jiangxilepis
A clam shrimp and other

possible invertebrate and fish
fragments were also found.
ILLUSTRATION: RAÚL MARTÍN

24
EARLIEST TREES
The first major tree types all
went extinct, but Archaeopteris
is an indirect ancestor of today’s
trees. The group that includes
Guangdedendron, the lycopsids,
survives as much smaller plants.
D EVON IAN PE RI O D
( 4 19-3 59 M YA)
Cladoxylopsid trees
Archaeopteris trees
Lycopsid trees
Guangdedendron
Modern trees
400 MYA TODAY
Rootlet Hollow
Other roots from the period
BUILDING BETTER ROOTS
Early tree types had increasingly Guangdedendron’s
sophisticated root systems. While main roots divided in
Main roots
the simple radiating roots of two. Lateral rootlets
split into
cladoxylopsids limited the trees’ pairs were likely hollow to
size, branching roots supported Cladoxylopsid Archaeopteris carry air in the oxygen-
greater weight and height. tree tree poor environment.
SOURCES: “THE MOST EXTENSIVE DEVONIAN FOSSIL FOREST WITH SMALL LYCOPSID TREES BEARING THE EARLIEST STIGMARIAN ROOTS,” CURRENT BIOLOGY; CHRIS BERRY,
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY; PATRICIA GENSEL, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL; GAVIN FOSTER, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON; BRIGITTE MEYER-BERTHAUD,
CNRS; ERNEST M. GIFFORD AND ADRIANCE S. FOSTER, MORPHOLOGY AND EVOLUTION OF VASCULAR PLANTS; YOU-AN ZHU, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; NOAA
Kingdoms of the
Dadanites and Lihyanites
Distant view of tombs at Dadan.

Photograph by Matthieu Paley
PAID CONTENT FOR ROYAL COMMISSION FOR ALULA
M ore than two millennia ago, AlUla’s verdant oasis nurtured the
growth of sophisticated and innovative cultures.
Arabia’s deserts have always been peopled landscapes, rich with human
and natural diversity. People have lived in and around them, people have
journeyed across them, and people have found water sources within them
to sustain life.
That is how it is in the AlUla valley, a green oasis of citrus and palms
set amid desert cliffs of sandstone in northwestern Arabia. Here, ancient
civilizations flourished from at least the Iron Age (first millennium BCE)
onwards. Archaeologists working on the neighboring basalt plateau of
Harrat Uwayrid have discovered tools such as hand axes made of local
stone, leading Azhari Mustafa Sadig, archaeology professor at Saudi Arabia’s
King Saud University, to suggest “that the plateau was occupied by hunter-
gatherers as early as the Paleolithic age, more than 200,000 years ago.”
Nomadic hunter-gathering shifted into farming as people took advantage

of the AlUla valley’s natural resources to settle. They began harnessing water
flows within the oasis for agriculture, while continuing to herd sheep, goats,
and other livestock. According to archaeologist Abdulrahman Alsuhaibani,
by 2,600 years ago the oasis hosted the growth of Dadan, a “powerful capital
city” with an economy fueled by farming and long-distance trade.
Ruled by a dynastic succession of kings from a power base within the

AlUla valley, Dadan soon rose to prominence in the region. As Alsuhaibani
confirms, the city’s centralized structure of governance was strong and
stable enough to deploy resources on defense, with inscriptions testifying
to the presence of “guardians” posted to Dadan’s frontiers.
Movements of people along routes of trade were bringing new

commodities northwards, such aromatics including frankincense, a resin
formed from the sap of a tree native to southern Arabia and the Horn of
Africa. Trade of frankincense formed a huge part of Dadan’s economic
success. Farmers in distant southern Arabia would harvest vast quantities
of the resin for transport northwards to markets around the Mediterranean
and elsewhere. They dealt with traders, who then carried the frankincense
on journeys that sometimes lasted months at a time to reach Dadan,
where it was transported onwards. The profits they generated—and the
tolls charged by the people of Dadan—formed the bedrock of the region’s
prosperity for several centuries.
This is Paid Content. This content does not necessarily reflect the
views of National Geographic or its editorial staff.
PAID CONTENT FOR ROYAL COMMISSION FOR ALULA
With trade came new ideas, new remained critical to society, enhanced by
expressions in art, and new ways of writing. innovative developments in the control of
Dadan developed its own writing system, water resources. Water was clearly used for
based on scripts used in neighboring domestic and agricultural purposes, but
oases, such as Tayma and Dumah, and the also appears to have played a role in rituals.
alphabets of southern Arabia. Thousands of A huge cylindrical basin for water hewn
inscriptions survive here now, some formally from a single stone, located in the heart of
composed dedications, others casual graffiti. Dadan next to a building, was likely used
Dadanitic, as the local language is known, for religious or other ceremonial purposes.
was extraordinarily resilient, remaining in Along with its own writing system, Dadan
use in and around the AlUla valley for at had its own gods and forms of worship,
least 500 years. with sanctuaries located in mountains near
the city and on the summit of Mount Umm
Historian Michael Macdonald has Daraj across the valley.
analyzed subtle differences across Dadanitic
inscriptions, noting how shapes of letters The people of ancient Dadan worshipped
vary in a way that is unusual for a script the supreme deity Dhu Ghabat, the meaning
designed purely for carving into stone. of whose name is debated: some interpret
Intriguingly, he says, the development of it as “master of the grove,” others as “lord
letter forms “suggests that the script was of the forest,” and some as “god of absence.”
used to write in ink on materials such as The Umm Daraj mountain sanctuary is
papyrus or potsherds.” Archaeologists dedicated to Dhu Ghabat, where devotees
continue to hunt for examples. including Lihyanites, visiting traders, and
Dadan’s resident trading colony of Minaeans
It is natural to presume that the power from southern Arabia would make votive
of Dadan waxed and waned. In particular, offerings with frankincense, as well as small
we know about a period of conflict with figurines in sandstone depicting humans.
Nabonidus, king of distant Babylon, who Architectural elements have been discovered
claims in the sixth century BCE to have bearing decorative motifs of a snake, perhaps
invaded Dadan’s home region, killing its king as “a protective function,” suggests historian
and occupying its land. Husayn Abu al-Hassan. Inscriptions also
suggest, as Michael Macdonald notes, that
After Nabonidus, at some point around “worship of Dhu Ghabat may have included
2,500 years ago (it isn’t known precisely the offering of the ‘first fruits’ to the deity.”
when), control over Dadan shifted to the Other gods worshipped in Dadan at this time
kings of the tribe of Lihyan, who ruled the include Ha-Kutbay, the goddess of writing.
region for several centuries, perhaps until the
first century BCE. But the material evidence Art clearly mattered to the ancient
that survives suggests that Lihyanite rule peoples of Dadan—Dadanite and Lihyanite
perhaps didn’t greatly disrupt Dadanite artistry involved in carving statues is
culture. remarkable. “Where and how [did] the
inhabitants acquire such mastery of the
In what was now the kingdom of rules of sculpture—anatomical proportions,
Lihyan, men and women both owned volume, perspective?” asks archaeologist
property in their own right. Agriculture Said al-Said. He believes that, although there
were cultural interactions with neighboring
cultures in Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia,
and southern Arabia, it’s likely that this
Dadanite skill demonstrates a cultural
evolution unique to this part of Arabia.
Rock art that may date from the Dadanite

or Lihyanite period includes hunting scenes,
camels, ostriches, and abstract depictions
of people. Archaeologists have discovered A Dadanitic inscription showing a mixture of formal and
statuary at certain sites, including informal letter shapes.
anthropomorphic likenesses that have Photograph by L. Nehmé
been interpreted as either Dadanite gods or
images of living individuals, carved to show
homage and dedication to the gods.
Alongside the people of Daan’s notable

skills in politics, trade, science, and art,
evidence suggests dedication in how they
buried their dead. During the Lihyanite
period, people carved tombs into the cliffs,
designed for one person or more. Also
visible today, set into sandstone cliffs, are the
“lion tombs,” carved tombs adjacent to one
another, each of which is flanked by reliefs Bust of an ex-voto, excavated in Umm Daraj sanctuary,
AlUla.
of lions, perhaps as divine protection for the
Photograph courtesy of Royal Commission for AlUla
tombs’ inhabitants.
“The kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan

played a major role during the first
millennium BCE,” says Alsuhaibani,
confirming the importance of a place and
a period of history long overlooked. Today,
excavations and investigations into the
cultures of the people of Dadan continue
throughout the AlUla valley, shedding new
light on their artistry and ingenuity. With
each new discovery, it becomes clear that
the desert—once thought of as barren or
Detail of a carved lion above a tomb at Dadan.
empty—in truth has always hosted life. The
Photograph by Matthieu Paley
Dadan oasis, among other oases and centers
of activity in this region, exhibits human
achievement and drama as rich as anywhere To learn more about AlUla visit
on our planet. www.nationalgeographic.com/journey-to-alula
To plan a trip to AlUla visit www.experiencealula.com

E X P L O R E | PLANET POSSIBLE
Stroll a canopy walkway, take

a tree-climbing class, find forest
P L A N E T
lodgings, play leaf detective.
You too can be an ‘arbornaut.’
For more stories about
how to help the planet, go to
natgeo.com/planet.
BY CHRISTINA NUNEZ
As deforestation occurs
worldwide at an alarming rate,
what could make us care and
act? Perhaps spending time in
and among trees, as National
Geographic Explorer Meg
Lowman does. A biologist,
author, and self-described
“arbornaut,” Lowman raises
awareness of forests’ vital
role—and helps developing
nations create jobs—by
promoting sky-high walkways
and tree canopy tourism. “The
canopy houses some 50 per-
cent of terrestrial biodiversity,”
she notes. Here are some ideas
for arboreal appreciation.
Become a leaf detective.

Take a closer look at the char-
acteristics of leaves on the
trees in your area. “There are
so many adventures on the
life of a leaf surface,” Lowman
says. “You just need to get out
your journals and start record-
ing observations over time.”
Climb trees—safely.
Relive the arboreal ascents
of childhood but with today’s
technology. Search online for
specialized climbing courses to
get the training and equipment
needed to scale large trees.
Explore a canopy walkway.

Gaze out from a walkway high
in the trees, like those Low-
man helps build around the
world. You’ll find an inter-
national map of walkways at
treefoundation.org.
Stay in or above trees.

Look online for lists of tree
houses for visits or lodging.
Another option: fire towers.
Now that the U.S. Forest Ser-
vice is using more technology
to aid humans’ fire detection
efforts, some former lookouts
can be rented for overnight
stays at recreation.gov.
The National Geographic

Society has funded the
work of “CanopyMeg” Lowman
since 1998. Learn more about
its support of Explorers at
natgeo.com/impact.
PHOTO: ERIKA LARSEN

E X P L O R E
PHANTOM IN
THE FOREST
A
BY NADIA DRAKE PHOTOGRAPHS BY K E N N Y H U RTA D O
a ghost floats in the

AC R O S S A S T E E P C A N YO N ,
darkness—a phantom in this redwood forest,
somewhere in California’s Santa Cruz County.
We slip-slide into the gully, landing in spongy
piles of discarded needles, ferns, and poison oak,
and then we scale the other slope. A great horned
owl hoots once, twice, three times. Dawn is just
beginning to tickle the treetops, but down here,
beneath the forest canopy, it’s still chilly twilight.
A few feet away, the astonishingly white tree
hovers like an otherworldly apparition, its crown
high above our heads. It’s an albino redwood. An
enigma. A biological improbability—an organism
that shouldn’t exist.
“My guess is that this thing is probably a hun-
dred years old, or more,” says graduate student
Zane Moore, who studies redwood genomes at the
University of California, Davis. “It’s one of the tallest
in the county.”
Rather than being evergreen, the tree is everwhite,
its needles soft and waxy. Normally Sequoia semper-
virens, the coast redwood, survives by harvesting
sunlight and turning it into food—but this albino
S A N TA C RU Z C O U N T Y, C A L I F O R N I A is missing a crucial component of the basic cellular
machinery it needs to feed itself. Instead, it taps into
the root system of its pigmented parent and steals
sugars and nutrients.
IT’S AN EVERGREEN
Although rare on Earth, albinos grow naturally
T H AT ’ S W H I T E . I T L I V E S within the fog-drenched coast redwood range.
LIKE A MOOCHER AND They’re a scientific puzzle—mutated trees that are
L O O K S L I K E A G H O S T. somehow allowed to survive, even as parent trees
THE ALBINO REDWOOD IS discard other shoots. A few are tall like the tree we’re
A G E N E T I C M A RV E L , visiting, but most are shorter and shrubbier. Others
have sprouted high up in their parent trees. Maybe
W R A P P E D I N M Y S T E R Y.
50 or so are naturally occurring white-and-green
M AY 2 0 2 2 29
E X P L O R E
chimeras, organisms with two distinct sets of genetic State Park, where a well-trodden loop trail allows
instructions. One of these trees, which was growing visitors to experience the majesty and monstrosity
near a right-of-way in Sonoma County, is so beloved that is an old-growth redwood grove: thick, towering
that when railway builders threatened to cut it down trees with twisted bark and gnarly burls, split crowns,
in 2014, local residents forced the company to dig it fused trunks, and even a burned-out cavern big
up, load it onto a truck, and relocate it. enough for dozens of people to squeeze into.
Surrounded by ferns and fragrant, dewy leaf lit-
T H E T R E E S F I R S T A P P E A R E D I N P U B L I C AT I O N S in ter, these massive trees dominate the landscape
the mid-1800s, when settlers started noticing their and lend an almost primordial appearance to the
curiously creamy foliage. Since then, and with a forest. Moore’s first albino, in contrast, is a roughly
few exceptions, the albinos’ locations have human-height mix of brown and white branches,
been closely guarded to protect them from tucked into an unmarked grove near the
trophy-clippers or decorators, like those park’s railroad tracks. He found it in 2011
who once festooned an opera house with OREG. UNITED after he watched a documentary about
the snowy sprigs. STATES the albinos and decided to go see one
The towering albino we visited at Coast redwood for himself. “And around the same time,
range (Sequoia
dawn has been known since the 1970s, sempervirens) I’m realizing, Oh, I could do botany as
says Moore, now one of the world’s Santa a living?” Moore recalls. “You know, I
Cruz CALIF.
experts on the trees. He and a colleague really like plants.”
are keepers of the albino redwood map, an Everything about albino redwoods is
evolving guide to the roughly 630 known albi- tinged with mystery. How they survive, and
nos growing between southern Oregon and central sometimes appear to thrive; their physiology; their
California. Some of these trees have been cultivated anatomy; the mutations that make their bone-white
by enthusiasts. Others, maybe a hundred or so, Moore color. Even the scientific literature describing the
has stumbled upon accidentally, including the one he trees is sparse. Recently, scientists went hunting for
glimpsed while snarled in beach traffic on a notorious albino-producing mutations but were thwarted by the
California highway. Mostly, he says, he chases them redwood genome itself—a colossal, just sequenced
based on historical reports or tips from locals: “It’s assemblage of 26.5 billion base pairs distributed
like a treasure hunt.” among six pairs of 11 chromosomes. (Humans,
Later in the day, he shows me the first albino he by comparison, have three billion base pairs and
ever encountered. It lives in Henry Cowell Redwoods 23 pairs of chromosomes.)
This photo, of “a gleaming bush nonchalantly sprouting next to the curving metal,” was made in 2021. An albino redwood is
also growing by the railroad tracks in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in an 1877 photo that researcher Zane Moore has.
NGM MAPS. SOURCE: U.S. FOREST SERVICE

E X P L O R E
In 2016, Moore discovered that some albinos

In the realm of the California
contain much higher levels of cadmium, nickel,
redwoods, humans are the and copper than their green parents—as much as
fleeting apparitions. The oldest 11 times the amount needed to damage a plant. He
wondered whether the albinos were sequestering
tree displayed in the park dates
those heavy metals and in some way benefiting their
to two centuries before the parent trees, which researchers suspect could oth-
birth of Christianity. erwise choose to shut off the albinos’ food supply.
So far, there’s no consensus among scientists about
what’s going on. And now, in a twist, researchers at
Princeton University who are studying how carbon
and hydrogen atoms travel through the trees’ meta-
bolic pathways are using the trees to possibly better
reconstruct ancient environmental conditions.
People often say that albino redwoods are
ephemeral—ghosts that materialize and vanish,
phantoms that hide in plain view. But in the realm
of the California redwoods, humans are the fleeting
apparitions. At Henry Cowell Park, a ceremoniously
displayed stump came from a tree that sprouted in
a California forest two centuries before the birth of
Christianity. The oldest tree in the park has been
soaking up sunlight for more than a thousand years.
Yet even the supposedly frail albinos outlive us.
Moore shows me one growing near the park’s rail-
road tracks that also appeared in a photograph from
1877—a gleaming bush nonchalantly sprouting next
to the curving metal. And he tells me that a few miles
away, a huge tree exists that was first described in 1912.
“It was fully cut down in the 1970s, but it’s still
growing back,” Moore says. “You want to see a spec-
tacular albino? That’s it. Covers 728 square feet, and
it’s about 15-ish, maybe 15, 20 feet tall on average, just
this big clump of white. It’s really something else.”
Of course we go see it. Casually growing between
two houses, the tree is a riotous gathering of milky
branches erupting in every direction—a thicket large
enough to get lost in—that has regrown in just 50
years. Now, every threat to redwoods is also a threat
to the albinos, Pittermann says, because “their vigor
is impacted by the health of the parent tree.” But this
razed tree’s regrowth is the same phenomenon seen
Albinos may look delicate, but they’re survivors: Their
after forest fires: White shoots often are among the
white shoots are often among the fastest to regrow from fastest to regrow from flame-damaged landscapes.
flame-damaged landscapes. “It’s amazing, right?” she says.
I GREW UP IN THE ARMS of an old-growth redwood

Researchers do know that, in addition to lacking grove, a place that feels more precious every day. Yet
photosynthetic machinery, the trees have almost no it took me nearly 25 years to spot the bushy cluster
control over water loss through small openings in of albino sprouts along one of my childhood trails:
their leaves, which happens more quickly in higher a froth of snow-white needles the size of a minivan.
temperatures. The albino trees also have weaker Like most people, I’d traipsed by it multiple times,
wood than the pigmented trees, perhaps because oblivious to its striking colors or perhaps dismiss-
they can’t easily make a compound called lignin ing it as a trick of sunlight. To this day the tree, an
that’s crucial for building cell walls. “It’s hard working embodiment of the peculiar and the unlikely, is
with these long-lived plants,” says ecophysiologist thriving. Though precisely where, I won’t say. j
Jarmila Pittermann of the University of California,
Contributing writer Nadia Drake enjoyed this sylvan break from
Santa Cruz, who did the work on water loss. “I’m also covering the James Webb Space Telescope and other space
fascinated by the fact that there really are a lot of oddities. Photographer Kenny Hurtado, a longtime chronicler
them here” in Santa Cruz County, she says. of coastal California culture, is now based in the Midwest.
HEAT
AND DROUGHT
ARE
KILLING
OUR FORESTS.
BUT
WE CAN
LIMIT THE
DAMAGE—
IF WE
CHANGE
COURSE NOW.
BY CRAIG WELCH
35
P R E V I O U S P H OTO
Standing nearly 217 fir, considering its

feet tall and estimated circumference, height,
to be more than 500 and crown size. Old-
years old, Big Lonely growth forests around
Doug, on British the world face bull-
Columbia’s Vancou- dozers and chain saws,
ver Island, was saved and climate change
in 2011 by a logger poses new threats:
impressed by its size. It intensifying wildfires,
proved to be Canada’s beetle attacks, heat,
third largest Douglas and drought.
GARTH LENZ
S E Q U O I A N AT I O N A L F O R E S T
CALIFORNIA
FIRES IN THE PAST incense cedars.
While sequoias can
TWO YEARS KILLED UP often survive ground
TO A FIFTH OF THE fires because they
have few low branches,
LARGEST SEQUOIAS this fire blew flames
into the crowns. Cli-
On a burnt slope in mate change and fire
the Sierra Nevada, suppression are fueling
their only native home, bigger wildfires.
giant sequoias—some
more than a thousand F L A P : Embers rain from
years old—stand like the crown of a sequoia
black daggers among that was ignited by a
the other dead: white windblown ember in
firs, sugar pines, 2021. The tree survived.
SUE CAG;
JEFF FROST (FLAP)
N O RT H E R N C OA S T
AUSTRALIA
39 MILLION MANGROVES El Niño of 2015-16
finished them off by
DIED OF THIRST HERE causing a temporary
16-inch drop in sea
Years of high heat level here, drying out
and drought had the trees’ roots. This
stressed mangroves 2021 photo shows lit-
along hundreds tle recovery; the green
of miles of the Gulf belongs to a short
of Carpentaria coast. mangrove species that
Then the intense survived the die-off.
MATTHEW ABBOTT
EASTERN SIBERIA
RUSSIA
IN 2021, FIRES TORCHED regularly in this region
about twice the size
21 MILLION ACRES IN A of Alaska. But in 2021,
PLACE KNOWN FOR COLD four times the average
annual area ignited,
Snow blankets a boreal potentially releasing
forest that burned ancient carbon from
the previous summer permafrost and
in the Sakha Republic. transforming forest
Small fires occur into grassland.
ANTOINE BOUREAU
G R A N D E P R A I R I E , A L B E RTA
CANADA
QUAKING ASPEN, as they call the die-
offs that have struck
NORTH AMERICA’S MOST since the turn of the
WIDESPREAD TREE, century. But they know
drought and rising
IS DYING IN DROVES temperatures make
the trees more suscep-
Forest scientists are tible to disease and
struggling to figure insects—such as the
out a response to tent caterpillars that
“sudden aspen decline,” defoliated this stand.
GARTH LENZ
M OJAV E N AT I O N A L P R E S E RV E
CALIFORNIA
THE DOME FIRE KILLED rise and a long drought
persists; invasive
MORE THAN A MILLION grasses promote fire.
JOSHUA TREES IN 2020 This relatively cool
pocket, where some
Yet these icons of the trees survived the
Mojave Desert already 2020 fire, is a potential
faced other threats. refuge. Volunteers
Seedlings appear less are planting seedlings
often as temperatures to aid the recovery.
KEITH LADZINSKI
T in this fire-scarred
T H E F I R S T T H I N G YO U N OT I C E
forest is the color. Not long ago this square of
land south of Yellowstone National Park was a
monochrome of ash and burned pines. But last
summer, shin-high seedlings and aspen shoots
painted the ground an electric green. Purple
fireweed and blood-red buffalo berries sprouted
around blackened logs. Yellow arnicas danced
in the breeze. Five years after 2016’s Berry fire
chewed through 33 square miles of Wyoming,
this slice of scorched earth was responding to fire
as Rocky Mountain forests have for millennia: It
had entered a season of rebirth.
Monica Turner was cataloging that recovery.
On a sweltering July day, Turner, a professor of
SOUTH OF
Y E L LO W S TO N E
WYOMING
THIS BURNED FOREST
IS GROWING BACK,
ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,
shuffled along a line of tape she’d stretched 50 BUT OTHERS AREN’T
meters across the ground. She and a graduate Ecologist Monica
Turner counts lodge-
student were counting every lodgepole pine pole pine seedlings
seedling within a meter on either side. We were sprouting (along with
far enough from paved roads that there was fireweed) among pines
that burned in 2016.
no telling which forest inhabitants might be Fire opens seed cones,
lurking—elk, deer, moose, wolves. The air was allowing lodgepoles
so hot I wondered fleetingly if the bear spray to regenerate—but if
another fire comes be -
canister on Turner’s hip might explode. fore trees mature, they
So many tiny trunks crowded the researchers’ may not grow back.
SOFIA JARAMILLO
feet that covering a distance they normally distinction set them apart. The site with fewer
would walk in seconds took almost an hour. pines had burned another time as well, in 2000.
In the end they counted 2,286 baby trees in an Trees that sprouted after that fire had not yet
area half the size of a tennis court. This spot was matured to produce enough seeds before being
producing 70,000 pines an acre. “This is what wiped out in 2016. In this place, rather than
lodgepole pines do,” Turner said. “They come reseeding the pine forest, the Berry fire was
back gangbusters.” resculpting the landscape into something new,
Yet the previous day, in a neighboring patch perhaps for centuries or even millennia.
of burned timber, Turner had documented Yellowstone is part of a global trend. From the
something unsettling. Instead of a river of new Amazon to the Arctic, wildfires are getting bigger,
pine seedlings, the ground was a mix of flowers, hotter, and more frequent as the climate changes.
grasses, and caked earth. Aspens were there, but Australia’s forest fires in 2019 and 2020 burned an
so were invasive grasses and sour weeds. Along area as big as Florida. That’s devastating enough.
one 50-meter tract, Turner had spotted just 16 But often overlooked amid the initial carnage is
baby pines; on another, only nine. All told, this what happens after the trees die: Many forests
patch was producing fewer than one-fiftieth as now struggle to recover. That too is not limited to
many young conifers as its neighbor. Yellowstone, nor is it always triggered by fire—but
The two patches of forest were almost identi- it is caused by climate change.
cal. Before the Berry fire, both sites had burned In many places, forests are no longer regen-
around the time of the Civil War. But one erating on their own. Some of the world’s most
THE FUTURE OF FORESTS 49

significant stands are instead transitioning to already are only a small fraction of the three tril-
something new. Some will never be the same. lion trees and 10 billion acres of forest on this
Others may not come back at all. planet. Climate change still poses less of a threat
to forests than logging and land clearing, but the
threat is growing fast. “How big does that frac-
tion get over time, and when does it overwhelm
the other?” asks Matt Hansen of the University of
Earth has lost a
I T ’ S A TO U G H T I M E TO B E A T R E E . Maryland, who monitors forests using satellites.
third of its forests over the past 10,000 years—half The problem is, we can’t yet quantify the
of that just since 1900. We logged them for timber. planetwide scope of climate impacts. Satellite
We cut them to make way for farms and cattle. We data show that Earth’s tree-covered area actu-
cleared land to build homes and roads. Globally, ally expanded from 1982 to 2016 by 7 percent,
deforestation has decreased from its peak in the an area larger than Mexico. But that doesn’t
1980s, but trends vary by region. In Indonesia, mean forests are doing fine: The data don’t dis-
which had been mowing down forests for oil palm tinguish between natural forests and industrial
plantations, primary forest loss has declined tree farms, such as the millions of palm, euca-
since 2016. From August 2020 to July 2021, the lyptus, and pine trees planted as crops while
Brazilian Amazon lost 5,000 square miles of rain- rainforest is cleared. The data also don’t show
forest, a 22 percent increase over the previous which forests were lost to chain saws and which
year. Since 1990, we’ve cut down more forest were killed by climate-related events.
globally than there is forest in the United States. No computer model can yet project how cli-
Now fossil fuel emissions spewing from coal mate will change forests globally—or how their
plants and tailpipes are rearranging forests in carbon stores will feed back on climate. “Earth
other consequential ways. As carbon dioxide system models historically haven’t done a good
and other greenhouse gases warm the planet, job of capturing this,” says Charlie Koven, a
some of its estimated 73,000 tree species are climate scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley
pushing poleward and higher up slopes, drag- National Laboratory, who worked with the UN’s
ging other life with them. Alders, willows, and
dwarf birches are expanding across the Arctic,
from Scandinavia to Canada, providing cover and
food for snowshoe hares and moose. Trees are
growing faster as they soak up excess CO2—a key SINCE 1990, WE’VE
ingredient for photosynthesis. That “greening” of
the planet has so far helped slow climate change,
CUT DOWN MORE
protecting us from ourselves. FOREST GLOBALLY THAN
But climate change also is killing trees. And THERE IS FOREST IN THE
what has forest scientists increasingly uneasy
is the quickening pulse of extreme events—fire,
UNITED STATES.
more powerful storms, insect infestations, and,
most notably, severe heat and drought, which
can worsen the effects of all the rest. These sin-
gular, frequently unprecedented episodes can Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
swiftly inflict mass tree mortality, shifting for- (IPCC). Only two of its 11 models include both
ests that have been around since the last ice age fire and geographic shifts in plants.
to entirely new states. The global number of trees isn’t the only thing
“We have a whole set of mechanisms that are that matters. Climate change is reshaping forests
pushing Earth’s forests to grow more and suck locally almost overnight, transforming them even
up more CO2 ,” says University of Utah biologist where there are policies to protect them. It’s hap-
William Anderegg. But those mechanisms “are pening so fast we can’t discern the consequences.
fundamentally in tension with mechanisms that While we’re losing trees of all types and sizes, the
are pulling Earth’s forests toward a cliff—with biggest and oldest harbor the most carbon, are
more tree death and more loss of carbon.” important for biodiversity, and will be the hard-
The forests that have plunged over that cliff est to get back. “Big trees are disproportionately
important and cannot be replaced quickly—if Monica Turner’s who retired last year from the
ever,” says Nate Stephenson, a scientist emeritus U.S. Geological Survey. He’s been trying to alert
with the U.S. Geological Survey. people to that danger for two decades now.
That will matter to us all. Humans are bound
to the woods. Our history is linked to trees. We
climbed down from their canopies and used
them to make fire. The advent of paper—and the
printing press—let literature and science flour- TURNER HAS A QUICK SMILE, bobbed sandy hair,
ish. Trees feed us, shelter us, give us medicine. and, at 62, a college student’s capacity to stay
We lean on them in ways we scarcely acknowl- upbeat while working nonstop. I spent several
edge, as sources of wonder and inspiration or to days with her last summer in the John D. Rocke-
decompress in a noisy world. feller Jr. Memorial Parkway. The parkway is not
One of my favorite escapes is the Hoh Rain- a highway but a parcel of sagebrush and pine
forest on the Olympic Peninsula, four hours larger than Manhattan. It links Yellowstone and
from my home in Washington State. It’s a place Grand Teton National Parks. Turner seemed so
where glistening ferns tall enough to hide elk at home on this forested plateau that her Long
crowd the ground while ancient spruces and Island accent kept catching me off guard.
big-leaf maples draped in emerald moss block Turner showed up in Yellowstone in 1978 to
the sky. What you can see in such places is com- work as a summer ranger, giving guided nature
plex enough, but humans also are beginning to talks at twilight. Yellowstone, with its golden
appreciate how much is going on out of sight. meadows and kaleidoscopic thermal pools,
Trees in a forest are not isolated individuals; transfixed her. She eventually would return and
they share nutrients and data across species in spend decades studying its trees.
underground fungal networks. They talk to one In 1988 Turner and a colleague, ecologist Bill
another, passing chemical messages, warning Romme, crisscrossed its wildlands in a heli-
of pest invasions and other dangers. copter, scanning the aftermath of the park’s
Old-growth forests are collaborative, Korena worst fire season in a century. A third of Yellow-
Mafune, a postdoctoral research fellow at the stone—793,880 acres—had gone up in smoke
University of Washington, told me as we walked in a few months. Turner feared it would never
through the Hoh recently. She suspects a diminu- recover. But during that flight she began to
tive version of this fungal network may even exist believe what Romme had recently suggested:
on high branches. She’s found soil beneath moss This was what Yellowstone was supposed to do.
growing in the canopy, with tiny trees sprouting Many people had assumed Yellowstone’s fires
from the living branches of big old ones—“a mini- blew up because firefighters more than a century
forest within a forest,” she says. She worries that earlier had begun suppressing wildfires, allow-
even this ancient place, so much richer than a ing excess trees to pack forests like kindling. This
tree plantation, could change rapidly if a hot is true in parts of the West. But while traversing
enough dry spell lasted too long. game trails to map the park’s fire history, Romme
Already, snow melting early in Alaska is discovered that Yellowstone historically burned
depriving yellow cedars of their warming blan- very severely once in a great while. “There had
ket, letting cold snaps freeze their roots and kill- not been very many fires even in the days before
ing them by the thousands. Heat and drought fire suppression,” he told me one morning in the
sparked by climate change have killed up to 20 park. “It was really kind of shocking.”
percent of trees in Africa’s Sahel, in southwest Yellowstone is lodgepole country. Their thick,
Morocco, and in the western U.S. since 1945, slender trunks occupy 80 percent of the park’s
according to the latest IPCC report. Five of the woods. Some are serotinous, meaning they need
eight most abundant tree species in the Ameri- fire to unlock cones that hold their seeds. Romme
can West have declined significantly just since had shown that these forests had seen monster
2000, mostly from fire and insect infestations. stand-clearing blazes in the 1700s and 1800s.
Lodgepole pines top the list. Such fires were rare because the park was “too
“Forests are far more vulnerable in the cli- moist, and it was too cool,” he said. But every 100
mate change era than people think,” says Craig to 300 years, in an exceptionally hot, dry sum-
Allen, a landscape ecologist and collaborator of mer, enormous patches would ignite in one great

52
S O U T H E A S T C OA S T
BRAZIL
FIRST CAME THE River. Drought had
stressed the trees,
DROUGHT, THEN THE partly by boosting
DEVASTATING HAIL the water’s salinity.
Hail and wind killed
Six months after nearly a third of them.
Australia’s mangrove Globally, the main
die-off in 2015, the threat to mangroves—
same El Niño caused clearing for timber or
a storm that hit man- farming—has declined.
groves in the estuary But climate change is
of the Piraquê-Mirím a rising concern.
VICTOR MORIYAMA
A LO N G T H E C A P E F E A R R I V E R
NORTH CAROLINA
RISING SEAS near Eagles Island.
Dredging encouraged
ARE CREATING the intrusion and killed
‘GHOST FORESTS’ the trees long ago.
Cypress stands all over
Seawater seeps into the Southeast have
aquifers and freshwa- been decimated since
ter wetlands, killing the 19th century by
vegetation such as logging and draining
these bald cypresses of wetlands.
MAC STONE
conflagration, allowing the woods to be reborn.
Forests, Turner realized, were resilient. It J E M E Z M O U N TA I N S
would take time to accept how that could change.
NEW MEXICO
during the
A N E A R LY WA R N I N G C A M E I N 2 0 0 2 ,
A TREE’S RINGS up in the forest; a long,
hot drought settled
Southwest’s worst drought in five decades.
Weeks before meeting Turner, I scrambled up
REVEAL A LONG HISTORY in. A monster blaze in
a dusty embankment near New Mexico’s Ban- OF SURVIVING FIRE 2011 ravaged 45 square
miles in its first night.
delier National Monument. Beside me, Craig From 1650 on, this The result? “An extin-
ponderosa pine survived guished ecosystem that
Allen and Nate McDowell, an earth scientist 15 fires—but in the 20th will never be seen again
at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, century most fires were here,” says scientist
examined a picture Allen had taken in 2002. suppressed. Fuel built Craig Allen (right).
It showed dense throngs of piñon pines, their KEITH LADZINSKI
needles tinged orange because they were dying.

Allen swept an arm toward a nearby mesa.
He’d studied forests in this scratch of arid wood- trees protect themselves with deeper roots, for
land near the Jemez Mountains since the 1980s. example, or by storing more water—but those
Now the adult pines from his picture were gone. investments come at the expense of growing taller
What remained was cracked earth, hardy juni- to compete for light and space with other trees.
pers, and an occasional seedling. The upshot, scientists figured out in just the
A drought in the 1950s had brought even less past decade, is that many trees in most land-
rain, and yet between 2002 and 2004 the impact scapes, from the hot, rainy Amazon to cold,
on trees was worse: In some areas, more than 90 dry Alberta, are operating at the limits of their
percent perished, many falling victim to bark hydraulic systems, even under normal condi-
beetles, natural predators that spread as never tions, with little safety margin. That means a hot
before. All told, some 350 million piñons, New drought can push them over the threshold. The
Mexico’s state tree, died across the Southwest. 2002 drought in the Southwest did exactly that:
Unprecedented fires eviscerated hundreds of Tree-ring records would later show it was the
thousands of acres of ponderosa pines. driest and worst year for growth in a millennium.
Allen was taken aback by the severity. But No other year even came close.
bit by bit, he, McDowell, and their colleagues All this awakened Allen to what he now sees
came to understand: This drought was hotter. as a grave global threat. “Seeing the transforma-
The slight increase in temperature attributable tion of this landscape that I’d studied my whole
to greenhouse gas emissions was already enough adult life … climate change wasn’t theoretical
to set the death of New Mexico’s trees in motion. anymore,” he told me. He started tracking the
And what’s become ever more clear to Allen, mass mortality events elsewhere. Over the next
through his own work and that of many others, two decades, heat and drought would kill bil-
is that trees the world over are vulnerable to lions of trees directly and indirectly—in Spain,
the added heat. The warmer atmosphere sucks in South Korea, throughout Australia. In cen-
more moisture from plants and soil. To cut their tral Siberia, Russia lost two million acres of firs.
losses during droughts, trees close pores in their In Texas in 2011, drought killed more than 300
leaves, called stomata, or shed leaves entirely. million trees—one out of every 16 in the state.
But that limits the CO2 they take in, leaving them Increasing warmth helped deadly forest pests
both hungry and parched all at once. When it’s spread, weakening trees and letting beetles and
especially hot, they even leak some of the water moths live through the winters or reproduce more
they’re desperate to retain. often. Such invasions wiped out trees in Hondu-
When soil gets dry enough, trees can no lon- ras, Turkey, and Algeria. In central Europe they
ger maintain pressure in the internal conduits arrived as a shocking new plague.
that carry water up to their leaves. Air bubbles On a chilly day last fall, I struggled up 227 steps
interrupt the flow, causing fatal embolisms. Some inside a former Cold War surveillance station on
ROOTS OF A CRISIS
As temperatures rise because of climate change,
HEAT AND DROUGHT
Hotter air pulls more water from soil

and trees during a drought, even
as heat stress requires trees to pump
PESTS
Under repeated stress, even the

most pest-resistant trees are at
risk. Bark beetles, previously not
OTHE
D
trees are being hit with heat waves and drought, more water to leaves. To survive known to kill giant sequoias, have
mounting stressors, trees may tempo- recently felled dozens of the an- E
killing them or weakening their resistance to a rarily shut down some processes. cient trees after droughts and fires.
R
cascade of pressures, from pests to rising sea levels. te
HEALTHY Carbon
dioxide
Water
STRESSED HEALTHY STRESSED
converted
to food
3 Greater
Open atmospheric Closed 1
CO2 stomata pull of water CO2 stomata
1/8 inch
Inside Needle
leaf Cedar bark
beetle
Water Bark beetles b

their assault b
attacking bra
where bark is
OPEN ACCESS LOCKDOWN
To make food (car- Stomata close to avoid
bohydrates) and stay water loss, but this stops
cool, the tree absorbs the uptake of carbon
carbon dioxide and dioxide. The tree can
Healthy / Stre
releases water through die if it depletes its
pores called stomata. food reserves. Resin
Water
Food Water Food Air A healthy tree

bubbles
chemical defe
abundant res
out invaders;
weakens thos
Cork Xylem
WORKING FLOW Phloem BROKEN FLOW
The atmosphere pulls 2 Lack of water can create
water from roots to can- Bark air bubbles in the xylem, Tunnels
opy through the pipelike RESERVES impairing water trans-
xylem. Food is distrib- port and raising the risk
Food 3
uted via the phloem. of tree death.
Water
Once inside, b
bore tunnels a
on the bark’s
Root Root layer that sho
Piñon
pine Giant Fire distributing f
Water Less
water sequoia scarring
WET SOIL DRY SOIL

Roots can expand or In a drought, a tree must Rising temper
contract their sur- 1
compete with dried-out may speed up
face area and depth soil for water. The tree has Life cycle Life cycle cycles of some
in response to water Dry soil greater demand for water 2 years 1 year leading to mo
availability in the soil. retains water. even as less is available. of attacks.
MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF; MESA SCHUMACHER. SOU

NATHAN L. STEPHENSON, USGS; ANNA W. SCHOETTLE, U.
PATHOGENS LOSS OF WATER VAPOR SEA-LEVEL RISE
Trees can contract and host The Amazon’s tree canopy releases Mangrove forests buffer
ER FACTORS Climate Rising Rising
infectious diseases such as blister most of the rainforest’s water many of the world’s shore-
change temperature temperature
Drought rust, which ravages many pine vapor, key to Earth’s greatest water lines but need freshwater
species. A warming climate Rising recycling ecosystem. If too many Drought to survive. Rising seas are Extreme
xtreme fire can alter pathogen life cycles temperature trees die of heat and drought, the cutting them off from that weather
and extend sporing times. system could collapse. vital resource. Drought
Rising
emperature
Blister rust has a second ATMOSPHERIC Under normal conditions, Heat and drought
host, Ribes plants, which WATER salt-tolerant mangroves increase atmospheric
release spores that infect rely on oxygen and demand for water, fur-
pines; pines then reinfect freshwater intake from ther pressuring a system
the Ribes plants. 1 their roots to thrive. strained by higher seas.
Water vapor Less total
Some pines in drier,
cools forest. water vapor
higher elevations can
avoid infection, but their
ecosystems are changing. RAIN HEAT RAIN
Spores 59% Water Greater
Total water atmospheric
recycled pull of water
back into
begin atmosphere
by 2 White-pine
nches blister rust CO2 CO2
thinnest. Needle stomata disease 26%
must be open from canopy
to be infected.
essed 2
Cooling water
22% vapor is lost
Defenses from when stomata
breached evaporation close under
stress.
e produces 6.5% Less

from 3
enses and water is
in to flush subcanopy recycled.
stress
se defenses.
When sea levels rise,

Red inundated mangroves
mangrove
suffer from lack of oxy-
gen and extreme salin-
4.5% ity. This can lead to
from stress conditions similar
4 understory to drought on land.
Blisters discharge
more spores.
beetles Brazil nut Dying Rising sea level

and feed tree tree
phloem Whitebark
ould be pine O2 O2
ood.
1
1
Ribes plant
(Gooseberry)
Freshwater Less freshwater Saltwater
inflow, low salinity inflow
2
Sporing Host susceptibility

Soil level
ratures A changing climate can 41% When this water
p the life also alter the timing Current conditions River runoff recycling system is
e pests, of host susceptibility, feeds coastal diminished, less water
ore waves creating more opportuni- mangrove forests. reaches coastal man- Nutrient-rich Soil erosion and high
Increased warming
ties for infection. groves via rivers. soil deposited salt concentration
URCES: CRAIG D. ALLEN, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; BRENDAN CHOAT, WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY; ANGELO BERNARDINO, FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF ESPÍRITO SANTO;
S. FOREST SERVICE ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESEARCH STATION; GRETCHEN BAKER, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; NATE MCDOWELL, PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY
WORLDWIDE LOSSES
Trees are facing unprecedented mortality events around the globe. These
die-offs are projected to accelerate as more frequent and severe droughts
and heat waves push trees—especially old-growth forests that matured
under bygone conditions—beyond their threshold of survivability.
Die-offs in boreal forests

and rainforests, both
critical absorbers and
EUROPE storers of carbon dioxide,
95 ASIA
NORTH 62 are likely underreported.
AMERICA
285
AFRICA
48
Location of 675
published tree
mortality sites
(1970-2018)
SOUTH
AMERICA Boreal forest
Total sites 57 OCEANIA
128 Humid tropical forest
ALL FORESTS HOT & WET

ARE AT RISK Number of tree
mortality sites
Trees have a range of
climate conditions they
can withstand. But 160 100
when temperature and inches
precipitation change 50
in frequency, duration,
or severity, trees and
entire forests can fail.
675
unique sites of
25
10
5
scientifically re- 42
ported die-offs
over the past
five decades
COLD & WET HOT & DRY
140 Forests cannot 69

inches grow in these 90°F
cold and wet HÖLSTEIN, NEAR BASEL
extremes. 60
120 80
W
SWITZERLAND
ET
T
O
H
36 77
100 70
137
80 60
RE e
WHICH TREES WILL

TU ag
A
plant ecologist Ans-

RA e r
nn CIP
PR
PE av
Elevation
ua IT
gar Kahmen (at right)

SURVIVE A HOTTER,
60 50
E
M al
l a AT
(feet)
TE nu
and technician Lucio

ve IO
n
ra N
DRIER FUTURE?
A
84 Rizzelli regularly ride

ge
Over 9,000 5 studies 40 40 into the canopy of a

7,000-9,000 13
How exactly do trees research forest. Here
5,000-7,000 19 die of thirst? As part they’re measuring the
20 30
3,000-5,000 27 COLD & DRY of a 20-year project to water vapor that a
1,000-3,000 40 answer such questions, Norway spruce sheds
LD
University of Basel through its needles.

D
0-1,000 48
CO
RY
MONICA SERRANO AND CHRISTINA

ORSOLYA HAARBERG
SHINTANI, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: WILLIAM
CLIMATE DATA SHOWN HERE REPRESENT THE HAMMOND ET AL., NATURE
AVERAGE OVER FIVE DECADES, FROM 1970 TO 2018. COMMUNICATIONS
S O U T H W E S T O F C O P E N H AG E N
DENMARK
WHAT FORESTS DO “forest bathing,” has
been shown by scien-
FOR US TRANSCENDS tists to reduce mental
CALCULATION and physical stress. At
Camp Adventure, visi-
The tangible benefits— tors ascend a spiraling
food, wood, carbon 150-foot-high board-
storage—are not the walk to get a fresh
only ones. Immersing perspective on trees—
oneself in woods, or and perhaps on life.
ORSOLYA HAARBERG
a 4,300-foot peak outside Prášily, a Czech vil- some spots and skipping others. The mosaic let
lage near the border with Germany. I huffed to animals and trees recolonize easily. Her own
keep pace with Petr Kahuda, a ranger at Šumava work, influenced by that long-ago chopper ride,
National Park, and Zdeněk Patočka, a forest sci- had thoroughly documented that pattern. But
entist at Mendel University. The tower was built what if the system no longer worked that way?
in the 1960s to listen in on NATO radio transmis- Turner started investigating. She learned that
sions, but after the Iron Curtain fell, the Czech baby pines grew poorly in hot, dry seasons. She’d
government opened it and this 170,000-acre park been taught that young lodgepoles were too green
to the world. At the top, a circular balcony over- to burn, but she found them supporting explo-
looks rolling forests that once fueled the region’s sive fires. She watched areas of the park burned
glass industry. Now, huge portions of its trees are in 1988 catch fire again. She saw fires crashing
dying, victims of bark beetle attacks. through before young trees produced mature
In 2018 central Europe experienced its worst seed cones. Some burned so big and hot that
drought in five centuries. Summer temperatures no seed trees survived to regrow the forest.
hit nearly six degrees Fahrenheit above average. In five spots around Grand Teton and Yellow-
Tree deaths skyrocketed, and weakened survi- stone, Turner found forests coming back sparsely
vors attracted beetles. Worst hit was Czechia. or not at all. Climate change was reshaping some
Loggers raced to salvage what they could. People of the most storied scenery. Simulating a future
were so desperate, Kahuda said, that one man in which we don’t curtail emissions, she caught
offered Šumava National Park his sheep, hoping glimpses of some of her favorite places as her
their smell might drive away the insects. children might one day see them: At Oxbow
In Germany, 750,000 acres of forest died from Bend, where Mount Moran is reflected in the
2018 to 2020. No one knew quite how to respond. Snake River, the thick stand of conifers could
History aggravated the crisis: Almost no native be replaced by sagebrush, grasses, and aspens;
forests remain in central Europe. Humans have along Firehole Canyon Drive or the Madison
thoroughly transformed the landscape. Origi- River, the pine forests could become meadows.
nally dominated by beech and oak, many for- Turner had thought of Yellowstone as “the
ests had been replanted with Norway spruce and most resilient place in the world.” Now her
pine. After World War II, clear-cuts were made research showed its forests transitioning to a
to ship timber and pay reparations to the Allies.
But while spruce grows naturally at higher,
cooler elevations, foresters also planted it down
low. It did fine there for 70 years. Then, says Hen-
rik Hartmann, a forest expert at the Max Planck FIRES ARE RESHAPING
Institute for Biogeochemistry, “climate change
made this formerly suitable habitat inadequate.”
STORIED SCENERY:
SOME FORESTS ARE
COMING BACK SPARSELY—
OR NOT AT ALL.
FOR A WHILE, Turner kept her faith in Yellow-
stone’s cycle of fire and rebirth. Trees die; it’s
part of the equation. But at a 2008 conference in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she was confronted with new state. Other scientists were reaching sim-
the possibility that the equation had changed. A ilar conclusions elsewhere. Camille Stevens-
colleague presented maps suggesting that Yellow- Rumann, a forest ecologist at Colorado State
stone in coming decades could see fire seasons University, examined 1,485 sites from 52 fires
like 1988’s nearly every summer. That year “would in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Washington.
no longer be exceptional—and the exceptional The number of burned sites that didn’t recover
years would be out of control,” Turner recalls. jumped from 19 percent before 2000 to 32 per-
She didn’t buy it at first. For thousands of cent in the years after. “And by ‘not recovering,’
years Yellowstone’s monster blazes had burned I mean not a single tree—not one,” she says.
erratically at different intensities, scorching Not long ago, the U.S. Forest Service mostly
planted trees only after forests had been the canopy of a nearby sequoia and stared over at
logged—it counted on burned areas regen- the President. My throat itched from the smoke
erating naturally. Now, “over 80 percent of of a nearby wildfire. My legs ached from hauling
our reforestation needs are being driven by myself 200 feet up a climbing rope to join forest
catastrophic wildfire,” says David Lytle, the ecologist Anthony Ambrose. I’d come because
agency’s forest and rangeland management he and other scientists were suddenly rattled.
director. More than half of the millions of acres In 2014, two summers after that story was
burned recently in 154 national forests won’t published, sequoias began shedding needles,
grow back without replanting. Even then, on a severe move to curb water demand during a
tens of thousands of acres, seeds may never horrendous drought. Then scientists noticed
take root, Lytle says. 33 trees succumbing to fatal beetle attacks.
But around the world, more than just drought Ambrose saw tunnels carved through bark. He
and fire are at play. After extreme heat and saw branches trying to push insects out by ooz-
drought had weakened mangroves across hun- ing pitch. He worried other trees might be next.
dreds of miles of northern Australian coast, an El Before then, sequoias were considered “freaks”
Niño event in 2015-16, likely worsened by climate of the conifer world because “nobody had ever
change, caused a temporary regional drop in sea seen one killed by insects,” Nate Stephenson
level. Eighteen thousand acres of mangroves died had told me the day before I met Ambrose.
of thirst. In southeastern Brazil, the same El Niño Stephenson would know. After studying these
drove down precipitation, stressing mangroves monarchs for more than 40 years, he probably
along the flat, brown Piraquê-Mirím River. Then, understands them better than anyone else.
one June day in 2016, plum-size hail pummeled In 2015, shortly after the needles fell and the
this hot landscape for the first time on record, as bugs arrived, Stephenson met with Christy
60-mile-an-hour gusts blew foliage off trees and Brigham, who’d recently arrived as the park’s
drove trunks sideways across 1,200 acres. chief of resources. “How bad is it?” she asked.
Five years later I visited with Angelo Ber- Stephenson saw no reason for panic.
nardino, an oceanographer with Federal Drought and fire threats to sequoias had been
University of Espírito Santo. From a boat on predicted by climate modelers, but most didn’t
the river, we watched soil around the dead trees expect serious danger for decades. Sequoia and
sloughing into the water, ensuring that few if Kings Canyon National Parks had pioneered the
any mangroves would ever sprout here again. setting of prescribed burns to clear brush and
logs from the understory so that wildfires didn’t
explode. The parks would now light even more
controlled blazes, Brigham decided. She hired
Ambrose and forest ecologist Wendy Baxter to
climate shifts,
I F A N Y S P E C I E S C O U L D W I T H S TA N D track how sequoias were managing water stress.
you might think it’d be giant sequoias, many of Ambrose has climbed enough sequoias to
which have stood since the reign of Julius Cae- know they are tough old beasts. He’s seen them
sar. Instead, change has come frighteningly fast. struck by lightning only to grow new canopy
In 2012 the cover story in National Geograph- branches. He’s watched them slow their photo-
ic’s December issue profiled one stunning synthetic machinery in dry times. Trees that can
specimen in Sequoia National Park. At 247 feet drink 800 gallons of water a day don’t survive
in height, nearly half that of the Washington Mon- thousands of years without learning to “hunker
ument, the President, as the behemoth is called, down,” he says. But by 2021, as we sat together
was thought to have been a seedling when fewer staring at the President after the most shocking
people walked Earth than live in modern France. fire season on record, Ambrose was wondering
It held more leaves than there are people in China. how much more these trees could take.
Our story told of sequoias’ remarkable resil- Sequoias need low-intensity ground fires to
ience: the way tannins supposedly made them release seeds from their cones and clear soil, so
impervious to wood-boring beetles; how their seeds can take root. Their high branches make
thick bark was nearly flame resistant. Research- them unlikely hosts for canopy fires. But in 2020
ers were wary about the future but not alarmed. our history of suppressing fire collided with a
Last summer, less than a decade later, I sat in rapidly changing climate. The same dry spell

NEAR BOULDER
COLORADO
HOW BURNED TREES a forest that burned
in 2020. The mulch
CAN NURTURE THE will help stabilize the
LANDSCAPE slopes in these foothills,
letting new vegetation
With the help of a take root and pre-
helicopter, charred venting soil erosion,
trees ground to mulch which otherwise
are showered like could harm nearby
cremated remains over lakes and streams.
KEITH LADZINSKI
G R E AT B A S I N N AT I O N A L PA R K
NEVADA
HOW THESE ANCIENT here in 2000. Some
bristlecones are
TREES COULD WEATHER about 5,000 years
CLIMATE CHANGE old, making them the
longest-lived indi-
A pale moon shines vidual organisms on
through the skeletons Earth. Seedlings have
of bristlecone pines 21 sprouted among the
years after a wildfire— dead, offering hope
made rare and more that this species might
intense by years of fire be one of the best
suppression—ripped equipped to endure
through 1,650 acres a warming climate.
KEITH LADZINSKI
that cost sequoias foliage had killed tens of mil- might soak up more carbon than spruce over
lions of trees—sugar pines, incense cedars, and time and be less likely to burn. But soils hold
white firs—in densely packed forests nearby. most of the carbon in the boreal region, and for
That’s where the Castle fire began. now they seem very vulnerable.
Soon it jumped ridges and spotted into the Meanwhile, in the boreal forests of Siberia,
sequoias. Long flames ignited their crowns. intensifying fires have mutated recently into multi-
Heat and wind shot smoke tens of thousands million-acre monsters that threaten to release
of feet high. Embers exploded. High branches huge reserves of ancient carbon from the perma-
collapsed, plunging seed cones into flames, frost. Those burns are turning some forests into
incinerating future generations. shrublands or grasslands, which store less carbon,
In one grove Brigham found hardly any seeds. says Heather Alexander of Auburn University in
“There was nothing on the ground except ash. Alabama. Yet the switch to a lighter-colored land-
We have never seen that before. Never.” After scape also has a cooling effect, because it reflects
the fire, Brigham took stock. Up to 14 percent of more sunlight than darker forest—especially
all the large sequoias in the Sierra Nevada, their when blanketed by winter snow. The bottom line
native habitat, were dead or mortally wounded. for climate, Alexander says: “Unknown.”
Months after I left Ambrose, it happened The Amazon rainforest presents a clearer and
again. Fires in September 2021 charred sequoia more urgent picture. It produces much of its
bark and sent twigs raining for miles. Ambrose’s own rain, recycling water vapor over and over.
study trees lost water 24 hours a day. Flames The clearing of forest for cattle ranches and soy
came so close to the General Sherman—the
biggest tree on Earth—that firefighters wrapped
it in flame-resistant material.
The 2021 fires claimed another 3 to 5 percent of
large sequoias. Up to 19 percent of these magnif- EACH REGION IS ITS
icent trees—trees that had weathered everything
for a millennium or more—had been lost in just
OWN CASE, BUT THE
two years. THREAT TO FORESTS
IS GENERAL AND
GLOBAL. ‘THERE’S
JUST RED FLAG AFTER
isn’t just
L O S I N G F O R E S T S T O C L I M AT E C H A N G E RED FLAG,’ ECOLOGIST
about such heartbreak. There are other con-
sequences for people and wildlife. Wildfire
JENNIFER BALTZER SAYS.
smoke increasingly fouls the air of major cities
such as San Francisco and Seattle. Australia’s
2020 megafires killed 33 people—and a billion
animals, including 60,000 koalas. The fires may farms has accelerated again under President Jair
have expanded the country’s list of endangered Bolsonaro, and climate change may be hasten-
animal species by 14 percent. ing the approach of a dangerous tipping point.
Losing forests also releases carbon that ampli- Grueling droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-16
fies the climate threat. The future on that score killed billions of trees outright and helped
looks uncertain but worrisome. spread fires that killed more. As forest is logged,
In North America’s boreal forest, from Alaska burned, or dried out, that reduces rainfall in a
to Newfoundland, massive fires now release self-reinforcing spiral. Some scientists fear that
incredible amounts of carbon—not only from spiral threatens to send the world’s biggest rain-
the trees themselves but also from the moist peat forest hurtling toward a transition to a savanna.
soils in which they grow. Jennifer Baltzer, a forest Each region of the world faces its own par-
ecologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, ticular challenges, but the threat to forests is
has found that in many burnt patches, the dom- general and global. “There’s just red flag after
inant species, black spruce, is being replaced by red flag where these forested ecosystems are
other species such as aspen—which in principle being pushed right to their limit,” Baltzer says.
Yet increasingly, governments from Japan to four times more land, up to 50 million acres, over
the United Kingdom are setting up complex trad- 10 years—if Congress provides the money.
ing schemes that allow businesses to offset fossil But that’s not enough. We also need to restore
fuel emissions by protecting forests rather than damaged forests, primarily in equatorial regions,
to cut emissions at the smokestack. Often those where native trees can come back quickly, but
schemes don’t account adequately for the possi- elsewhere too. The infrastructure bill signed by
bility that forests may not be protectable. As I was President Joe Biden last fall authorizes billions
visiting sequoias last year, a wildfire in Oregon of dollars to increase nursery and seed-growing
was releasing carbon that tech giant Microsoft capacity and kick-start the largest U.S. refor-
had purchased to offset its own emissions. estation campaign in history by replanting four
million acres in a decade.
And of course we need to break our fossil fuel
addiction, quickly.
On my last day in Yellowstone with Turner, we
this summer, or
N O O N E K N OW S W H AT AWA I T S visited old burns from another 2016 fire. This one
next. But it’s time we embraced our new reality. had ripped across a plateau above the Madison
We can no longer forestall rapid changes to some River, which also had burned in 1988. The recent
forests. The planet won’t stop warming until we blaze had so scorched the landscape that it even
completely halt fossil fuel emissions, and that incinerated downed trunks, leaving nothing but
will take decades. As Craig Allen witnessed in lines of white ash that stretched like shadows
New Mexico and Nate Stephenson has seen with across blackened soil. Turner called them “ghost
giant sequoias, some changes may be drastic. logs.” In 30 years of traipsing through fire scars,
But we can keep things from getting even she’d never seen ground so pummeled by fire.
worse. To start, we must halt the destruction of Do we want even more of this?
native forests, especially tropical, boreal, and This spring marks 150 years since President
temperate old-growth forests. The benefits they Ulysses S. Grant signed the act creating Yellow-
provide aren’t replaceable. The good news: Many stone, America’s first national park. It required
are still healthy, for now. “preservation, from injury or spoliation” and
For example, humans have cleared far less of “retention in their natural condition” of the park’s
the Congo rainforest, the world’s second largest, wonders. The effort that entails has expanded
than of tropical forests in Asia or South America. since Grant’s day, when threats were direct and
The forest is getting less precipitation, but it’s local. Turner projects that if global temperatures
showing resilience. While some trees in Gabon were to rise four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees F)
produce less fruit, providing less food for forest from preindustrial values, the region’s high-
elephants (see article on page 96), the Congo has elevation spruces and subalpine firs, such as
avoided widespread tree mortality. Even in Bra- those near the Snake River’s headwaters, could
zil and Southeast Asia, millions of square miles be wiped out. Forest cover could drop by half by
of lush forest remain intact. 2100. The density of what remains would drop
“We need to protect the forests we have,” says even more.
Robin Chazdon, a restoration expert with the That’s far from inevitable. If the world’s
University of Connecticut. “That’s number one.” nations keep their current promises, the planet
We also need to manage forests better, espe- will warm less than three degrees Celsius (5.4
cially for fire. In cooler, dry months in northern degrees F). Stabilizing emissions closer to two
Australia’s Arnhem Land, Indigenous rangers degrees or less could limit forest losses in Yellow-
carry drip torches or drop fire starters from stone to 15 percent. High-elevation trees would
helicopters to ignite ground-crawling blazes in still struggle, and there’d be more Douglas firs
the tall grass (see article on page 74). So far, that and aspens. But some old growth would persist.
has dramatically curbed explosive late-summer Yellowstone’s forests, like many in the world, will
forest fires. In the U.S., the White House never be the same. But they might be close. j
announced plans in January to help government
and private landowners start more prescribed Senior writer Craig Welch has been reporting on
climate change for more than 20 years. In the past
burns and thin more forests, where appropriate, year he has written cover stories on electric cars
with logging. The aim is to reduce fire risks on and the culture of whales.

FIGHTING
FIRE
WITH
FIRE
AU S T R A L I A’ S A B O R I G I N A L P E O P L E
H AV E R E V I V E D T H E A N C I E N T
P R AC T I C E O F P L A N N E D B U R N I N G
TO P R E S E RV E A N D R E N E W
T H E I R H O M E L A N D S —A N D H E L P
S U P P O RT T H E I R C O M M U N I T I E S .
BY KYLIE STEVENSON
PHOTOGRAPHS BY M AT T H E W A B B OT T
75
PREVIOUS PHOTO
Smoke from a fire set
deliberately hovers Conrad Maralngurra
over Arnhem Land in starts a low-intensity
northern Australia. blaze to protect
Aboriginal people have his community in
inhabited the area for Mamadawerre, an
tens of thousands of outstation along
years, managing it by the northern border
burning grasses and of the Warddeken
underbrush early in the Indigenous Protected
dry season to prevent Area. In summer,
wildfires from ravaging lightning strikes
forests later, when it’s routinely spark fires
hotter and drier. in the tropical savanna.
.
Guided by fires set by
members of their clan,
Kaywana Gamarr-
wu and Vernon Gar-
narradj, a Warddeken
ranger,
uis v hike with their
daughter,
r Vinnisha,
through their ancestral
lands.
pr Behind them,
a man carries spears.
The six-day bushwalk
was organized to help
Aboriginal people
reconnect with their
environment and learn
traditional practices.
IT’S
FIRST
LIGHT, early November, near a place
called Deaf Adder Gorge on the western edge
of the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area.
Northern Australia’s tropical heat pummels
Arijay Nabarlambarl as he jumps out of a helicop-
ter and strides toward a fire. Low and snaking,
the flames have scorched the bone-dry wetlands,
leaving singed earth and black-socked paperbark
trees. The 25-year-old falls in behind two other
rangers, and a symphony of leaf blowers drowns
out the crackle of fire. The trio methodically
walks the perimeter, blasting leaf litter from the
edges back onto the fire to keep it from spreading.
They’re one of three groups of Indigenous
rangers in this remote pocket of Arnhem Land,
about 160 miles east of Darwin, fighting a
late-season wildfire, triggered by lightning, that
has fingered off in several directions. In some
patches the flames leap in tall spinifex grasses;
in others they creep shin-high into the crevices Tabetha and Estella
of sandstone formations. Nadjamerrek, who are
Nabarlambarl pauses to assess his section of cousins, fling heavy-
duty matches, igniting
the blaze. He’s been a ranger since he finished small brush fires that
high school; the job gave him a chance to move will burn out on their
from the town where he was educated back to own. Comfortable
with fire, Aboriginal
his ancestral land. In the eight years since, he’s people use it in many
learned the fire stories from his elders, stories aspects of their culture,
that span the tens of thousands of years his including hunting and
traditional ceremonies.
people have inhabited the land. He kicks at
smoldering bark from the bottom of a tree, pre-
venting the fire from gripping it. “It’s looking
good because of the early burn and the creek
nearby,” he explains. Nabarlambarl wipes his
brow and gazes through the smoke. The land
is home to a host of endemic and threatened
species, including the black wallaroo, the north-
ern quoll, and the white-throated grasswren. It
brims with stunning waterfalls, rock formations,
rivers, and unspoiled forests. Even though it’s and conduct prescribed burns from the air, drop-
burning, it’s undeniably beautiful. ping incendiary pellets from helicopters.
The blaze is just one of 53 that Warddeken’s Moist vegetation, low winds, and lower tem-
rangers worked to suppress last year in the late peratures at that time of year mean the fires they
dry season. Between August and December, light are smaller and less intense, typically burn-
fire is relentless. Tropical savanna is the most ing out overnight. If the land is burned gently,
fire-prone landscape on the planet, and up to the wildfires that will inevitably come later won’t
one-third of northern Australia burns every year. be as destructive. It also gives the rangers a fight-
But fire isn’t just the problem—here, it’s also ing chance at extinguishing them.
the solution. Protecting the environment with fire, and
During the cool of northern Australia’s early from fire, is a role Aboriginal rangers take seri-
dry season, when moisture lingered on the land, ously. They are the land’s owners, its caretakers,
Nabarlambarl and his fellow rangers weren’t and they have a deep, spiritual connection to it.
fighting fires; they were lighting them. From April “I love being out on country,” Nabarlambarl
to July each year, rangers walk hundreds of miles says. It’s what made him become a ranger. It’s
armed with drip torches, setting the land alight, what brought him home.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE 81

TOP BOTTOM
Mary Kolkiwarra During an evening

Nadjamerrek talks to around a campfire
schoolchildren about on the bushwalk with
rock art. She helped lead their clan, Garnarradj
a movement in the 1970s and Gamarrwu teach
to get Aboriginal people Vinnisha, who is three,
to return to their land. how to use a spear.
TOP BOTTOM
A kangaroo painting, in Students from a school

an x-ray style that shows in Mamadawerre use
organs, decorates the tablet computers to
roof of a cave known photograph trees.
as Manaamnam, one of Classes, often held out-
tens of thousands of such side, blend traditional
sites in Arnhem Land. and standard education.

Using long-handled
crowbars to probe
the marshy grasslands,
Warddeken rangers
Rosemary Nabulwad,
Arijay Nabarlambarl,
Margaret Nabulwad,
Janice Nalorlman, and
Lorna Nabulwad spend
a day off hunting for
turtles burrowed into
the mud. They’re a
popular delicacy in
Arnhem Land.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE is not a new concept. anbinik exist only in natural fire refuges, such
Fire management is used by Indigenous peo- as gorges, or in strange, isolated clumps in the
ple all over the world but has gained renewed savanna. (The Disney Conservation Fund pro-
attention. As the climate warms and wildfires vided a grant to the Karrkad Kanjdji Trust to
become more extreme, forestry experts globally help Indigenous rangers protect anbinik trees.
are calling for a return to traditional practices. The Walt Disney Company is a majority owner
In Arnhem Land, lighting early dry-season of National Geographic Partners.)
fires was once systematic and widespread. Fire Traditional owners believed fire was the com-
was used for hunting, for regeneration, for cere- mon thread. Arnhem Land was being ravaged by
mony. Aboriginal elders say fire brings the land intense, uncontrollable wildfires that affected
to life again; after a burn, the land is reborn. everything. They called for a renewal of strategic
Even now, it’s common for Aboriginal people to early dry-season burning. It would be a way of
deliver their own fire management—to see land not just caring for country but also reconnecting
that needs fire and simply take a match to it. with aspects of their culture.
Like many Indigenous Australians, Terrah “Land needs fire,” Guymala says simply.
Guymala has been comfortable with fire since
childhood. Now 56, he recalls lessons from his modern reality
A N C I E N T P RAC T I C E B E C A M E
elders about using fire: to drive kangaroos toward through a novel approach designed by Bininj,
hunters; to create smoke for rituals, particularly as western Arnhem Land’s Aboriginal people call
around death; to burn each type of vegetation themselves, along with non-Aboriginal people,
at the right time of year. Guymala is a senior known as Balanda. They combined customary
traditional owner for Manmoyi—one of the out- knowledge on how, when, and where to burn
stations in and near Warddeken’s 5,400 square with modern tools such as satellite mapping and
miles (nearly the size of Connecticut). Owned by helicopters to conduct aerial burning and drop
36 clan groups, the area is managed through a firefighters into remote areas. In 2006 the world’s
complex system of customary law. “Back in the first savanna-burning carbon-abatement project
day,” Guymala says, “this land was full of people, began in western Arnhem Land, supported by
and they used to manage the fire.” Land bereft of the liquefied natural gas facility in Darwin, which
its people—“empty country,” he calls it—is why was required to offset its emissions.
wildfires began consuming the landscape. Aboriginal groups, including those in Ward-
Guymala’s family, like so many others, moved deken, now participate in Australia’s carbon
away from their land, into missions and settle- market, with polluters buying credits represent-
ments in the years following colonization. His ing an amount of greenhouse gases kept out of
family came back when he was a child. Their the atmosphere. In some places, credits are sold
return was part of the homelands movement based on how much carbon is stored in protected
that began in the 1970s, led by Indigenous leader forests. That’s controversial in part because for-
and world-renowned Aboriginal artist Bardayal ests can burn down. But savanna burning works
“Lofty” Nadjamerrek. Traditional owners like differently. Strategic fires in the early dry season,
Nadjamerrek noticed that in their absence the along with firefighting in the late dry season,
country had shape-shifted. Non-native weeds limits wildfires, protecting forests and reducing
and feral animals, such as cats and buffalo, had the overall amount of smoke. The emissions
moved in; some native animals, such as emus, avoided are sold as credits.
were scarcer; ancient bim (rock art) sites were Indigenous groups now run about 80 savanna-
being damaged by buffalo and fire; and the burning projects in northern Australia, gener-
health of monsoon rainforests, floodplains, and ating about $53 million a year in revenue. The
the savanna was deteriorating. approach has drawn overseas interest. A project
Most worrying, the culturally and ecologically in Botswana is in the pipeline, and fire ecologists
significant anbinik forests were in trouble. The say the methodology could work in Southeast
giant, endemic trees—some living more than a Asia, as well as in Central and South America.
hundred years—were once widespread in the “It’s hugely innovative, it’s globally significant,
landscape. Their sap was used as an antiseptic, and Indigenous people are, by far and away, at
their wood to make fighting sticks, and their the pinnacle of it,” says Shaun Ansell, the for-
shade as a place to shelter from the sun. Now mer CEO of Warddeken Land Management, the
MARTIN GAMACHE, NGM STAFF; CRAIG MOLYNEUX. SOURCES: COLLABORATIVE AUSTRALIAN PROTECTED AREAS DATABASE, COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA;
COMMONWEALTH SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH ORGANISATION; NAWARDDEKEN ACADEMY; NORTH AUSTRALIA AND RANGELANDS FIRE INFORMATION
HARNESSING THE SIX SEASONS
How the Aboriginal people of western
THE FLAMES
Arnhem Land divide the year, shown
below in the Kundedjnjenghmi language:
Kudjewk
Hot, wet, and humid with monsoons
For tens of thousands of years, Australia’s Aboriginal Bangkerreng
Last storms of the wet season
people used fire to prevent out-of-control wildfires.
Yekke
Today, after many returned to their northern Australia Cooler, drier period
homelands in the 1970s, that practice has been Wurrkeng
revived. Setting small, strategically planned blazes Cool, with winds from the south
using drip torches and incendiary pellets dropped Kurrung
Hot and dry period
from helicopters, Indigenous rangers create patches Kunumeleng
of burned savanna that act as firebreaks. Over the Humidity, thunderstorms, and lightning
past two decades, the total area burned by fire
in western Arnhem Land has diminished significantly. Total Burned Area (2000-2020)
Thousands of square miles

160
Managed burns
during cooler
WHEN IT BURNS
120 seasons
MAP AREA
Lightning-sparked fires are 80
common between October and
December, before monsoons NORTHERN
set in. Prescribed burns to TERR. 40
prevent wildfires are typically AUSTRALIA
lit in the cooler, drier months
0
from April to July.
Canberra
Fire frequency (2000-2020) J F MAM J J A S O N D
0 5 10 15 20
Monsoon forest INDIGENOUS SUCCESS
Rangers in the Warddeken
IPA take advantage of the
rocky terrain when deciding
where to set prescribed
Islands Cobourg
25 mi
burns. These burns and
wi Penin 25 km
the favorable landscape are
Ti sula two key factors that have
helped lessen fire prevalence
Melville Island since 2000.
Bathurst
Island GARIG GUNAK BARLU
NATIONAL PARK
Boucaut
Va n Di e me n G u lf Bay
Maningrida
Bea g le G u l f Mamadawerre
Gunbalanya
(Oenpelli)
Darwin DJUKBINJ Djelk

So
NAT. PARK MARY I.P.A.

ut
Warddeken Manmoyi
hA
Jabiru Indigenous
l l i g a t or
Protected
RIVER Area Kabulwarnamyo
K AKA DU
Batchelor
Adelaide N.P. NAT I ONAL Deaf Adder Arnhem
LITCHFIELD River Gorge
NAT. Arn PA RK
PARK hem Plateau
Lan
D d tropic
al savanna Bulman
al
y
Weemol
Nauiyu
L A N D
na
Pine Creek
v an South East
sa NITMILUK Arnhem Land
Peppimenarti a l NATIONAL
pic PARK
I.P.A.
y tro
er le Carpentaria tropic
b al savan
Kim Katherine
na
TOP BOTTOM
With his son Tyson at his A helicopter guided

side, Maralngurra talks by Terrah Guymala, a
with archaeologist Ches- Warddeken ranger, drops
ter Clarke about clearing incendiary devices that
brush from rock art sites slowly react chemically
to protect ancient paint- and then ignite after
ings from being burned. they are on the ground.
TOP BOTTOM
A cleared path circles Enosh Nadjamerrek

an isolated grove of works to extinguish a fire
anbinik growing on the in the late dry season.
savanna. Many of the Rangers use leaf blow-
huge trees, cherished by ers to push the fire back
Aboriginal people, have onto itself and to remove
been lost to wildfires. debris in its path.

Aboriginal-owned company that’s responsible
for the protected area. “It’s putting so much
investment back into remote communities
where so few economic activities can happen.”
In western Arnhem Land, the results have been
transformational. In 2004, before fire manage-
ment began, 71 percent of the area burned, mostly
in intense late-dry-season wildfires. By contrast,
in 2020, 32 percent underwent strategic burning,
containing wildfires after August to just 2.1 per-
cent. That left 65.9 percent unburned, despite
near-catastrophic fire conditions that year.
Instead of thousands of blackened square miles,
vast areas of leafy canopies remain unscorched.
As the vegetation benefits, so does the wild-
life. Anecdotally, people have reported the
return of many native animals, including emus.
Ecologist Cara Penton says the results of Ward-
deken’s project to monitor species are still being
collated, but cameras set out on the savanna to
track small mammals often capture species her
Indigenous colleagues haven’t seen for years.
Northern quolls—small carnivorous marsupials
classified as endangered—were an exciting find,
she says: “People were really, really pleased to
see the quoll was still here.”
“NGANABBARRU!” Tinnesha Narorrga pulls

the four-wheel drive to a swift stop on the red,
dusty road. The 25-year-old ranger and two other
women slide from the front seat. One grabs the
rifle, and all three disappear into the bush, hot
on the hooves of a small, retreating herd of buf-
falo. The Daluk Rangers are on the hunt.
Warddeken established the Daluk Rangers A black kite, one of
(daluk means “female” in the area’s Aborigi- three raptors known
nal languages) in 2017, and Narorrga’s mother, as a firehawk, circles
over a fire set earlier
Suzannah Nabulwad, was a key player. “I saw by hunters. Sometimes
my brother and the other men going out and congregating by the
thought, We can do that too,” she says. Employ- hundreds, firehawks
prey on fleeing insects,
ment would give the women independence. She lizards, and other small
helped get the program running, then when her animals. They’re known
daughter completed high school, she joined too. to carry burning sticks
more than half a mile
The bush goes quiet, as if on pause, waiting away to start new fires.
for a gunshot that doesn’t come. As twilight set-
tles in, Narorrga and the other rangers reemerge
from the scrub empty-handed. Nganabbarru are
faster than you’d think.
The Daluk Rangers are just one of Ward-
deken Land Management’s suite of ranger
programs funded by carbon credits. These pro-
grams employ 240 Indigenous men and women
across three ranger bases at the Mamadawerre,
Kabulwarnamyo, and Manmoyi outstations. country, and the history that surrounds it, valu-
Being a ranger is a huge source of pride, espe- able,” Ansell explains. “By being on country and
cially for young women, like Narorrga, who oth- being out there and engaged with it, it keeps it
erwise likely would have to leave their traditional relevant in our modern society.”
lands for employment in cities and towns.
Money from carbon credits allows rangers to eyes wide, a scrum of
L E G S C R O S S E D , F AC E S U P,
undertake a variety of land management activi- schoolchildren sits on a bright blue woven mat
ties, including culling feral animals, like the buf- under the shade of a rocky outcrop. It’s midmorn-
falo that Narorrga was chasing. From July 2020 ing, and they’ve come by four-wheel drive down
to June 2021, Warddeken’s rangers removed 2,336 a dirt track from Kabulwarnamyo to Kundjor-
feral animals, including 1,913 buffalo. The rangers lomdjorlom, where the Warddeken Indigenous
also eradicate invasive weeds, monitor wildlife, Protected Area was dedicated in 2009. In front
and protect rock art. Traditional owners make all of them, in a rickety camp chair, is 89-year-old
the decisions on how to manage the land. Mary Kolkiwarra Nadjamerrek, senior tradi-
“With the ranger program, you’re making tional knowledge-holder and the late Lofty
that traditional knowledge and connection to Nadjamerrek’s wife. The rock walls are covered

After lighting the bark
on some nearby trees,
Stacey Lee hunts
for snakes in the fires’
glow, while Evelyn
Narorrga, carrying a
flashlight, already has
one wrapped around
her right hand. The
harmless snakes will
be eaten. Aboriginal
people have used fire
to hunt for millennia.
with painted images. It’s one of an estimated
30,000 rock art sites in the protected area.
Until recently, although around 50 children
came and went from Kabulwarnamyo each year,
the outstation didn’t have a school. Students
had to travel long distances or live with family
in bigger towns far away to get an education. In
2015 the community decided to use money from
carbon credits to build its own school. It estab-
lished Nawarddeken Academy, which has since
opened schools in two more outstations. All offer
a bicultural program giving equal weight to
Bininj knowledge and the standard curriculum.
As the sun climbs in the sky, Kolkiwarra
Nadjamerrek speaks to the students in the Kun-
winjku language about connection to country
and the importance of culture. When she finishes,
she sweeps her arms outward, encouraging the
children to look at the ancient artworks. They
scatter, scaling rock walls and ducking beneath
ledges. This is a history lesson at its best.
“We do the formalized literacy and numeracy
in the classroom, but everything else we try to
take it out bush,” explains Jodi Vallak, senior
teacher at Kabulwarnamyo. She says basing her
lessons on ties to country means the children
are especially enthusiastic about class. “It does
have that powerful narrative that it’s actually
worthwhile learning.”
The importance of the schools is difficult to
understate, Vallak says, as she watches her stu-
dents explore their past. The boost in population
brought about by the rangers triggered the need
for schools, but now the schools are part of the
attraction for people to return to country. Elders Children spear fish
hope this generation will gain both the tradi- in a creek veiled by
tional knowledge and the education to create smoke from a strate-
gic burn. By controlling
opportunities of their own here. The land needs wildfires and reducing
their children and grandchildren to care for it. the amount of smoke
in the atmosphere,
Aboriginal people
IN HIS KHAKI UNIFORM, Terrah Guymala drags a are able to sell carbon
chair onto the back deck of the Manmoyi ranger credits. The income
station. A hint of smoke has woven its way through helps pay for the rang-
ers’ efforts and other
the paperbarks and screw pines and settled in programs, such as
the air. In the days after the Deaf Adder Gorge schools, allowing them
fire, several more blazes have broken out on this to live in outstations
in their homelands.
side of the Indigenous protected area.
In the face of global warming, Guymala knows
his work here is more critical than ever. He says
Aboriginal people see the climate changing
every day. “As a boy, we used to walk around
and see big mobs of animals, and we had lots of
rain. And we used to see everything was in time.
But these days, it’s out of time,” he explains. “It’s meaningful employment, family, and education
meant to be green-plum season right now, but are what will keep them here. He’s confident that
it’s out of time. It’s affecting everything—our by returning to country, they can restore what’s
lifestyle, our food season, our water.” been lost. In Bininj hands, he believes, native ani-
Guymala shoos a fly orbiting lazily around him mals will come back, dry creeks will refill, the
and looks out at the bush. “It’s from people, not seasons will resume their usual patterns. Perhaps
nature,” he says. “Nature is beautiful, innocent.” even the mighty anbinik will flourish once again.
Climate studies project that by 2050 Australia’s “If we respect our Mother Nature, she will
north can expect an average annual tempera- listen to us, and it will come back to normal. We
ture increase of up to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, believe that,” Guymala says. “More talking to
a substantial rise in the number of days over the nature, more singing to the nature. That is
95 degrees, and longer fire seasons, with 40 per- what will help.” j
cent more days of very high fire danger.
Despite these grim predictions, Guymala is Kylie Stevenson is the Darwin–based co-author
of a book about Larrimah, a dying town in the out-
hopeful. History and spiritual connection have back. Matthew Abbott is a photographer based
brought many Aboriginal people back, but in Sydney who lived for two years in Arnhem Land.

The Central African
country of Gabon
is home to the most
forest elephants, about
95,000—two-thirds of
the entire population.
Poaching for ivory
and habitat loss have
reduced their overall
numbers by 80 percent
in the past century.
96
I N A R E M OT E F O R E ST I N GA B O N ,
WA R M E R N I G H TS A N D
L E S S R A I N FA L L M AY B E C AU S I N G
T R E E S TO G ROW L E S S F RU I T,
T H R E AT E N I N G O N E O F A F R I C A’ S
M O ST E N DA N G E R E D A N I M A L S .
A FRAGILE REFUGE
FOR FOREST ELEPHANTS
BY Y U D H I J I T B H AT TAC H A R J E E
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASPER DOEST
A forest elephant
reaches for the fruit
of a Detarium macro-
carpum tree in Lopé
National Park. Fruit
is the most nutritious
part of the elephant’s
diet. For trees such
as this one, the animals
help them spread
by digesting the fruit,
which makes the seeds
germinate faster.
1 2 3
A FOREST’S FEAST
A selection of the variety of fruits and seeds found in Lopé National Park:
1. Pentaclethra 3. Nauclea latifolia 6. Sacoglottis

macrophylla 4. Strychnos gabonensis
2. Trichoscypha congolana 7. Omphalocarpum
acuminata 5. Nauclea diderrichii procerum
Forest elephants graze
in Lopé’s grasslands,
remnants of arid
periods in the last ice
age 12,000 years ago.
Covering more than
1,900 square miles in
central Gabon, the
uncommon mosaic of
savanna and tropical
rainforest is rich in
biological diversity.
Named Gabon’s first
wildlife reserve in 1946,
it became a national
park in 2002.
D
D U S K WA S FA L L I N G when we drove into the
forested expanse of Lopé National Park in central
Gabon, leaving the town of Lopé—the last outpost
on the way to the reserve—far behind.
In the distance, the hills were changing color
from blue to gray. On either side of the dirt road,
a mosaic of savanna and thick tropical rain-
forest stretched to the horizon. The landscape
looked so primeval that it was possible, in the
moment, to think of human civilization as an
illusion. Then, just as we were about to enter
a dense patch of forest, our driver, Loïc Mak-
aga, who manages the park’s research station,
slammed on the brakes.
“Elephants!” he said in a low, excited voice,
An emaciated female
forest elephant may be
evidence that climate
change is harming even
the most untouched
forests. Scientists think
higher temperatures
and less rainfall are to
blame for a dramatic
drop in the amount
pointing ahead. He turned off the engine. of fruit on the trees in
Lopé’s forests. The lack
A few hundred yards in front of us, a proces- of fruit appears to be
sion of elephants emerged from the forest. In making it harder for
the moonlight I counted six, including a calf elephants to get the
nutrition they need.
nudged along, presumably by its mother. They
lumbered across the road at a leisurely pace,
gliding into the foliage on the other side with
an assuredness that suggested they’d been
here many times before. Watching them from
so close, I felt like a stranger who had ventured,
uninvited, into some family’s ancestral home.
Nevertheless, I pulled out my phone to capture the night. They appear to plan their search for
the moment, but as I fumbled around with it, food, much like humans once planned their food
hoping to fulfill this trivial, human wish, a huge gathering around seasons, returning to the same
bull elephant standing less than a hundred feet trees when the fruit is most likely to be ripe.
to our right trumpeted aggressively, its trunk Just as the elephants depend on the forest to
raised in the air. survive, many of Lopé’s trees rely on elephants
“We need to go!” Makaga said briskly, putting to disperse their seeds through the animals’
the jeep back in motion. dung. Some even produce fruit that cannot
The rainforests of Gabon are one of the last be digested by any other animal, suggesting a
strongholds for forest elephants, whose num- fragile interdependence with origins deep in
bers in Central Africa have suffered a dramatic evolutionary history.
decline in recent decades because of poaching. D e s p i t e b e i n g r e m o t e a n d r e l a t ive l y
Smaller than African savanna elephants, forest untouched by people, Lopé National Park and its
elephants are enigmatic beasts that roam trails elephants appear to be in trouble. Researchers
they have traversed for generations, feeding on have discovered that Earth’s warming tem-
grass and leaves and fruit. They tread softly, peratures could be lowering the fruit yield of
moving quietly among the trees, like ghosts in many species of trees at the park, which in
A FRAGILE REFUGE FOR FOREST ELEPHANTS 105

GARDENERS
Cross section of actual-size
Omphalocarpum procerum fruit
OF GABON
Forest elephants are key ecosystem engi-
EMBR Y O
neers in Africa’s tropical rainforests. More

than a dozen tree species in the region rely
on the animals to disperse seeds through
Fruits weigh as much as
their dung. The elephants, in turn, depend 4.5 pounds, contain up
on the highly nutritious fruit for their diet. to 40 thin seeds, and
have a nutritious pulp
But climate change may be threatening that smells like garlic.
CORE
this relationship by disrupting fruit growth.

Elephants suffer when they spend more
SEED
time and energy searching for fruit, and
could be compelled to raid villagers’ crops
to supplement their diets. PULP
O. procerum FRUIT WALL

100 ft tall
JOURNEY OF A SEED
The juice of the O. procerum fruit is a sticky glue,
1 Gathering the fruit which prevents elephants from spitting out the
Elephants bump against seeds. They are the only animals that can eat the
tree trunks to shake off rock-hard fruit, swallowing—and passing—the intact
fruit, then pierce it with
their tusks, or crack it seeds, making them more likely to germinate.
with their jaws, before
eating it.
4 Regeneration
O. procerum trees thrive in
elephant-populated areas.
They’re rarely found where
elephants no longer live.
2 Processing the seed
Elephants’ digestive tracts
break down the seeds’ pro-
tective barriers; seeds pass,
on average, in 40 hours.
Large intestine
Stomach Fermentation
Food storage
Esophagus
3 Scattering the seed
Elephants disperse seeds
3.3 miles, on average, from
the parent tree through
their highly fertile dung.
Teeth Small intestine

Large flat Three times
molars length of Elephant
body
dung
TAYLOR MAGGIACOMO AND RILEY D. CHAMPINE, NGM STAFF; MESA SCHUMACHER. SOURCES: EMMA R. BUSH, ROBIN C. WHYTOCK, AND KATHARINE ABERNETHY,
UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING; ALI NABAVIZADEH, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE; YVETTE HARVEY, ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY; KEW
a
C A M E R O O N
uine
ELEPHANT HAVEN
f G
Millions of forest elephants are MINKÉBÉ N.P.
lf o
believed to once have roamed 50 mi
EQUATORIAL 50 km
Gu
the entirety of Africa’s tropical
GUINEA
N
rainforests. Today the species
or
hw
t
occupies only a quarter of its es
tC
former range, mostly in Gabon. MONTS DE on
AKAND
AKANDA
N A N.P.
. . CRIS
CRISTAL N.P. go MWAGNÉ
GNÉ N.P.
With dense forests and a low rate lia
of deforestation, the country
is home to about 95,000 forest
Libreville GABON nl
owl
and
AREA ENLARGED
forests
EQUATOR PONGARA
PONG
elephants, some 60 to 70 percent N.P. IVINDO
VINDO N.P.
ué
of the global population.
Port- Ogoo
LOPÉ
Gentil N.P. TR
A
RANS-
ILW G
Cong
WON
W
WONGA-WONGUÉ
WO
AB Y
PPRESIDENTIAL
PR
PRE
RESIDENTIAL
ESIDENTIAL RES.
A
ON
olia
WAKA
A A N.P.
A F R I C A Moanda
n
manganese Franceville
mine
coa
LLOANGO
LOOANGO
OANGO
GO N.P. MONTS PLATEA
PLATEAU
sta
BIROUGOU
O GO N.P.
. . BATÉKÉ N.P.
l fo
GABON
res
ts
MOUKALABA-
MO
MOUKALA
ALABA-
LABA-
DOUDO N.P.
DOUDOU N.P
C O N G O
Tropical forest Gabon’s forests cover
Forest elephant
Intact forest* 89 percent of its land
Loxodonta cyclotis
area. About a quarter
Savanna elephant Disturbed forest
of that area is within
Loxodonta africana Unforested land national parks.
TRACKING A FRUIT FAMINE Congolian c o a s t a l f o r e s t s 1 mi

ts.
A 32-year survey in a pristine part 1 km

u M
of Gabon’s forests recorded an

eko
81 percent decline in the availabil-

Mok
ity of the fruits that elephants eat. Ogooué

Climate change is most likely the
cause of the drop-off. A combi-
AY
nation of warmer nights and less ABO N RAILW
-G
rainfall is thought to be interfer- A NS
Train TR Every year, 10 to 15
ing with the natural triggers that station elephants are killed
cause trees to grow fruit. by trains near Lopé.
an
Lopé
ng o li Kazamabika
Chance of encountering ripe fruit o a
Mt. Brazza rn C nn
in Lopé National Park 1,640 ft Weste st-sava
500 m fore
20%
O. procerum and other fruits LOPÉ NATIONAL PARK
15% important for elephants
Studying the forest
10% Since 1986, researchers have
hiked trails created by ele-
5% phants to observe fruit on the
All fruits trees each month. This unique
survey of more than 2,000
0 trees is matched with on-the-
ts
1986 2000 2010 2018

ground measurements of the
res
climate for the same period—

fo
Research station which are rare for this region.

Climate change in Lopé N.P., 1984–2018
al
+1.5°F -10
st
DAILY MIN. INCHES OF c oa Trees under observation

TEMPERATURE ANNUAL RAIN Le Chameau
ian
2,215 ft gol O. procerum tree
The region’s nighttime temperature rose by 3.9 675 m Con
percent and annual rainfall dropped by 17.4 per-
cent compared with averages over 34 years.
MAP DATA: INTACT FOREST LANDSCAPES, 2020; IUCN; WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE; EC JRC; EO DATA *INTACT FOREST LANDSCAPES ARE AT LEAST 193 SQ MI
PROVIDED UNDER COPERNICUS BY THE EUROPEAN UNION AND ESA; © OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS (500 KM²) AND MINIMALLY INFLUENCED BY HUMAN ACTIVITY.
A baby elephant
walks with its family
on one of many paths
that generations of
forest elephants have
cut through the rain-
forest, leading from
tree to fruit-bearing
tree. Elephants pass
on the knowledge of
what to forage, where
to find it, and when
it’s likely to be ripe.
turn seems to be causing forest elephants to
go hungry. Some are so undernourished that
their bones poke into their thick hides. Because
certain tree species depend on the animals to
survive, the struggles of the elephant population
could jeopardize the long-term sustainability
of the forest.
“Even in a place like Lopé National Park,
where we have very little human pressure and
very low density of population, wildlife cannot
escape the impact of human activities—that
being climate change,” says Robin Whytock,
an environmental scientist at the University of
Stirling in Scotland and one of the authors
of a 2020 paper describing these findings in
Science magazine.
I joined Edmond
O N A S U N N Y, H U M I D M O R N I N G ,
Dimoto, a field researcher with Gabon’s national
park agency, on a hike through a lush forest on
the slopes of a mountain called Le Chameau,
since it’s shaped like a double-humped camel.
Dimoto, a man of muscular build, had
swapped his shoes for knee-high rubber boots.
Treading carefully on a trail still damp and slip-
pery from the previous night’s rain, he snipped
tendrils and vines in his path with a pair of prun-
ing shears. The forest hummed with the sounds
of insects and trilled with birdsong.
Stopping by a tree, Dimoto pointed out ants
crawling on the trunk. Their bites were horribly a notebook and jotted down his observations
painful, he told me: “Your arm will swell up like about the abundance of leaves, flowers, and
a balloon for a day.” We decided to move along, fruits. He rates each of the trees he surveys on a
stepping over branches and fallen logs as we scale of one (sparse) to four (abundant).
climbed. He showed me an elephant’s footprints. Nearly every month for the past 25 years,
Still fresh, the markings showed that the animal Dimoto has hiked through patches of forest at
had slipped in the mud. Lopé to monitor its trees, which bear a spectac-
Dimoto came to a halt in front of a tree known ular variety of fruits ranging from avocado- to
as an Omphalocarpum procerum, which was watermelon-size. In his very first week on the
dotted with doughnut-shaped fruit sprouting job, a gorilla charged him. The experience was so
out of its trunk. The fruit has a tough shell that terrifying that Dimoto told his colleagues, “I’m
makes it unpalatable for every animal species
except elephants. They use their head like a
battering ram against the tree to shake off the
fruits. Then, with stunning dexterity, they pick
one up with the tip of their trunk, cradle it in a JUST AS ELEPHANTS
DEPEND ON THE
crook of the trunk, bring the fruit close to their
mouth, and finally pop it in with a deft push
from the tip. FOREST, MANY OF
Sweat trickling down his neck, Dimoto peered LOPÉ’S TREES RELY
ON ELEPHANTS
through binoculars at the canopy above. He gazed
up and down, doing a quick count of the number
of fruits. After a couple of minutes, he took out TO DISPERSE SEEDS.
LEFT
The doughnut-shaped
fruit of the Ompha-
locarpum procerum
grows on its branches
and trunk, which is
common for rainforest
trees. Scientists believe
it’s an adaptation to
promote pollination by
insects, such as ants,
found in the trees.
BELOW
Edmond Dimoto,
assisted by Lisa-Laure
Ndindiwe Malata, sur-
veys the flowers, fruits,
and leaves of a tree in
Lopé. For 25 years, he
has hiked in the forest
nearly every month to
help create the longest
continuous study of
tropical trees in Africa.

Photographed at
night with an infrared
camera, an elephant
chews on a Detarium
macrocarpum fruit
as she guides her calf.
In 1987, elephants
typically needed to
search only 10 trees
to find one with ripe
fruit, but by 2018,
they had to check 50,
reflecting a nearly
81 percent decline
in the available fruit
in Lopé’s forests.
RIGHT
A park employee
measures the circum-
ference of some
elephant dung as part
of a study to assess
how climate change is
affecting the diet of
forest elephants. After
the dung’s volume is
recorded, it’s dunked
in a river to help field
researchers separate
the seeds, which will
be used to determine
what the elephant ate.
BELOW
In a plop of elephant
dung, a Detarium
macrocarpum seed-
ling sprouts. Forest
elephants are the
main way seeds are
dispersed in African
rainforests. The animals
travel long distances
in search of food
and leave their seed-
riddled poop along
the way, fertilizing
future trees.
amount of fruit affected gorillas and chimpan-
zees. Tutin’s research ended in the early 2000s,
but the monthly monitoring of hundreds of trees
marked with metal tags bearing unique numbers
went on, making it the longest continuous study
of its kind in Africa.
Emma Bush, a colleague of

S TA RT I N G I N 2 0 1 6 ,
Whytock’s at the University of Stirling, began
analyzing these data. She found a dramatic
decline in the amount of fruit. On average, the
probability of encountering ripe fruit for 73 tree
species that were monitored had decreased by
81 percent from 1987 to 2018. If elephants had
to search 10 trees in 1987 to find one with ripe
fruit, they now had to search more than 50 trees.
Bush had a clue about why this could be
happening. In the 1990s Tutin had observed a
decline in the flowering and fruiting of certain
tree species during years that were hotter than
usual. She hypothesized that the nighttime
temperature had to drop below about 66 degrees
Fahrenheit for these trees to flower.
Examining Lopé’s weather data for the pre-
vious three decades, Bush and her colleagues
found that the average nighttime temperature
had gone up by about 1.5 degrees. The amount of
rainfall also had decreased significantly. Climate
change was making Lopé hotter and drier.
“We think this is the most credible theory as
done.” They had to coax him not to quit. Another to why fruit has been declining,” Bush says.
time, he tripped and fell while running from a After Bush shared her results with Whytock,
rampaging elephant. “I was certain I was going the two discussed how to figure out whether
to die,” he told me. Seeing him lying still, the this was affecting the park’s wildlife. Whytock
elephant turned away. had just started a project to assess biodiversity
Dimoto’s observations are the continuation in Lopé using hundreds of camera traps. He
of a study that a primatologist named Caroline also had seen recent images of elephants from
Tutin began in 1984, when she and her col- camera traps that Anabelle Cardoso of Oxford
leagues established a research station that’s University had set up for her research.
still operating inside the park. They wanted Many of those elephants looked alarmingly
to understand how seasonal variations in the emaciated. In some images, their ribs were
clearly visible. Whytock recalled photos from
the early 1990s, in which the elephants had
plump bellies and ample behinds. The contrast
was shocking.
THE BODY CONDITION Looking for old images of elephants, Whytock
OF FOREST ELEPHANTS
turned to Lee White, a biologist who is Gabon’s
minister of water, forests, the sea, and the envi-
DECLINED FROM 2008 ronment. In the late 1990s, while doing research
TO 2018. THE SCARCITY at Lopé, White had recorded hundreds of vid-
OF FRUIT WAS THE eos of elephants on his camcorder. “And he had

kept all the tapes—literally hundreds of tapes,”
LIKELIEST EXPLANATION. Whytock says. “I was handed this enormous

An enraged elephant
tries to defend itself
after it was hit by
a train that crosses
paths the animals use.
Elephants are known
to freeze on the tracks.
Park officials decided
this one was too
severely wounded to
be saved. After it was
killed, the park director
distributed the meat
to people in the area.
case of tiny digital camera tapes. I had no way
to play them.”
Whytock’s mother found a camcorder in her
attic. From White’s tapes and other sources,
Whytock was able to compile a database of
thousands of elephant photos. He found that,
on average, the body condition of forest ele-
phants—scored by such criteria as how bony the
animals looked—had declined by a pronounced
11 percent from 2008 to 2018. The scarcity of fruit
in Lopé was the likeliest explanation. “Fruits and
seeds are the highest calorie food in the elephant
diet,” Bush says.
One way Lopé’s elephants try to make up for
the fruit shortage is by raiding people’s gardens
in the middle of the night. Jean-Charles Adigou,
whose house was on the edge of the park in a
settlement of a few dozen homes, told me he
often was woken up by elephants visiting his
backyard, where bananas and plantains grew.
To scare them away, Adigou and his neighbors
would make as much noise as they could. But
frequently it was too late, he said. A herd of six
elephants can destroy a backyard plantation in
minutes. “When I was young, this didn’t hap-
pen,” he said. “Elephants stayed far away from
the village.” A hungry elephant
is caught by an infra-
Another resident in the settlement, a fisher- red camera raiding
man named Vincent Bossissi, was expecting a patch of spinach
the worst. I talked to him as he sat on a plas- and sorrel in Pascal
Mambwete’s backyard
tic chair under a mango tree in his backyard, garden near the park.
where he also grows corn. When I asked him As settlements expand
about elephants, he turned grim and looked into areas traversed by
elephants, the gardens
away. Mangoes were especially attractive to are a tempting source
the animals, he said. He fully expected them of needed nutrition.
to visit one of these nights and strip his mango
tree of all its fruit. This explained the row of
ripe mangoes on a table beside him. As the con-
versation went on, I watched him eat one after the elephants’ diet. One morning, I accompanied
another, apparently to preempt any losses from two field researchers in search of elephant dung.
a nighttime raid. We didn’t have to drive far before coming upon
Though Bossissi wasn’t enthused about ele- a fresh brownish-green, bucket-size pile beside
phants, Brigitte Moussavou, one of his neigh- the road. After slipping on rubber gloves, one
bors, told me that many in the community were of the researchers counted the number of lumps
aware that elephants enable the regeneration and then determined the circumference of each
of certain tree species, including the greatly with a tape measure.
valued moabi tree, whose seeds are used for The reason behind collecting such detail,
cooking oil. he explained somewhat abashedly, was to
“We want to protect our crops,” she said, “but document how much dung the elephants were
we are not against elephants.” producing—over time, these data would reveal
how much they were eating.
scientists now are
AT L O P É N AT I O N A L P A R K , After collecting the dung in a plastic bag, we
investigating whether climate change is altering drove to a stream. The researchers emptied the
contents onto a rectangular wire mesh and low- In the hushed silence, I found myself wonder-
ered it into the water, letting the finer poo wash ing about a world being reshaped by warming
away while leaving behind seeds, stems, and temperatures. The buffalo finally sauntered
branches. From the seeds, Whytock explains, away, and we drove on. As the hills and forests
scientists hope to discover which fruits—and receded, I was left with a troubling thought:
how much of them—the elephants are eating Could the fraying of the ancient bond between
and then compare that with the dung studies trees and elephants in a place as pristine as Lopé
White and others did three decades earlier. be a forewarning? Was it the case that other
“This is a more direct way to measure if the for- seemingly untouched forests, with no Edmond
est elephant’s diet has been affected,” he says. Dimoto to observe their trees, already were being
On the drive out of Lopé early one morning, harmed in as yet unnoticed ways? j
not far from where I’d seen the elephants, we
saw a buffalo in the road, blocking our path. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a contributing writer.
Dutch photographer Jasper Doest documented
We stared at it, and it stared at us, standing its the life of Flamingo Bob, a tame bird popular with
ground. A mist hung over the shrubs and trees. children in Curaçao, in the February 2020 issue.

FIXING
BETTER GROWING
STRATEGIES
AND A BOOST
FROM SCIENCE
COULD HELP
THESE CARBON
ABSORBERS
FIGHT WARMING.
Heat lamps glow in
an infrared image
of a research station
near the University of
Minnesota’s Cloquet
Forestry Center. Scien-
tists want to see how
elevated temperatures
and drought conditions
in the future could
affect the complicated
forest ecosystem,
from soil to treetops.
DAVID GUTTENFELDER
FORESTS 121
S O LU T I O N
RELOCATING
TREES
COULD GIVE
STRESSED
Rand Bieri measures
carbon dioxide in
the soil of a test plot
warmed by heaters
FORESTS
near Cloquet, Minne-
sota. Researchers have
planted tree seedlings
here from as far away
as Oklahoma to see
A WAY TO
how well they tolerate
the potential impacts
of climate change.
DAVID GUTTENFELDER
BEAT THE
The National
Geographic Society,
committed to illuminat-
HEAT
ing and protecting the
wonder of our world,
has funded Explorer
David Guttenfelder’s
storytelling about
AS THE
geopolitics and conser-
vation since 2014.
WORLD’S and collect

G O L D E N N E E D L E S D U ST T H E G RO U N D
CLIMATE
in Greg O’Neill’s hair like bright blond high-
lights as he pushes his way through a grove of
tall, elegant larch trees in British Columbia’s
Okanagan Valley.
SHIFTS
“Such a beautiful tree,” he says. “A proud spe-
cies. When it finds its happy place, it goes wild.”
But the “happy place” for many trees, here and
elsewhere, is changing as Earth’s climate warms.
These thriving larches, in fact, didn’t sprout from
tree parents in this valley, or even this country.
They came from 284 miles south, in Idaho, where
BY their ancestors adapted to conditions now com-
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA mon here: warmer summers, slightly shorter
winters, different rainfall patterns.
They are part of an experiment designed to
answer an increasingly urgent question: How started burning fossil fuels and pumping huge
can we help forests keep up with human-caused quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmo-
climate change? In plots like this, from Northern sphere, average global temperatures have risen
California to the Yukon border, O’Neill, a forester about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahr-
for the British Columbian government, and his enheit). On the current emissions trajectory,
colleagues have planted seedlings from larch they’re likely to rise at least that much more in
and other species collected from groves along the coming decades.
the West Coast to test the concept of assisted On average worldwide, forests can expand
migration. They want to see how far and how their range up to 3,000 feet or so a year, as treelets
quickly foresters need to move tree populations often track their preferred climates toward the
north to keep pace with climate change. poles, or uphill. To keep up with the pace of
The problem is simple, says Cuauhtémoc today’s change, they’d need to be going six to
Sáenz-Romero, a researcher at the Universidad 10 times as fast. In British Columbia the dispar-
Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, in Mex- ity is even greater: A 2006 study suggested the
ico. “Climate is moving … and trees cannot walk.” province’s climate zones would move northward
Since the late 19th century, when humans about six miles a year.
FIXING FORESTS 123

As they grapple with
climate change, forest-
ers in British Columbia
and their colleagues
have planted 152,376
seedlings from 15 tree
species at 48 sites
between Northern
California and the
southern Yukon. This
massive enterprise,
known as the Assisted
Migration Adaptation
Trial, aims to ensure
that species and
seed sources selected
for planting will be
well suited to climate
conditions they may
experience throughout
their lifetimes.
REBECCA HALE
WESTERN
LARCH
COMMON
PAPER
BIRCH
WESTERN
RED CEDAR
HYBRID
SPRUCE
SITKA
SPRUCE
GRAND WESTERN
FIR WHITE PINE
PONDEROSA
PINE
LODGEPOLE
PINE
DOUGLAS
FIR
YELLOW
CEDAR
WESTERN
HEMLOCK
QUAKING
ASPEN
AMABILIS SUBALPINE
FIR FIR
FIXING FORESTS 125

For a place like British Columbia, where for- later into the season than its Yukon cousin, says
ests cover some 60 percent of the province and Sally Aitken, a tree geneticist at the University of
form the backbone of its economy and cultural British Columbia (UBC). But those local adapta-
identity, a forest mismatched to climate rep- tions are needed in new places now.
resents an existential threat. A maladapted Inside and outside of British Columbia, sci-
tree—one whose genetics match a different entists argued bitterly over the ethics of moving
climate reality—is more susceptible to weather species away from their current ranges. After all,
disasters, diseases, and pests. past introductions had sometimes caused hor-
The early 2000s brought that home. A series rific invasive species issues. Others countered
of drought years weakened many trees. Mild that humans already had foisted unprecedented
winters allowed the destructive mountain pine change on ecosystems and that the risks of inac-
beetle, formerly kept at bay by the province’s bit- tion could be greater.
ter cold season, to move northward. Every year, Even with a lot of help in British Columbia,
from 1999 to 2015, tens of millions of trees were there’ll be hard limits to how quickly forests
killed. In 2003, record-setting wildfires ripped can adapt. Since no one suggests cutting down
through more than 650,000 acres of beetle- and healthy forest to replant, foresters can make head-
drought-desiccated forest in British Columbia. way only by planting on burned or logged lands.
At the current rate, the province won’t fully
in British
I N 2 0 0 9, T H E F O R E S T RY S E RV I C E replace its logged forests for 80 years. Even then,
Columbia began the world’s biggest assisted new trees will just keep pace with climate change
migration experiment. At 48 sites, O’Neill and rather than outrun it, because it’s nearly impos-
his colleagues planted neat grids of seedlings sible to plant trees far enough ahead of their cur-
rent range for them to thrive many decades from
now: Winter chills can stunt or kill seedlings of
trees suited for warmer weather if they’re planted
THE PROBLEM IS SIMPLE, too far beyond where they currently thrive.
RESEARCHER CUAUHTÉMOC on the UBC

I N A D R I Z Z LY R E S E A R C H G A R D E N
SÁENZ-ROMERO Vancouver campus, Ph.D. candidate Beth
SAYS: ‘CLIMATE IS Roskilly peeks through a thicket of baby larches
MOVING … AND TREES from all over western North America, planted
tightly together in a raised bed. She’s searching
CANNOT WALK.’ for populations that are both heat and drought
tolerant and cold hardy. “If we’re going to move
larches up, we need to know they’re going to
survive,” she says.
of 15 different species collected from 47 groves Meanwhile, climate pressures increase. In
between Oregon and Prince George, British June 2021, driving near the Canada-U.S. border
Columbia—152,376 trees in all. during a record-shattering heat wave, Aitken
About 10 years in, many of the trees that are watched with horror as her dashboard thermom-
flourishing came from populations a few hundred eter ticked upward past 115°F. Outside the car,
miles south, a sign of how much climate already Douglas firs leaked a sticky resin and a sick, tur-
has changed. The early data were so compelling pentine odor. “I’ve never seen trees that stressed
that in 2018, British Columbia’s forestry agency out,” she says. The next day, enormous fires tore
officially adopted a policy that requires foresters through the region; that autumn, unprecedented
to use seeds from warmer climate zones for the extreme rainfall caused weeks of landslides.
280 million trees they plant each year. Despite such climate threats, Aitken is utterly
The experiment upended one of the most clear: “It’s not like they’re a lost cause,” she says.
basic rules of modern forestry: Plant local. Little “We’re just trying to figure out a way to keep up.” j
genetic tweaks, honed over generations, may
help a larch from Idaho better handle drier sum- Staff writer Alejandra Borunda focuses on climate
change and the environment. In July 2021 she
mers than one in British Columbia or may result covered Los Angeles policies that left low-income
in a British Columbian lodgepole pine growing neighborhoods sizzling without shade trees.
S O LU T I O N and green pasture 150
A M I D RO L L I N G FA R M S
miles northwest of São Paulo, Brazil, two tropical
forests bloom as one. The first consists of a single
species, row after row of non-native eucalyptus,
PLANT
planted in perfect lines like carrots. The other is
haphazard, an assortment of dozens of varieties
of native saplings.
There’s no denying it: This forest looks ridic-
MORE TREES,
ulous. The gangly eucalyptuses shoot like
witch fingers high above patches of stubby fig
and evergreen trees. Yet these jumbled 2.5-acre
BUT DON’T
stands of native trees, ringed by fast-growing
exotics, are among many promising efforts to
resurrect the planet’s forests.
OVERDO IT.
The eucalyptuses, says Pedro Brancalion,
the University of São Paulo agronomist who
designed this experiment, get big so quickly they
can be cut after five years and sold to make paper
GIVE
or fence posts. That covers nearly half or more
of the cost of planting the slow-growing native
trees, which then naturally reseed ground bared
SEEDLINGS
by the harvest. And this process doesn’t hamper
natural regeneration.
You needn’t look far these days to find orga-
nizations trying to save the world by growing
ENOUGH
trees. There’s the Bonn Challenge, sponsored
by the German government and the Interna-
tional Union for Conservation of Nature, which
ROOM TO
enlists countries to reforest 865 million acres
by 2030, while Pakistan has its Ten Billion Tree
Tsunami Programme. Major tree-growing cam-
paigns, including Trillion Trees, sponsored by a
THRIVE —
trio of wildlife protection groups, and the World
Economic Forum’s trillion-tree initiative, plant
seedlings while also working to restore or con-
AND HAVE
serve existing forests. Some companies even
offer “buy one, plant one” deals for items from
whiskey decanters to surfing gear.
LONG
Yet too many planting campaigns, forest
experts say, still get too much wrong. On a tour
of another of his rangy forest sites last fall, the
Brazilian restoration ecologist drew newspaper-
LIVES
size boxes in the dirt to represent his plots. He
found that if he leaves portions of each plot
entirely free of trees—if he puts seedlings on
only about half the land—the woodland fills
in on its own. Decades on, he will have saved
money and produced a thick wild forest while
planting less.
BY Too often, tree-planting groups are so focused
CRAIG WELCH on getting credit for each seedling planted that
they ignore what matters most: What kind of
woodland is created? At what cost? And most
FIXING FORESTS 127

A portion of a former
eucalyptus plantation
in Itatinga, Brazil, has
become part of an
experiment to develop
economical ways of
regenerating forests.
Researchers from
the University of São
Paulo planted native
trees alongside fast-
growing eucalyptuses,
which can be cut and
sold after a few years
to help pay for the
restoration. The native
trees will naturally
reseed ground bared
by the harvest.
PAULO GUILHERME MOLIN, FEDERAL
UNIVERSITY OF SÃO CARLOS,
CENTER FOR NATURE SCIENCES
important: How long will it last? Using num-
bers of trees as a magic “proxy for everything,”
Brancalion says, you “spend more money and
get lower levels of benefits.”
You can literally miss the forest for the trees.
T
REE PLANTING SEEMS like a simple,
natural way to counter the over-
whelming crises of climate change
and biodiversity loss. Trees provide
wildlife habitat and slurp carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere.
No wonder trees are hailed as the ideal
weapon. Why not plant more and solve more
problems? Yet for every high-profile planting
operation, devastating failures have occurred.
In Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Mexico, mass plant-
ings have resulted in millions of dead seedlings
or have driven farmers to clear more intact for-
est elsewhere. Trees planted in the wrong places
have reduced water yield for farmers, destroyed
highly diverse carbon-sucking grassland soils, or
let invasive vegetation spread.
“I don’t think tree planting is a simple solu- Workers on a former
tion,” says Karen Holl, a restoration ecologist eucalyptus plantation
at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who are transforming it into
a native forest on an
collaborates with Brancalion. Reforesting the experimental farm run
planet can’t substitute for cutting coal, oil, and by the University of
natural gas emissions. Tree planting also can’t São Paulo. Anderson
da Silva Lima and Eder
replace old-growth forests. It took hundreds Araujo plant seedlings
or thousands of years to hone those intricate of Rapanea trees, a
biological (and carbon-sequestration) systems. species prevalent in
Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.
Saving them is even more important than grow- VICTOR MORIYAMA
ing new forests.
A tree’s true value is that it’s long-lived, which
means someone must make sure it doesn’t die.
Ethiopia, to great fanfare in 2019, claimed to
have planted 350 million trees in one day, but important landscapes. In 2019, nearly half of
Holl and her students have found little data to the nations in the Bonn Challenge planned to
show how well those trees have fared. When Holl sow tree plantations and log them regularly for
reviewed tree-planting proposals for the World timber or pulp rather than grow wild forests.
Economic Forum, she found that even the best That, despite the fact that natural forests on
efforts monitored results for only 24 months. If average sequester far more CO2.
the goal is carbon storage and biodiversity, “we So, what should we do?
can’t judge that in two years,” she said. Rather
T
than simply planting a trillion trees, it’d be O BRANCALION, THE ANSWER is
better to grow half as many but then make sure obvious: Restore native forests,
they’re “alive in 20 years.” mostly in the tropics, where trees
Where—and how—they get planted matters grow fast and land is cheap. That
too. Adding trees in the snowy far north darkens may require planting. But it also
the landscape, letting it absorb more sunlight, may call for clearing invasive grasses, rejuve-
potentially increasing climate warming. Planting nating soils, or improving crop yields for farmers
them in native grasslands can damage equally so that less land is needed for agriculture and
more can be allowed to revert to forests. than clearing—woodlands, 200 million trees
Brancalion has focused on Brazil’s Atlantic have come back. Not far from where I met Bran-
Forest, 75 percent of which has been removed calion, residents aided by a local environmental
for cities, cattle ranching, paper production, or nonprofit planted strips of trees for firewood
growing sugarcane and soybeans. But that land and fruit and grew beans around degraded
often isn’t used well. Expanses of sugarcane forests, helping black lion tamarin monkeys
land don’t produce a profit—they “cost money,” avoid extinction.
Brancalion says. Those areas—on steep slopes, With resources limited and no time to spare,
near remnant forest patches—offer opportu- Brancalion says, jump-starting natural processes
nities for restoration. Improving agricultural can help. In many cases, if we let nature do the
efficiency may make more land available. heavy lifting, he says, “the forest can regrow
Combining eucalyptus harvests with native quite effectively.” j
planting is just one reminder that successful
restoration must provide value for local commu- Staff writer Craig Welch covered the ongoing
transition to emission-free electric vehicles
nities. Since farmers in Niger learned they grew in the United States and around the world in
more cereal grains by planting around—rather the October 2021 issue.
FIXING FORESTS 131

S O LU T I O N
SCIENTISTS
CAN
CREATE
STURDIER The future of the once
magnificent American
chestnut tree may
TREES
depend on saplings
like these in a green-
house in Syracuse,
New York. The saplings
have been genetically
BY ALTERING
modified to resist
a fungus that killed
billions of chestnuts in
the early 20th century.
THEIR
AMY TOENSING
The National
Geographic Society,
DNA.
committed to illuminat-
ing and protecting the
wonder of our world, has
funded Explorer Amy
Toensing’s storytelling
THE BIG
about immigration in
America since 2021.
QUESTION: BY T H E T I M E77-year-old Rex Mann was old
SHOULD
enough to work in the forests of Appalachia,
they were full of the dead.
“We called them gray ghosts,” the retired
forester says of the American chestnut trees
THEY?
scattered throughout his former North Carolina
home and still towering over the forest floors.
They were skeletal remains of majestic trees
that once grew to be as much as 100 feet tall and
10 feet wide. Over the course of the 20th century,
an estimated four billion of them, one-fourth of
the hardwood trees growing in Appalachia, were
BY killed by an Asian fungus accidentally imported
SARAH GIBBENS in the late 19th century. It’s considered one of the
worst environmental disasters to strike North
America—and also a preview.
Emerald ash borer, sudden oak death, Dutch the American chestnut, perhaps it can work for
elm disease, oak wilt disease, walnut canker, other similarly afflicted trees.
hemlock woolly adelgid—in a globalizing world, “Some people say, ‘You’re playing God,’” says
many trees are facing pandemics of their own. Allen Nichols, president of the New York chapter
And now climate change, with its catastrophic of the American Chestnut Foundation. “What I
droughts, floods, and heat waves, is making it say is: We’ve been playing the devil for ages, so
especially difficult to fight off attackers. Even we need to start playing God, or we’re going to
Joshua trees, icons of the southwestern desert, start losing a whole mess of stuff.”
are finding that the world is too warm.
All this has led some scientists to ask: Can by an insidious
T H E C H E S T N U T B L I G H T I S C AU S E D
we build better trees, ones that are more able fungus that leaves orange-tinted cankers on a
to cope? And here again the American chest- tree’s trunk and limbs. These splotchy indenta-
nut may soon set a precedent—this time on tions, reminiscent of a bruise, can choke off the
the path to resurrection. By tweaking its DNA, tree’s flow of water and nutrients. The fungus,
scientists say, they’ve created a blight-resistant Cryphonectria parasitica, spares the young. But
tree that’s ready for a second act. If it works for as tree bark ages, it cracks, letting microscopic
FIXING FORESTS 133

Hannah Pilkey harvests
chestnuts in the fall
at the Tully Field
Station, near Syracuse.
The chestnut flowers
were fertilized with
pollen from genetically
modified trees. Bags
ensure that pollen
and seeds aren’t
accidentally spread.
AMY TOENSING
fungal spores enter the trunk, where they release “Fast-forward 30-plus years of breeding work,
oxalic acid that kills tree tissue. and what we see is, blight resistance is much
As a species, American chestnuts have sur- more complicated than we really thought,” says
vived by shooting up clones from the roots of Tom Saielli, a forest scientist for the foundation.
dead trees. But it’s a Sisyphean task; blight is Scientists now believe that as many as nine
inevitable with age, and a tree’s ability to clone gene regions working together may be responsi-
itself is not infinite. ble for providing blight resistance, which makes
In their attempts to save the chestnuts, for- breeding a challenge. The real question is, What
esters have sprayed the trees with fungicides, is the right combination of genes to produce
infected them with fungus-killing viruses, and blight resistance? Breeding also requires many
even burned infected trees to the ground. Efforts new generations to make progress, and each
to breed American chestnuts with Chinese coun- generation takes years.
terparts to create a hybrid resistant to the blight Genetic engineering offers a controversial
began as early as the 1930s and in earnest in shortcut to creating a truly American blight-
the 1950s. The American Chestnut Foundation resistant chestnut. In the 1990s Charles May-
began formal work on the hybrid in the 1980s. nard and Bill Powell at the SUNY College of
Syracuse proved tolerant of the blight.
Chestnut fans wanted to know when they
could get Darling 58. Eight years later, they’re
still waiting.
Powell is confident Darling 58 is safe, but
transgenic trees inspire a fear of the unknown.
Who can grow genetically modified crops and
where they can be grown are tightly regulated in
the United States. Powell and his colleagues have
asked the Department of Agriculture, the Food
and Drug Administration, and the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency to deregulate Darling 58,
affording it the status of a nonmodified tree. It’s
the first time these agencies have grappled with
such a request—to release a genetically modified
tree into the wild—and it would set a precedent
for other plant species.
“Once these are out in the forest, there’s no
calling them back. There’s no way to reverse it,”
says Anne Petermann, executive director of the
Global Justice Ecology Project. Some Indigenous
activists also are concerned the trees will violate
their right to keep genetically modified organ-
isms, or GMOs, off their land.
D
A lab worker removes
the spiky green bur ESPITE THESE FEARS, scientists say
from chestnuts polli-
nated with transgenic genetic engineering is a powerful
pollen. With each gen- tool for keeping forest ecosys-
eration of genetically tems intact. At Purdue University,
modified trees, scien-
tists get closer to the researchers have been studying
day when American ways to genetically modify ash trees to fend
chestnuts may once off the emerald ash borer, a highly destructive
again thrive in the wild.
AMY TOENSING
beetle. In Canada, scientists have developed
a genetically modified poplar that wards off
spruce budworm. And at Powell’s lab in Syra-
cuse, scientists are investigating new genes to
embed in elm and chinquapin trees.
Environmental Science and Forestry in Syra- For fans of the American chestnut, like Mann,
cuse, New York, began that quest, using what whose parents told stories of the tree’s demise
was then emerging technology. Powell says it and whose grandchildren may see its return,
was like having to “build a boat before we went restoring the chestnut would be proof that envi-
fishing. We just started testing genes.” ronmental wrongs can be righted. At his home in
His eureka moment came when he learned Kentucky, Mann engages in what he calls “chest-
of a wheat gene that enhanced pathogen resis- nut evangelism.” He says he’ll preach the value
tance in tomatoes. The gene produces oxa- of chestnuts “until I start drooling.”
late oxidase—OxO for short—an enzyme that “A lot of people don’t even know all this death
breaks down the acid produced by the blight and destruction has been unleashed in our
fungus, rendering it harmless. By 2014 May- forest,” he says. “I think we have no right to just
nard and Powell had successfully added this stand by and let all this disappear.” j
wheat gene to the chestnut’s genome. They
christened the modified tree Darling 58, after Sarah Gibbens is a staff writer who specializes
in environmental stories. For the December 2021
Herb Darling, an engineer and avid supporter issue she wrote about a scientific quest to
of their work. Trees grown in test plots at resurrect the smell of an extinct flower.
FIXING FORESTS 137

S O LU T I O N AS A CHILD IN THE 1980S, Prince Constantin zu
Salm-Salm cherished walks with his grandfa-
ther through the two cathedral-like forests the
family owned near an ancestral castle in central
A NEW
Germany. The 432-acre spreads of Norway spruce
and Douglas fir, planted decades before he was
born, were an investment—one the young prince
hoped to inherit someday.
PLAN IN
That all changed on a February night in 1990,
when a hurricane named Wiebke hit the area
with winds over 120 miles an hour, battering the
GERMANY:
tree-covered hillsides around Wallhausen.
After the storm finally passed, the two
walked through the forests. Hundreds of tow-
LEAVE
ering 40-year-old spruces lay toppled. “He was
in tears,” the prince recalls. “The big question
my grandfather had to answer was, What do
we do now?”
FORESTS
Today Germans face a similar reckoning but on
a much larger scale. Since 2018, central Europe
has experienced four straight years of drought
ALONE
or unusually high temperatures. Devastating
bark beetle infestations have wiped out tens of
thousands of acres of German spruce stands.
Meanwhile, forest fires have sent woodsmoke
AND
wafting into the center of Berlin. In forest-loving
Germany, the situation has sparked a national
debate over how to respond. One option is
ALLOW
to plant trees, replacing what’s been lost with
more of the same.
The wooded hills around Wallhausen repre-
sent another possibility. Prince Salm is part of
NATURE
a growing group of German forest owners who
have turned to what’s known as close-to-nature
forestry. This hands-off approach avoids tree
TO
planting when possible and advocates largely
sticking to native species. The aim is to replicate
the ecosystems of wild forests by leaving dead-
HEAL
wood behind and selectively harvesting only the
most mature trees.
have cultivated wine

P R I N C E S A L M ’ S F A M I LY
ITSELF
in the area for more than 800 years. After the
devastating impacts of Wiebke they came to an
unusual decision. “We said, ‘Nature knows better
what should be here,’ ” Prince Salm says.
Their forests are an hour west of Frankfurt, on
north-facing slopes that can’t support vineyards.
Aside from hunting deer and wild boars, and
BY harvesting some of the biggest trees each year,
A N D R E W C U R RY they leave the forests largely alone.
On a late fall day not long ago, Prince Salm
plunges through his forest in green rubber boots
and a blue down vest. Beneath the crowns of tall Prince Salm’s grandfather. Timber and its by-
Douglas firs that survived Wiebke, young oak, products are now a $150-billion-a-year enterprise
beech, and cherry trees that took root in the employing more than 700,000 Germans. A third
hurricane’s wake are aflame with the last of the of the country is covered with trees today.
season’s red and yellow leaves. That’s why years of drought and infestation
“Everything you see here came in naturally,” have come as such a shock. For the first time,
he says, as his brown-and-white cocker spaniel Germans are confronting the possibility of a
disappears into a dense tangle of saplings and future with dramatically fewer trees. “We don’t
brush. “The only investment we make is roads want to imagine this in Germany, which thinks
and hunting.” of itself as a forest country,” says Pierre Ibisch,
In a way, German forestry is edging away an ecologist at Eberswalde University for Sus-
from its roots. The nation was one of the first to tainable Development. “But we face this risk.”
approach forests as a resource to be managed.
T
In 1713 an administrator named Hans Carl von has
H E G E R M A N G OV E R N M E N T
Carlowitz advocated that landowners plant new declared the situation a national
trees to replace what they cut down for mining crisis, providing forest owners with
and metal production. It was the genesis of the nearly two billion dollars in sub-
concept of sustainability—but in a narrower sidies to remove beetle-damaged
sense than the word is used today. Following deadfall and replant forests.
Carlowitz, German foresters have approached Some close-to-nature forestry advocates say
trees with industrial efficiency, planting fast- that might be a mistake. Instead of rushing to
growing species such as spruce in neatly spaced plant more trees, they see an opportunity to do
less. Leaving deadwood and tree canopies to
slowly rot returns nutrients to the soil, boosting
the health as well as the diversity of surviving
AFTER THE HURRICANE trees. “From our perspective, less is always
BATTERED THE FORESTS, more,” says Knut Sturm, forest manager for the
city of Lübeck.
‘WE SAID, “NATURE There are caveats, of course. Close-to-nature
KNOWS BETTER forests can be profitable, but they require the
WHAT SHOULD BE HERE,” ’ timber industry and foresters to adjust to a

different way of doing business. Sawmills, for
PRINCE SALM SAYS. example, are set up to process narrow, straight
spruce trunks, not portly old-growth oaks.
As climate change accelerates, it’s also impor-
tant to consider planting more drought-resistant
rows. The approach caught on around the world species imported from elsewhere, says Marcus
and is still popular in Germany. Lindner, a scientist at the European Forest
A century ago a botanist named Alfred Möller Institute. “It’s possible to shift to more close-
pushed back. He argued that forests were com- to-nature silviculture but still bring in more
plex organisms and that trees shouldn’t be drought-tolerant species.”
cultivated like slow-growing stalks of wheat. Back in Wallhausen, the sun is dropping low,
Instead, forests should be managed the way and lights are beginning to come on in the vil-
nature might: by selectively felling individual lage below. “I want for my children that they
trees while maintaining a continuous cover. can choose from 10 different species, not just
Möller, who died in 1922, never had a chance Douglas fir or spruce,” Prince Salm says, calling
to see his ideas put into practice. After World his panting spaniel to heel and turning for home.
War II, forests all over Germany were logged “We have to make sure the same mistakes aren’t
to help rebuild war-damaged cities in Britain, made all over again.” j
France, and the U.S.S.R. To replace them, for-
esters planted millions of trees, mostly spruces, Andrew Curry is a journalist based in Berlin. He
previously wrote for the magazine in August 2021
in the 1950s. It was the beginning of a booming about archaeological research into the true
forestry industry that included foresters like history of gladiators.
FIXING FORESTS 139

In a city-owned forest
in Lübeck, Germany,
Arne Bramstädt
removes mature
Norway spruce trees
as part of an effort to
restore the original
forest. Hauling with
horses avoids dam-
aging the forest floor
with heavy machinery.
ORSOLYA HAARBERG
LEAVE THEM
ALONE—BUT
LOVE THEM
The Langur Way
Canopy Walk traverses
a timeless rainforest
on Malaysia’s Pinang
Island. Restoring
complex forests could
help bridge the gap
to a healthier planet.
IAN TEH
INSTAGRAM
PRASENJEET YADAV
FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS
WHO One example of tourism’s conflicting consequences?

An India-based molecular The living root bridges in northeastern India. These
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photographer and National
Geographic Explorer
decades or centuries—attract visitors, who in turn
WHERE
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Nohwet, India But Yadav, while working on a National Geographic
WHAT Society–funded project in 2017, saw how bridges made
Nikon D850 with a 24-70mm to support only a few people were regularly swarmed
lens (and a long exposure by selfie seekers. This has prompted some groups in
that caused motion blur)
the region to regulate access to the treasures.
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05.

THEY’RE KEY TO PROTECTING THE PLANET.

W W W.T R AV E LW I T H N ATG E O.C O M

Still Standing Tall

• Seeds That Need Saving

The Phantom The World’s Forests

DESPITE SEEING the forest for the trees,

Tree canopy height

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C STORY AND PHOTO GRAPHS BY O R S O LYA H A A R B E R G

STILL STANDING TALL

I A M D RAW N TO T H E serenity and sheer Roaming the intact Scots pine

Seed Bank Alarm

E X P L O R E The First Forest

of the ancient yellow

This multigenerational grove

and they work to fend off the timber company aiming

I GREW UP IN THE FORESTS of British Columbia. My

Defenses that evolved over millions

I persevered (see “The ‘Wood-Wide Web,’ Explained,”

times as much as clear-cuts. As the old trees age,

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saving Seeds, by More Means

THE FIRST FORESTS CHINA

Researchers in China have

Atmospheric CO2 (parts per million)

420 MYA 250 MYA Present

CHANGING THE CLIMATE

Crinoid Clam shrimp

A clam shrimp and other

ILLUSTRATION: RAÚL MARTÍN

400 MYA TODAY

Distant view of tombs at Dadan.

Nomadic hunter-gathering shifted into farming as people took advantage

Ruled by a dynastic succession of kings from a power base within the

Movements of people along routes of trade were bringing new

Rock art that may date from the Dadanite

Alongside the people of Daan’s notable

“The kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan

To plan a trip to AlUla visit www.experiencealula.com

Stroll a canopy walkway, take

Become a leaf detective.

Explore a canopy walkway.

Stay in or above trees.

The National Geographic

PHOTO: ERIKA LARSEN

a ghost floats in the

NGM MAPS. SOURCE: U.S. FOREST SERVICE

In 2016, Moore discovered that some albinos

I GREW UP IN THE ARMS of an old-growth redwood

Standing nearly 217 fir, considering its

THE FUTURE OF FORESTS 49

THE FUTURE OF FORESTS 51

would take time to accept how that could change.

needles tinged orange because they were dying.

Hotter air pulls more water from soil

Under repeated stress, even the

Water Bark beetles b

Food Water Food Air A healthy tree

WET SOIL DRY SOIL

MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF; MESA SCHUMACHER. SOU