American Scientist

IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World. Lauren E. Oakes. 272 pp. Basic Books, 2018. $27.

Ecologist Lauren Oakes’s memoir In Search of the Canary Tree describes the six years she spent studying a tree that lives on the coasts of the Pacific Northwest: Callitropsis nootkatensis, whose common names include yellow cypress and yellow cedar. Because the yellow cedar population has declined precipitously with the progression of climate change, Oakes likens the tree to a canary in a coal mine, a comparison alluded to in the book’s title. Her research investigated what kinds of trees are growing in to replace the dead and dying cypress. While she was immersed in this work, her father passed away unexpectedly, so she is grappling with loss on multiple fronts. Refusing to back away from topics shrouded in grief and fear, she describes herself as “looking for hope in a graveyard.”

Her initial study question was simple enough: “I wanted to know what species could still thrive amidst loss and change; what life could tolerate the conditions we’re creating, and how and why.” The fieldwork she describes is grueling. She and her two field assistants, nicknamed P-Fisch and Maddog, have to wait until the weather is right and then fly or boat in to sites in the Alexander Archipelago off the coast of Alaska, where the trees they are studying grow. They camp for weeks at a time, traveling by kayak to their field sites. Conditions are generally wet and chilly; there is no cell phone service, and satellite phone coverage is spotty.

Oakes’s fieldwork is punctuated by the self-doubt every new researcher feels as she encounters new problems. She describes candidly the struggles of a doctoral student in ecology: the hardship of the field, the painstaking and time-consuming work, the uncertainties, the unanticipated demands, the difficult decisions, the fatigue. And she also describes the exuberance she feels when these challenges are overcome.

But Oakes stands apart in that she wants to do more than simply study the consequences of environmental changes. “Most scientists today show graphs and numbers, complicated models, and statistics that basically say, ‘We are too late,’” she notes. She wanted in her dissertation research to blend ecology and social science, using the latter to search “for a way out of my own sense of fear and helplessness.” By interviewing the Alaskans who were losing this tree species—which they used, valued, and loved—she found out how they were responding to these changes.

But after completing and defending her dissertation, Oakes didn’t feel closure. “Instead,” she writes, “something felt unresolved, and it was far more personal than scientific.” She had failed to include the humanity of those she interviewed. “In distilling 1,500 pages of interview transcripts into a single, elegant table,” she says, “I’d left out the way a logger runs his calloused hand across fine-grained wood in admiration, or the silence that fills the room before an Alaskan describes an impressive yellow-cedar.” She decided to write this book to tell those untold stories, along with “a story of refusing my own fear of what a warming world will mean for me in my lifetime; a story of becoming an unexpected optimist against a backdrop of dying forests and in a profession where pessimism is often the common response.”

Oakes decided while she was formulating the project to use social science to examine the impact of tree loss on people. One of her advisors, field biologist Greg Streveler, asked her, “If you answer [your research question], what then? On to the next project? Scientists have proven, again and again, a remarkable capacity for simply monitoring a species into extinction.” Oakes responded that she saw the yellow cedar as “a window into our future.” She decided that, to look through that window, in addition to using ecological science she would interview all sorts of people with relationships to the declining tree, including loggers, ecologists, artists, activists, and members of the Tlingit tribe.

In the course of those interviews, Oakes began to see for herself what determines whether people change their behavior to address environmental loss. She cites work by Anja Kollmuss and Julian Agyeman on what leads people to take action in the face of environmental change. Kollmuss and Agyeman have shown that behavior change is influenced by whether people experience a problem directly, whether they feel concern about it and feel that their action would have an impact, and whether they feel some attachment to the place affected. “After all,” Oakes writes, “we protect what we love.”

The death of Oakes’s father is a turning point in the memoir. As she processes her grief, she begins to reflect on how her loss is connected to the theme of loss in her interviews. “Death can feel so cataclysmic in our lives,” she writes, “but only when we’re close to what we’re losing, when there’s nothing that can replace it, and especially when the death is sudden.” The people most affected by the death of the yellow cedar have been those with deep attachments to it—especially the members of the Tlingit tribe, whose identities are deeply intertwined with the trees.

After her discussions with two women in the tribe, Oakes began to realize that many well-meaning actions of environmentalists over the past 50 years have ended up further damaging the precious relationship between people and nature. For example, one of the women opposed the idea of wilderness areas. “Wilderness is a curse word to us,” she told Oakes, because that area designation prohibits any human interaction with nature, disrupting the tribe’s traditional relationships with the land.

Ecologists also experience such disruptions. “An ecologist who works in a place, in a community, not just in an office or in front of a computer,” Oakes says, “comes to know that place like a friend; watching it change, or its members die, is a challenging loss.”

Like Oakes, I am an ecologist who studied a dying tree and its cultural relationships for my dissertation. I concur with her conclusion that a sense of place is essential for effective ecological work and environmental stewardship. Streveler tells Oakes, “What the world needs is more people with roots and the discipline to take the time to understand a place.” Unfortunately, a sense of place is generally a disadvantage in the academic job market; most ecologists must move often in their early careers and do field research in places where they do not live.

Oakes used something called the Inclusion of Nature in Self (INS) scale in her study. The scale displays a series of circle pairs, with one circle labeled “Nature” and the other “Self”; the two overlap to some degree, ranging from just touching to complete overlap. Oakes showed the scale to interviewees and asked them to choose the pair of circles that best described their relationship with nature. Studies have revealed that people who show more concern for all living things tend to choose the most overlapped circles—they feel a sense of connection with nature.

Oakes concludes that science’s focus on global rather than local impact has made it difficult for people to see the overlap between nature and self. “Work is needed . . . more on the changes occurring in local environments,” she says. “What’s happening in my home habitat, whether it’s a city by the rising sea, a landlocked town in the sweltering heat, or a community bordering forests at risk of flames? What’s happening to my source of water? What about the food I’m eating and where it grew?” Oakes writes that she would choose the pair of circles that show self and nature completely merged: “Because that’s where nature is no longer an externality. Because that’s where the problem is no longer us versus the other.”

Oakes chooses to live joyfully with what she knows and to contribute as a scientist to a better understanding of what climate change means at the local scale. “If this tree species and all the people connected to it gave me one great gift,” she writes, “it is this: the realization that there’s simply no imaginable tomorrow . . . that could ever nullify the need for unwavering care and thoughtful action today.”