 Looks like we have a nice crowd. Thank you for coming tonight. We're very excited to host author and naturalist, Burton Heinrich. He joins us tonight to celebrate the launch of his book of collected essays, A Naturalist at Large. As the New York Times book review notes, these passionate observations superbly mix memoir and science. As I was reading, these essays span a number of years and a number of ecosystems, starting with observations of earth, of its foundation of soil and rocks, then moving on to insects, mammals, ravens and other birds, and ending on strategies for life. One of my favorite essays is O. Tenenbaum, where Byrne talks about the natural growth of the coniferous trees, the spruce and balsam fir. So popular for Christmas and raises important questions about altering its true shape to feed a human expectation of what a live tree should look like in our living rooms. If our ignorance of how conifers grow can allow us to do this to a Christmas tree, how much more might we alter nature at large without caring or even knowing, he says? Of course, to understand what is at stake, you should read the book. So you can pick up your copy here tonight at Bear Pond Books. And for those watching on Orca Media, you can come into the store anytime. I'd like to remind everybody to please mute or turn off your cell phones and to let you know that the front door is locked for the duration of the reading. The back door is open if you need to exit during the reading. There is a bathroom at the back of the store to the right of the back door. And please help yourself to refreshments at the back table. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring this event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. There are complimentary Vermont Arts stickers at the counter if you'd like to pick one up. I'd also like to thank Orca Media for filming tonight's event. If you're interested in seeing this video or if you're interested, bless you. In learning about other Bear Pond Books events, I'm going to pass around our signup sheet for our newsletter. All of our event videos will be in the newsletter plus upcoming events such as Reeve Lindberg. She's the daughter of aviator Charles Lindberg. She'll be here on Tuesday, May 15th, talking about her new memoir called Two Lives, which is a neat collection of essays that reconciles the seemingly separate worlds of fame and privacy. But tonight we are proud to present Byrne Heinrich, a professor emeritus in the biology department at the University of Vermont and the author of numerous books about nature writing and biology, including bestselling, Winter World, Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, The Homing Instinct, and One Wild Bird at a Time. Among his many honors is the 2013 Penn New England Award in nonfiction for life everlasting. He resides in Maine and we're thrilled to have him here at Bear Pond Books. Everyone, please welcome Byrne Heinrich. Thank Bear Pond Books for inviting me and thank you for coming. So this is the first outing of this new book. It just came off the press about a week ago, I think it was. And so in a way it's also an outing for me as a naturalist. I mean that the title says this and naturalist at large, so it's about me. And it wasn't always cool to be a naturalist. I always thought of myself, I'm a scientist, I'm not a naturalist. And that was kind of imbued in me already when I was applying for graduate school. And I remember interviewing at the University of New York at Buffalo to go to graduate school. And I was passed around to the various professors interviewed and they would kind of check you out if you're suitable material. And one of them kind of surprises, hey, you're a naturalist. And showed me the door, so at this point, I guess I am a naturalist and I think I was one since I was six years old. But I didn't realize that there were certain connotations attached to it, et cetera. So I want to today talk a little bit about kind of the journey because these essays, in about 35 essays in this book were written over the last 30 years. And actually I've been publishing science since almost twice as long. And so this came more recently. So first of all, I want to say I really like the cover of this book. That's how you judge your book. And this got this beautiful art there, it's all mine. So they made a very good choice to put all the good stuff in there. And so this is from about eight pictures that all relate to biology, they all relate to natural history and they all relate to science. But I should probably go by the blurbs. So I'm gonna read some of the blurbs in the back. So that's part of reading the book by the cover. But the blurbs are actually from different books. However, I think that's fitting because this book includes things that went into different books because it's very different, very many different topics. Obviously from 35 essays, they include topics that went into other books. So this is kind of a combination, really of many books together. And so here's the first one in the back, it says praise for one wild bird at a time. So there's the essays here about birds, you know, a whole bunch of them actually. So that relates to that book. And this says, Baron Heinrich is a dedicated watcher, happy to knock down the fourth wall of zoology. Well, I never actually considered knocking down any walls, so I don't know what this is all about. And I don't even know what the fourth wall of zoology is. So there's maybe more behind this than I know. And the second one is praise for the homing instinct. I says deep and insight for writing. Well, that, I never thought about deep and insight for writing. It seemed to me it's just common sense, you know? But common sense comes from needing from having facts and just going by the facts and you get the facts from observations. And that's one thing that I do is I make observations and then if somebody else doesn't make the observations, well, then you get insightful, you know? And when you write it, so that's the way it goes. Okay, here's praise for life everlasting. Anyway, it's about life everlasting is far from morbid. Instead, it's life affirming, convincing the reader that physical demise is not the end of life, but an opportunity for renewal. Okay, well, a little bit actually of that I have, I saved that just to the very end of this book, one short piece, so that's a good ending, right? About death, but it's really about renewal. Death really is about renewal. It's a continual renewal in nature. You can't have it without death and you can't have it without birth. So it's all part of the process. And I didn't do it intentionally, but that topic comes up at the very last, but in terms of ecological conservation. And so here's a nice one. It says, Heinrich richly deserves the comparison to Thoreau. Well, I kind of puzzled on this one. I mean, Henry David Thoreau was a philosopher and I think they would label him as a transcendentalist. I'm not exactly sure what a transcendentalist is, but I don't consider myself transcending anything and I don't know what it is. But I think he, so what am I that I get compared to Thoreau? I mean, I'm a runner, I'm a scientist, I'm an artist, a physiologist, an ornithologist, an entomologist, ethologist. So I didn't know about Thoreau being any of those. So I don't know how the comparison holds. However, all of these things are, except maybe being a runner, concern being a naturalist because a naturalist combines just about, all the disciplines and it brings them together. And so maybe transcendentalism, transcendentalist means to bring a lot of things together. And that comes only from a broader contact, from broad interest. And it said that I'm a passionate observer in a mixed memoir and science. Well, I never thought of it as, well, the passionate comes from, really from just being interested and finding something interested. And that comes from just being out and observing and asking questions. And memoir comes kind of automatically because it means being involved in the process as an observer. And rather than being global and speaking in terms of generalities, observations very often become kind of personal and from experience. So I see as being a naturalist comes from original observations in the field from a personal perspective and putting your own spin on it and putting it in the context of what is known and trying to find out more about it. And as I said, I've been that since I was a very small child and I remember how during my PhD qualifying examinations, for example, at UCLA, Professor asked me, he says, why did you decide to be a biologist? And I couldn't think of any answer of why. And then I said, then I remembered a kind of an experience that I had that left a memory that is sharp right now as it was 72 years ago. And I was going across the Brook and it was in the spring about this time and the willows were in bloom and there were bumblebees flying one flower to the next and humming and there were birds there, warblists, harking insects. And I remember that scene exactly. So that sort of left an impression of something really wonderful and fascinating and that would focus interest for forever basically and finding new thrills like that. And so, but it led to doing studies and finding later on, it went to trying to find out what was really going on. It's basically, this is life and this is the most important thing on earth and what is behind it and what makes it fascinating, what makes it tick. And so it's strange that during my PhD qualifying I talked about this vision I had about these bumblebees and they kind of looked at me like I was a little bit crazy and I forgot about bumblebees for my PhD. I didn't work with bumblebees. I worked with Mars actually, but later on I did work with bumblebees and a matter of fact, I did some of my best most scientific work with bumblebees. I had like four or five publications in the premier science journals in science and in nature. It happened to be about bumblebees. I don't know, it just happened. And so that led to trying to put it together and trying to communicate it. And I remember another professor at Berkeley there. I've been working with bumblebees going back to Maine every summer and I'd go out in the field and chase bumblebees around for one reason or another and end up with a paper in science, but nobody really cared and I didn't communicate too much to the professors there, but he says, well, he says, what do you do? Did you go out to Maine again and find out that bumblebees make honey? And so I said, well, I'd better communicate that there's more going on than making honey. And so I wrote bumblebee economics. And that kind of led to one thing after another. And again, the idea was to bring the topics into a larger context. And so writing actually for me was also a path of discovery because once I started to write, I found out what I really didn't know at all. And try to put it together, where are the connections? And so whenever I was writing for a general audience, I would find out interesting problems that I hadn't solved and that just popped up. And one thing led to another. And I don't know how much time we have, but I do wanna leave quite a lot of time for your questions. And so we heard what the general topics were, went from things from the earth, plants to insects. And that is, of course, natural connection when you're talking about bees, you're talking about flowers, et cetera. And when you're talking about bees, you're talking about community action. And that actually led to ravens because bees share information and there were ravens doing something that looked similar, but it turned out to be very, very different. But you get insights from one to the other. So at this point, I'd like to be open to your questions and discuss some of these things if you have questions. And, of course, I gotta leave time for signing books too, right? Yes? What kinds of things are you working on this week in May? Tree swallows. Yeah, for the last seven or eight years, I've watched tree swallows and I've noticed that the males bring white feathers into the nest. And not just any white feathers, but long ones, usually those curved ones, those of the secondaries of the wings are their favorites. So I made tests, put out, spread out feathers. Actually, I was watching them so much that they were paying no attention to me. I could hold up the feather and they'd come pick it out of my hand. So anyway, I did test and find out what they really prefer and then I'm trying to find out why. And so actually, I have a draft of a book of that written right now. But by writing it, I write it earlier so that I find all the things that I don't know and now I have to clean up and get more observations to fill them in. So why did you pick tree swallows? Why do you pick a topic? Yeah, well, I just like birds. And so I've always put out bird houses. Ever since I was a kid, I think I was eight years old when I made bird boxes, hammered together out of boards, barn boards and hung them up. And there would be tree swallows and bluebirds and kestrels and starlings. And they were just for the fun of it. And so I still put up bird boxes all the time. And in one bird at a time, you may have read how sometimes I don't even have to put a bird box up. Flicka came and knocked the holes through the wall and built a nest right there. But yeah, tree swallows were right next door. And so one, the reason was because they were right under my nose, just like bumblebees, you can watch them from two feet away. And here with these tree swallows, they were five feet away. So, you know, take what's available and what can be most easily seen and observed. And then once you start watching, you see interesting things that you just can't imagine. And I couldn't imagine, you know, I knew pretty much, you know, what the other birds were doing. I know the chickadees in the box there, they didn't have a single feather in there. They didn't need to line the nest feathers and the gray-crested flycatcher had a nest in that box and had it all lined with pine needles. And here the swallow had to have white feathers, starling would take feathers, almost anything, but put them in at random. And then I found out that the swallow was putting in the eggs, the lining, even after laying the eggs, which is weird because usually you should put it in before. So a lot of things just didn't make any sense. So, a follow-up, if you may. You said you took what was easy. How do you explain that your fascination with ravens and hauling dead carcasses through the winter? Yeah, that's... Is that your definition of easy? Yeah, no, that was not easy. It's a good point. It's probably the hardest thing I ever did. But the thing was it was so fascinating because I didn't think it was gonna get that hard because all I was gonna do was get a one carcass, calf carcass, I got one there and put it out, and see who came and they made a noise and I would play back. I'd record the calls and play it back and see if the raven would come. And then one little thing let me know to another, if I had known beforehand what was all involved, I would never have done it. But it was always here. All I had to do was take one more little step and then I'll get a little bit closer and then I'll be done. And I get there, well, I have to take one another one and that's how it went. And because it was always fascinating to take the next step. Yes? I don't know much about them. They seem to be collected mud around my driveways and they would come and like land on my feet and drink the sweat out of my feet. But solitary bees makes me think that they don't have a queen or that they don't, that they'd be solitary. Well, the solitary bees, the social bees evolved to be social from solitary. The solitary bees, let's say some of them make a little mud thing, like a little pot almost. Others use a hole like the leaf cutter and then others in the ground, there's so many solitary. But anyway, basically they're all females. It's a single female that does that. But when the bees started making those holes in the ground for sometimes another female might come and use the same hole or some of her babies hatch out and make a side hole and pretty soon you get more and more. And the same way as cockroaches became termites by eating in the wood, they all got all the food there and all the babies there. So you end up with just one female doing all the reproduction and all of the offspring being neutered and so in a big honey bee colony, it's still one female. Rose and Ravens, can you talk a little bit about what kind of correspondences, letters you got and what kind of correspondences you've got or maybe a pretty surprising letter from somewhere in the world that you hadn't expected? No, I do not remember. I mean, well actually I get all kinds of correspondences, but not so much with respect to solving the problem because they are not involved in it. But since you mentioned that, I did get one letter. Mostly I get letters from, I have a pet raven, I have a pet raven and after a while I pay no attention to it anymore because I get too many, you know, I heard about this pet raven again and again and again but anyway at this time I got this letter from a lady in Berlin and she said, oh, I'm talking about her raven, a pet raven. And by the way, she says I work in a library, I think it was some kind of a division for deciphering handwriting. You know, the Germans write so funny, you can't read the handwriting, you can't read the print and I had a whole pile of letters from a friend of my father found in the attic and I couldn't read them, I couldn't make them out and so I sent her, can you translate this? Oh yeah, she can do it. And then I found a whole big trove of letters because of my ravens that made me able to write the snoring bird because I got all this information which otherwise I wouldn't have got. So a lot of times it's the unexpected things that come up, mostly that is just by reading and rummaging around. So the same with doing the research, you do the unexpected things and unexpected things come up and it's usually surprises and the surprises are the most fun. But definitely it's a matter of contact, not just through letters but actually doing things. You know, here it was me rummaging in the attic, for example, that led one thing leads to another. Yes? Have you been following the changes in birds and insects and other animals in response to climate change? Well, I definitely have noticed a lot of changes. You know, I don't know what to attribute them to. For example, I was just telling to Rick Dutch as we were talking about bees and I was thinking when I was doing the studies with bumblebees in the 1970s, I'd see a spirea bush and we just covered with bumblebees all over the place and I have pictures of a dozen or so and last summer I went jogging around the roads and spirea all over the place and I'd see one or two and nothing more. So what the hell is going on? And it's a good thing I did the studies then because there's no way it could be done now. And so I can't imagine that there was a sudden climate change like that that I wouldn't attribute that to climate change. I mean, it could be to spirea of disease or anything else. I mean, but you do see changes all the time and in part that's natural in ecosystems. I mean, I remember in Heinsberg around the beaver bog there was a, by Burnham, I forgot which one it was now. In one year, a couple of years, it was all eaten off. There wasn't, you know, I thought it was all dead. You know, all the leaves were all eaten it and it was dying and I thought it was gone. Well, too bad. You know, there was a little beetle but two or three years later, no more beetles. They're all gone. And it's all back. So, you know, things change so quickly. They're, you know, they're epidemics on their violent changes in weather. You know, you can have one big storm and maybe knock at the right time. You can knock out, you know, half the bird population of some species. So, and there is violent weather at any age so, you know, the whole pattern is not something I'm conversant on. All I can tell you is that there are big changes all the time. Yes? I have a question on a little bit different topic but a lot of times when science is mentioned, math is usually the next kind of topic that's brought up. How important do you think it is to approach science from a writing and artistic perspective? How important is it to? To write about scientific content but not necessarily in... Not necessarily. Okay. Yeah. With articles and... Yeah, well, I mean, I am at terrible dunce at math. If I had to do statistics, I used to be able to do some primitive statistics and I can't do it anymore. I let somebody else do it for me. But I don't do too much of it. I don't think, you know, 95% of my science is not mathematical. It's more related to a phenomenon that you can... Well, you have to do, you know, I do experiments but I don't have to do a thousand... I don't have to repeat it a thousand times to get a statistical significance. If there's that much variation, then I figure that there is... I'm not gonna be that interested in it because there's so much else going on. I want things that are much clearer and sometimes, you know, it's required. But I'm more interested in the phenomenon as such. I mean, for example, I remember going into the... When I was interviewing there at Buffalo in New York, the professor, they were very much into math and I was totally done at math and anyway, they had aquarium and had mice in there and this was full of water and the mice were swimming around in the water and breathing the water. And the reason I could see they were doing it, they had it under pressure and they were pumping in oxygen into the water so the oxygen in the water was totally saturated and so the mice could breathe in the water and they get enough oxygen out of it. But they were interested in the precise diffuse ingredients in terms of diffuse ingredients and exactly how fast was it going in from what concentration to what concentration? Well, I could see what was going. I knew what the phenomenon was and as far as I was concerned, I didn't give a shit about what the concentration gradient was. I know it had to be high. This percent or that percent didn't make any difference to me but a lot of people in some problems, it does make a difference. But, you know, I think it's, you don't need to, if it comes to that, get somebody who's good at math and let them do it. No, I just work in schools and I think it's super important for people who are interested in art and science to feel that they belong to the scientific community. Yes. And that's why I love reading these kinds of books. Yeah, so there are niches, all kinds of niches and there's room for artists, there's room for mathematicians, general observations, generalists, specialists. People come to science out of love for phenomenon often. Yeah. Out of love for music, out of love for a shade. Yeah, yes? 30 or 40 years ago when you were first starting to be a naturalist, who did you find worth reading? And now, who would you say is inspiring to you? Well, I mean, I really like Sigurd Olson talking about, you know, the North Country in Minnesota and I like, you know, outdoor things and I don't, there are so many good nature writers now that, you know, I'm not gonna be picking out many. I mean, I like E.B. White, he writes for general audiences and I don't know that I tried to do more watching than reading so I'm reading Paul and now about plants, you've got, and at the moment and so there are lots out there. Yes? I'm wondering how you gain the trust of a bird. We have a garage and an entrance to our basement which is what we used to go in and out of the house and there is an old Christmas tree where a little sparrow has built a nest and we've been watching the eggs and watching the hatch and now we've got little fuzzy babies in there and I would love to know how to keep the bird from spooking every time we come in and out. I've been testing a theory that maybe if I don't make eye contact with it, she'll stay but I wondered if you had any thoughts on that. Yeah, I think eye contact is important. I mean, that might spook them out, yeah. I mean, I was deliberate about that with my swallows. As I said, I could feed them out of my hand and when they first came to, and the first time in the clearing and went to check out the box, I would deliberately go near and act like a post, and so that they would get used to me and eventually I said, I'm gonna see if I can get close enough to touch it on the tail and I got a post there and one day I'd go, another day a little bit closer and after a while it wouldn't pay any attention to me and I actually touched it on the tail. So with the ravens, for example, you don't get near them and but I found out that the ones that we captured and put in a big aviary and I would be in there for hours and hours every day, after a while they couldn't escape so they were forced to be near me and they had a chance to see that I was harmless and after a while they went feed right by my feet, wild ravens. So it's a matter of habituation so and not really scaring at them just because eye contact is very important, they're keyed in, a predator, folks is in on them and so they would definitely notice if you really keep looking at them, just don't pay them any attention but be consistently near and they'll be habituated. Yes? So in your book about raven and winter, you were a moose carcass and it called out and that was the big question why did it call out. Right. And you kind of, yet by the end you figured, well, that it was a young raven or something and that maybe it was calling out to prove that it could find neat. Well that was one of the hypotheses. Actually when I wrote ravens and winter I think I ended up with seven or eight different hypotheses. I thought one of them might be maybe there calling in a predator to open the carcass because a raven can't even peck through the skin of a gray squirrel. But actually it's quite a job for a raven to eat a gray squirrel. What they do is they start at the mouth and they pull things out and they can turn the skin inside out but they can't penetrate the skin but they can never penetrate into a deer. They couldn't get anything until a coyote or a wolf or something tears into it. So it makes sense that if you find a carcass you're gonna make a racket and some animal that might recognize that call that's associated with food would come and eat it. So that's your final, it's been many years since you've written that, is that your final word on that? No, I had a hypothesis but I'm not gonna go into it. You're gonna have to read the book. I ended up with eight hypotheses. I think it was seven. But I don't wanna spoil it for any of you who wanna read it. Yeah? So were the tree swallows, were the feathers that they used from tree swallows or from some other bird? No, no the swallows have only tiny little feathers. So these are mostly turned out to be from waterfowl, light colored feathers from waterfowl but they'll take any white feathers, chicken feathers. I know out at North Branch Nature Center there's a box with tree swallows in it and there was white fur in there that came from a llama that was about a mile away. Yeah, yeah, yeah I know, I mean, that's the point that these feathers must come from long distances, especially where I was looking at in the clearing in the woods, there's no waterfowl right there. They have to go at least a mile to come back with a feather and they put about 50 of them in there up to 100. So it's a lot of work. So if you put in that much work, that would not be produced by natural selection unless there's some big advantage for it. So that's generally what that species will do. So the evolutionary, the advantage to them is sufficient and it must be clear when the range to go get that particular kind of feather is just too great an energy expenditure, right? Right, so it's a big energy expenditure. And the interesting thing is that it's mostly the male that brings the feathers. Usually the male starts the nest and then the female lines it. Here it's a male that brings the lining but she lines it, but he brings them. So there's something interesting story going on there. Why, why? Again, I have... Spot parasites, great idea. Why would they have to be white? See them, then? See your bugs crawling around then? Yeah, well, they don't generally pick out bugs. Yeah, so that's one hypothesis. Okay, add that and test it. I have a few others too. So, name one. Well, let's see. For one, feathers are very hard to find so it's really something valuable and the male brings them so maybe it's like the bull brain, the bride, pretty flowers where you've got very expensive, you're really worth something, you're bringing these flowers. So that's another hypothesis, that's more. I know there's, I don't remember what bird species is, but in one of the jungles in the southern areas, there's a bird that collects blue feathers and brings them in, so. Oh yeah, well, like the bird of paradise, I mean that, that decorates a bower, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if anybody's figured that one out. No. But I think it's something similar. It's definitely something valuable. It's attention-getting, but I don't think that is going to be the answer in this one. White. So there you get a hit. There you go, there you go. Another hypothesis. Another hypothesis. Do ravens adorn their death nests with anything? No. I watched a raven, what, it was a shiny ribbon on a, it was twirled around a street sign and it picked up the end and it figured out how to unravel it and I wondered, what was it gonna do with that shiny piece of ribbon? Well, I mean, they do collect ribbons of let's say ash bark, the inner bark, that's nesting for, it could be just for the lining, soft material. I don't, I have not seen anything colorful or anything like that in the nest, but if it happens to be there, I think they would just pick up anything that's kind of loose for the lining and the outside of course, it sticks. Yeah? This might not be within the catalog work that you've done, but I'm curious about, I grew up in Scotland and there were magpies all over the place there and the western Europe generally, and there are magpies in the American West, but there aren't magpies in the East, what's up with that? Good question, I have wondered about that, I don't know, it's weird, yeah. And there are carrion species like pros and ravens, right? Yeah, they are also carrion feeders, what is a little bit like ravens and pros, which are related, but you know, just like, yeah, these distributions are really kind of interesting, I mean, about 20 miles away from where I live in Maine, there are gray jays, and 20 miles further, they're none, never seen one, so I don't know, in the other place, we see a lot of them, so of course habitat has to be appropriate, but it looks like the habitat is very similar, so maybe it's competitors, a competing species, might raid the nests in a particular habitat. Of course birds tend to come back to the home area, but the same pairs in the offspring, but that wouldn't spread in some cases. So blue jays are corvids, like ravens, and have you done any work with blue jays? No, I have not. I would like to, but I haven't done it. In fact, I wanted to do some of the string-pulling tests with blue jays that I did with ravens, last year, actually, and I got a permit for it to get the blue jays, and behind it all over, and I couldn't find a nest, so there were about 20 of them around the feeders all the time, but when it came time, finding a nest, they were all gone. It would be interesting to see the correlation. Yeah, it would be interesting to see, and I'd like to do it, but I did try with crows, and they couldn't do the same test, that the ravens passed, the crows couldn't do them. So if I remember correctly, because I heard you talk about ravens a number of years ago, you had raised these ravens in an aviary where they could not have had a learning experience previously, right? That was interesting how quickly they figured that out. So you would have had to do the same thing with, and how many birds do you need to have hit the, I know you're not trying for statistical. Yeah, yeah, well I had, I think five or six. Yeah. Yes? What has been your favorite thing to study so far? Excuse me? What has been your favorite thing to study so far? The favorite thing to study. The one I'm at right now, which is, which is Treeswallis. Read the passage, any suggestion? Maybe, okay, how about at the very end, it's just a very short one. It's actually from Field Notes, which is a publication of the Field Naturalists of Ecological Planning Graduate Program at the University of Vermont in 2017. And they asked me to contribute once in a while. So I don't remember what they asked me to write about, but this is what I wrote, February, 2017. A dawn at Tickety Sings, a downy woodpecker drums in the red eastern horizon turned yellow. The Beatles put it this way, here comes the sun. It's been a long, cold, lonely winter. During the past months, there has been little light. Scarcity can be a good thing because it can draw attention to what we may take for granted. Scarcity forces us to fix it on what we miss. Right now, I really notice and appreciate the light. Most mornings throughout the winter, I have gotten up in the dark, anxiously awaiting the glow on the horizon. In the meantime, it had to do with the faint, flickering of rays from the wood stove onto the cabin floor. Light is a band of the electromagnetic spectrum and only part of it is visible to us. We can't see the ultraviolet nor the wood stove's heat, but they are still there in real time. The light from the stove comes from sunlight stored the year before. The light I used while reading last evening had been captured the previous day by the seven by seven centimeter photovoltaic wafer on a $20 inflatable lucy light, a marvel of technology that catches and releases light by the push of a little button. This lamp's light supply, captured the previous afternoon, first traveled eight minutes and 20 seconds through space from the sun, where it was produced by the collision of hydrogen adamants to create helium by nuclear fusion. The marvel of what a lucy light does is performed routinely by the trees all around me. They store energy of sunlight in molecular bonds in their wood and hold it until they die and decay or until I release it through combustion in our stove. But this light is captured by the chlorophyll molecule, the bio-light catcher, and the reaction that grabs carbon dioxide molecules out of the air while also releasing oxygen. Photosynthesis stores the energy of the sun's atomic fusion in the molecular fusion of the tree's wood. Wood is an adaptation of the most amazing plants on earth, a scaffolding that hoists solar catching leaves high into the air. Each tree races for sunlight against others doing the same thing. The piece of maple burning in the stove next to me came from a tree I culled over a year ago, enabling many others near it to grow. It was made from light and carbon dioxide captured decades earlier. Stored sunlight in the form of wood makes life possible here in our off-the-grid cabin in the winter. Meanwhile, tanker trucks drive daily up and down the road nearby delivering cargoes of hydrocarbons from stored sunlight energy that was captured by chlorophyll long before maple trees even existed. We now mine that light and energy from the ground in a suddenly and apparently irretrievably committed to putting back into the atmosphere what took hundreds of millions of years sequester underground. The oldest fossils on earth are those photosynthetic organisms. The magic process made possible by chlorophyll put oxygen into our atmosphere and enabled the evolution of aerobic life. Oxygen now comes to us mainly via plants. The forest plants are the major atmospheric keepers. Forests also create soil and by way of their root network, they capture and store water that would otherwise not stay on the land. They create atmosphere, climate and habitats, the home and food for millions of species. It is no wonder that we may reflexively balk at the idea of cutting trees up to burn them and perhaps we should. However, at the same time considering the rest of the forest is just considering the rest of the forest is just as crucial. Trees are the most visible but they're only one component of a forest. Obviously we need more trees and clear cutting and plantations of vast tracts of land are poor substitutes for the ecological complexity of forests but leaving them all untouched isn't the answer either. We keep and grow forests because they have a direct and clearly perceived value. I'm passionate about trees and not only because they are light incarnate, I also like paper, pears, apples and oranges, hazelnuts, timber frames and wooden boats. I care about forest too for their trees and for all that lives in on and around them. Growing a forest means harvesting trees by leaving trees including the biggest of the best in the rare as well as the common and allowing them to stay in a place for their entire life spans. The problem is not that we exploit trees, the problem is not used but misused by destroying forests and replacing them with trees only. But if misuse were reason to categorically abstain by credo, then one might as well prohibit having animals as companions or having children. There is necessarily a cost to everything. It is a balance that counts, not just a ballast. Maybe that's seeing the light.