![]() The Tlingit had settled this part of Alaska long before, surviving off the sea as well as the woods. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 282 parts per million.Īlready, there were people in the forest. It shed the limbs on its lower stem as it grew, leaving its lower trunk bare of branches. ![]() Underground, the roots found fractures in the limestone-rich soil, drawing in nutrients and moisture. The spruce began to rise, sending its roots into the soil where it could steel itself against the strong winds that buffet the island. Its blue death mark might as well be a question mark: Is this tree worth more to us alive? Or dead? The spruce’s fortunes as ever, are bound in the politics of timber and climate change thousands of miles away in Washington D.C. In the words of loggers, “You cut the best, so the best is always left.” Forest Service chose the spruce to be cut down and extracted by helicopter - an elaborate process reserved for only the finest trees on this rugged hillside. The devil’s club she dries for tea, and for medicine.Ĭovered in a riotous mix of pale lichens and deep-green moss, the tree’s flaky bark is marred by a long, electric-blue slash of spray paint running across one side of its wide trunk. There are the spruce needles she makes into syrup and adds to salt, and butter. ![]() There’s fiddleheads,” said Anderson, whose people made their homes here before this spruce arose from the soil. “There’s watermelon berries, Jacob’s berries, blueberries. Marina Anderson, a member of the Haida and Tlingít nations, on Prince of Wales Island. Walking around its 15-foot-wide base, Marina Anderson, the Organized Village of Kasaan’s tribal administrator, pointed out a plethora of plants her ancestors, the Haida and Tlingit peoples, have used over the centuries. This mammoth tree plays an outsize role in the Tongass National Forest, which holds the equivalent of 9.9 billion tons of CO2 - nearly twice what the United States emits from burning fossil fuels each year. And while roughly a third of the tree’s carbon would stay locked in the logs being shipped to mill, the rest would escape to the atmosphere. Its roots and the soil below would hold another 1.4 tons. The spruce would hold nearly 12 metric tons of carbon, says forest ecologist Beverly Law, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University. The sunlight it absorbs fuels a reaction that splits the water and carbon dioxide into glucose, which traps the carbon, and releases oxygen into the atmosphere. The spruce draws in carbon dioxide through the tiny holes in its leaves, known as stomata, and water through its roots. ![]() The miraculous process that sustains life on Earth is embedded within its vast trunk, a reservoir for the greenhouse gases that now threaten humanity. It would fetch around $17,500 on the open market.īut there’s another value the spruce holds: the carbon dioxide locked inside its fibers, in its roots, in the soil and in the vegetation that clings to it from its branches to its base, where berry bushes proliferate. Even when the top and branches are lopped off, a tree this size would yield at least 6,000 board feet of lumber, said industry consultant Catherine Mater, who assessed the spruce’s potential market value for The Washington Post.
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