Two kinds of long-term research are taking place at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a renowned research facility in the temperate rain forest of the Oregon Cascades. Here, scientists investigate the ecosystem's trees, wildlife, water, and nutrients with an eye toward understanding change over varying timescales up to two hundred years or more. And writers from both literary and scientific backgrounds spend time in the forest investigating the ecological and human complexities of this remarkable and deeply studied place.
This anthology-which includes work by some of the nation's most accomplished writers, including Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Freeman House, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, and Scott Russell Sanders-grows out of the work of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program and showcases the insights of the program's thoughtful and important encounters among writers, scientists, and place. These vivid essays, poems, and field notes convey a landscape of moss-draped trees, patchwork clear-cuts, stream-swept gravel bars, and hillsides scoured by fire, and also bring forward the ambiguities and paradoxes of conflicting human values and their implications for the ecosystem.
Forest Under Story offers an illuminating and multifaceted way of understanding the ecology and significance of old-growth forests, and points the way toward a new kind of collaboration between the sciences and the humanities to better know and learn from special places.
Table of Contents:
Maps
Charles Goodrich | Entries into the Forest
Part One | Research and Revelation
1. The Long Haul / Robert Michael Pyle
2. The Web / Alison Hawthorne Deming
3. Scope: Ten Small Essays / John R. Campbell
4. Ground Work: Natural History of the Andrews Forest Landscape
5. Threads / Vicki Graham
6. Interview with a Watershed / Robin Wall Kimmerer
7. One-Day Field Count / Michael G. Smith
8. Specimens Collected at the Clear-Cut / Alison Hawthorne Deming
9. Forest Duff: A Poetic Sampling / Kristin Berger
10. Pacific Dogwood / Jerry Martien
11. Riparian / Sandra Alcosser
12. Ground Word: Old Growth
13. Each Step an Entry / Linda Hogan
14. Cosymbionts, The Art of Science & from Drainage Basin, Lookout Creek / Vicki Graham
15. Log Decomposition / Joan Maloof
16. Decomposition and Memory / Aaron M. Ellison
17. Ground Word: Decomposition
18. In the Experimental Forest, & Notes for a Prose Poem: Scientific Questions One Could Ask
19. Among the Douglas-Firs / Joseph Bruchac
20. From “Where the Forests Breath” / Brian Turner
21. From “Varieties of Attentiveness” / Freeman House
22. Poetry-Science Gratitude Duet / Alison Hawthorne Deming and Frederick J. Swanson
Part Two | Change and Continuity
1. Genesis: Primeval Rivers and Forests / Pattiann Rogers
2. Forests and People: a meandering reflection on changing relationships between forests and human culture / Bill Yake
3. From “Out of Time” / Scott Slovic
4. “Ten-Foot Gnarly Stick” and “Pondering” / James Bertoli
5. In the Palace of Rot / Thomas Lowe Fleischner
6. Ground Work: Disturbance
7. New Channel / Jeff Fearnside
8. Slough, Decay, and the Odor of Soil / Bill Yake
9. From “The Mountain Lion” / Tim Fox
10. Ground Work: Northern Spotted Owl
11. The Other Side of the Clear-Cut / Laird Christensen
12. Clear-Cut / Joan Maloof
13. Ground Work: Forest Practices
14. Hope Tour: Three Stops / Lori Anderson Moseman
15. Purity and Change: Reflections in an Old-Growth Forest / John Elder
Part Three | Borrowing Others’ Eyes
1. Wild Ginger / Jane Hirshfield
2. This Day, Tomorrow, and the Next / Pattiann Rogers
3. Portrait: Parsing My Wife as Lookout Creek / Andrew C. Gottlieb
4. On Assignment in the H.J. Andrews, the Poet Thinks of Her Ovaries / Maya Jewell Zeller
5. Piles of Pale Green / Joseph Bruchac
6. Design / Jerry Martien
7. Listening to Water / Robin Wall Kimmerer
8. Ground Work: Water
9. For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witch’s Hair, Map Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen / Jane Hirshfield
10. The Owl, Spotted / Alison Hawthorne Deming
11. From “Field Notes” / Thomas Lowe Fleischner
12. Return of the dead log people / Jerry Martien
13. Denizens of Decay / Tom A. Titus
14. Ground Work: Soundscape
15. Mind in the Forest / Scott Russell Sanders
16. Coda / Vicki Graham
17. Afterword: Advice to a Future Reader / Kathleen Dean Moore
For Further Reading
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Acknowledgments
