Not seeing the forest for the tree

“The Golden Spruce” is the story of a man who demolished a treasured symbol. It is also a searching examination of eco-terrorism that dares to ask who does more harm, the person who cuts down a tree to protest the destruction of a forest or the society that destroys the forest.

The golden Sitka spruce of the title was known to residents of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands as the “Ooh-Aah tree.” It was sacred to the native Haida. Even scientists regarded the tree as a miracle of nature that should have died long ago, its shimmering yellow needles a sign that it was incapable of photosynthesis, of turning light into energy. Yet it had thrived for 200 years, growing 16 stories tall, surviving wind, lightning and nearly a century of intensive logging, until Grant Hadwin, a deeply troubled former logger, cut it down one winter night in 1997.

The Haida reacted as if Hadwin had murdered a child. “It was as if someone had done a drive-by on the Little Prince,” writes John Vaillant in “The Golden Spruce.” Still, the felling of the magnificent tree might not have made much of a stir had the author not recognized it as a human tragedy.

Set in the wilds of northwestern Canada, Vaillant’s book is a haunting tale of a good man driven mad by environmental devastation. The book moves between Hadwin’s unraveling and the events that precipitated it -- the dismantling of the last large expanse of temperate rain forest in the Northern Hemisphere. Forty percent of it is now gone, Vaillant writes, including a 200-square-mile “starfish-shaped swath of shaved planet” that foresters described proudly as “the only man-made object besides the Great Wall of China that was visible from space.” He is unsparing in his account of Hadwin’s revenge. The logger’s appalling tree surgery is as vividly wrought as one of Patrick O’Brian’s shipboard amputations.

“I didn’t enjoy butchering this magnificent old plant,” Hadwin wrote to newspapers afterward, “but apparently you need a message and a wake-up call.” Hadwin might have been a footnote in the annals of petty megalomaniacs. He had “overvalued ideas about the environment and fighting the establishment,” said one doctor who interviewed him. Vaillant demurs. “How, one might well ask, is it possible to ‘overvalue’ air and water? Perhaps a truer indication of mental illness ... can be found in the far more common tendency to passively accept the abuse of the very systems that keep us alive.”

Hadwin was born into a family of woodsmen. His grandfather had moved to western Canada to cash in on the timber boom. By 17, Hadwin was a prodigious logger, “his stamina and competitiveness ... the stuff of local legend.” Handsome and athletic, he was completely at home in nature, and for a while he collaborated in its destruction. “While doing the work he loved he helped to raze the site of many of his happiest memories.” Eventually he came up against what Vaillant calls the logger’s conundrum: How do you love something and then go out and kill it? Best to avoid the question. “You don’t allow yourself to think,” says one logger. “[I]f you start looking at it too hard, you’re going to go crazy.” Or, as Vaillant puts it, “In the timber industry, awareness causes pain.”

It forced Hadwin out of the logging business, alienated him from family and friends and drove him finally to inflict his misery on others. He cut down “the only tree on the continent capable of uniting natives, loggers, and environmentalists, not to mention scientists, foresters, and ordinary citizens, in sorrow and outrage.” Hadwin caused plenty of pain but raised little awareness. As far as nearby residents were concerned, he might as well have burned the national flag or carved a swastika on a church wall.

Disappointed by the reaction but unrepentant, Hadwin retreated to mainland British Columbia, where he berated the mourners. “[W]e tend to focus on individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered,” he told a reporter. Indeed, the Haida, whose people at the time were threatening to murder Hadwin, had been a partner in the slaughter of the surrounding forests. By the time Hadwin cut down the golden spruce, Vaillant writes, “entire islands had been shaved bald.”

The Haida, whose numbers have declined by 95% since the 18th century, had come to see the golden spruce as a symbol of once and future abundance. “This gift from Mother Earth connected us with our deepest spiritual needs,” said a local clergyman in a eulogy to the tree. More than 100 tribal elders traveled to the fallen tree “to reconcile with the spirit of the golden spruce.” Their grief was palpable. Said one observer: “People were wearing their blankets inside out.”

There had been no such outpouring over the deforestation of the Haida homeland, although people agreed that it was horrific. “When you fly over the northern islands now and see all that’s been taken,” said a tribal artist, “you can’t speak for a few days afterward.”

Many native people believed in taking from the Earth’s bounty so long as they gave proper thanks to the spirit of the dead, built shrines and altars and spared the most obvious representatives of the spirit world -- the white buffalo, the albino raven and the golden spruce.

In some cultures, the sentence for destroying a sacred thing is death. But the Haida never got their hands on Hadwin, who was charged with criminal mischief and failed to show up for his court date. Attempting to return to the islands by kayak -- partly to avoid the threat of a roadside ambush -- he vanished. Months later his kayak and camping gear washed onto an island in the aptly named Danger Passage. After a lengthy search, authorities presumed Hadwin was dead, although sightings are rumored from time to time as far away as Siberia. The Haida aren’t ready to forget him, and he may endure in their legends, not unlike one of the spectral outcasts known as brush men, who inhabit the ghost stories of some far northern tribes.

Even before his disappearance, Hadwin apparently never fully emerged from the shadows of his solitary existence. Vaillant, a journalist living in Vancouver, relied heavily on the recollections of Hadwin’s closest friend, a woman who had known him for only a few years. Struggling to explain Hadwin’s mental state, the author turns too often to psychology texts.

The core of “The Golden Spruce” first appeared as a riveting article by Vaillant in the New Yorker magazine. The book-length version pads as much as expands on the original account. Hadwin doesn’t show up for the first third of the book, which is an extended excursion into the history of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the exploitation of the Haida and the evolution of the timber industry. All of it is interesting, but if you hadn’t read the New Yorker article, you might wonder where the book is headed.

Some of the background is essential -- especially Vaillant’s evocative descriptions of the forest that so bewitched Hadwin. “In here, the patient observer will find that trees are fed by salmon, eagles can swim and killer whales will heave themselves into the graveled shallows and stare you in the eye.” Vaillant did not set out to exonerate Hadwin, nor does he dismiss him as delusional. Hadwin looked out over British Columbia’s razored landscape, where the vast clear cuts looked “like wounds, like violations of the natural order” and was himself irreparably damaged.

Vaillant speculates that Hadwin was a casualty of a certain kind of truth, one too powerful to assimilate. Others have glimpsed what Hadwin saw in the wilds. Henry David Thoreau was briefly unhinged by his first exposure to North American wilderness, describing it in “The Maine Woods” as “something savage ... though beautiful.... Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe,” as if he had seen the landscape of Genesis, God’s country.