Eric Rutkow’s American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation is a history of America’s woodlands. It is therefore a history of loss: the great forests that once stretched from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi were certainly touched in part by native Americans, who burned for deer parks and plots for seasonal plantings, but it was annihilated in ruthless, regimental progression by the arriving Europeans. The primitive peoples of Europe who came to set their rather ironically named plantations here feared dense woodlands, the abode, it seems, of Satan. And yet they coveted them, too. The Pilgrims get all the attention, but a colonial project is always also about resource-extraction: an early flurry of interest in sassafras because it was believed to cure syphilis, but mainly tall white pines for ship masts ~ Britain was long tapped-out of mast wood and depended on the Baltics for lesser wood than New World’s. No ruling the seas without wood.
It was a wood-based culture for a long time. Even into Levittown, wood was in most everything, although people often didn’t realize it. The logging industries sliced their way through the Northeast, then the Great Lakes, then the South, and finally the Pacific Northwest. Introduced disease took care of the elms and the chestnuts.
This book is organized into many sections, entirely too many to turn into anecdote here. Here’s one,though: wood pulp paper. Newspapers actually became cheaper in the 2nd half of the 19th century because of the transition from rag paper to wood paper, marking the rise of yellow journalism (ancestry of the tabloids and television’s excremental effluvia, currently piling the Trump high and deep). It’s a telling example of how technology transforms society.
Rutkow has some happier tales, victories against complete devastation — of, for instance, the redwoods, and the saving of the Bristlecone Pines — so I guess we should be satisfied with those peanuts. (Peanuts, by the way, were about the only thing that would grow once the yellow pine forests were scalped.) Not to suggest the remaining redwoods are peanuts, but we only have scraps now, and I for one am not satisfied with just scraps.
