Who doesn’t love Big Old Trees!? “You would have to be some kind of monster!” That pretty much sums up the episode. Author Amanda Lewis shares her journey around her book Tracking Giants-Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest. Amanda brought a breath of fresh air into the way I think about big trees. Her fun nature and transparent writing style make for a great dialogue and an even better read!
Resources
Tracking Giants by Amanda Lewis
Big Lonely Doug by Harley Rustad
Hiking Guide to the Big Trees of Southwestern British Columbia by Randy Stoltmann
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant
Sponsors
Quotes
11.52 - 11.55: “Books are still one of the last ways to reward deep thought.”
48.03 - 48.07: “That’s the thing about trees - once you stop looking for them, they start to reveal themselves.”
1.23.50 - 1.23.55: “Each distinct tree is not that big or special; it’s special because it is connected.”
Takeaways
When the forest calls (05.09)
Amanda was born in Ireland and moved to Surrey, BC, Canada at 4, where the west coast landscape became a defining feature of her life. She went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver but had to move to Toronto to pursue a career in publishing. She returned 8.5 years later to the forests of her childhood, burnt out from a difficult career and shaken from the big life change.
We are the champions (08.05)
Amanda began hiking in the North Shore mountains and began to rediscover herself. She was inspired to write a blog on her hiking excursions. Her friend introduced her to a book called Big Lonely Doug, which spoke about a Douglas fir tree included on the BC Big Tree Registry. She then decided to start a blog called Tracking Giants which would record her travels to all the champion trees, the biggest trees of each species.
The most difficult and the most rewarding (11.10)
Amanda believes that writing, even though difficult, is a wonderful way to touch people. Her goal with her book was to reach people like her who were fearful or unsure of their relationship with forests. The BC Big Tree Registry, created by Randy Stoltmann, is an online database of native trees where they are assigned tree scores based on their dimensions. Big tree registries originated in Maryland to catalogue what was left of the big trees after logging.
Obelisk in the desert (19.53)
Amanda points out that trees change across a landscape and a digitized registry allows for updates to reflect the changing state of trees. She muses that the reason big trees draw people in is that “they represent that deeper time and that slower way of being”. Big trees can also help people imagine what a landscape can look like in the future. Big trees tend to grow together, but she acknowledges that the grandeur that humans are in awe of is not why trees grow.
Missing the forest for the trees (28.30)
Amanda notes that while big trees help draw people into the forest from their busy lives, there is a danger in idealizing a single tree. She quips that trees don’t ask to be symbolized, put on a registry, visited or measured. She likes to look at metrics of appreciating trees that are beyond numbers and finds the idea of naming trees problematic and colonial. Since Indigenous peoples knew of the trees since time immemorial, younger tree trackers are choosing not to name them.
Approaches to conservation (36.02)
Amanda highlights that Indigenous peoples refer to trees as family members, which is a precursor to preventing deforestation. She discusses how arboreta, living collections of trees grown for scientific or aesthetic reasons, come from a different perspective than cultivating an individual relation with each tree. She laments that polarized perspectives on working in the forest are untrue and that Indigenous peoples show that you can both love and harvest trees.
“To find the tree, you must become the tree” (45.38)
Amanda shares about the opportunity for anyone to be a ‘community scientist’ in what is a very democratic registry by nominating any big tree they come across. However, she emphasizes that trees don’t have to be a certain way for us to appreciate them. Her search for a sustainable life after her exhausting career led her to trees and she learned that the trade-off of “looking for the biggest and best in life is that you end up missing a lot along the way”.
Tracking success and failure (51.06)
While writing her blog, Amanda couldn’t help but notice a book emerging from the posts. However, she was struggling to write it and worried if it would come to fruition. She had stopped contributing to her blog in an effort to find all the elusive champion trees. Her friend suggested she write on her blog about her failures since tree tracking is about the journey. She then decided to look at the book as an editor instead of a writer fixated on a particular ending.
“Easy is what you know how to do” (57.56)
Amanda finds the tree-tracking community to be welcoming and generous, and she has learned a lot from them. Even though she was not an expert in the field, it was in learning that she became comfortable with it. She explains that registering a tree only quantifies it, but does not protect it. However, with time, trees can become big and rare and it is a “tragedy of forestry on the coast” that many trees have been logged, leaving no chance of an old-growth forest.
An epidemic of loneliness and technology (1.07.00)
Amanda talks about how the disconnect caused by the pandemic calls for a paradigm shift. The forest can become a symbol of freedom or hold our guilt. She finds gardening is a manifestation of hope since the potential of a seed can be realized with the right conditions to flourish. She invites listeners to think about the decisions that can be made in the present to be able to look back without regret in the future.
Children of the same soil (1.14.20)
Amanda has discovered that when we pay attention to the details of the forest, facts begin to reveal themselves. She has become better at differentiating between different species of trees and has developed a deeper appreciation for the history of the landscape, regardless of the size or age of the trees on it. She feels centered thinking of herself as part of the same world as trees with rich stories, and believes there is hope to rewrite the narratives of our relationships with them.
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