From Understory to Overstory: Critical Studies of Old-Growth Trees and Forests

Abstract

Ancient forests occupy an especially prominent niche within the human imagining of nature. People from diverse corners of the globe and throughout the ages have imputed various aesthetic, cultural, economic, spiritual, and symbolic meanings to old-growth ecosystems and to the vegetal behemoths contained within them. From the coast redwoods of Northern California and the kauri of New Zealand's North Island to the monkey puzzle trees of Chile and pedunculate oaks of Białowieża Forest in Poland, such venerable forests are embodiments of time, interlacing human and non-human histories. In their sheer magnitude and obduracy, primordial trees render the past palpable within the immediacy of cross-species encounters within transhuman communities. Indeed, as "living monarchs of the world's forests,"old-growth supplies "a tangible link with the past" and "a spiritual ground in the present" (Maser 1994, 205).