Review: The Golden Spruce

The Golden Spruce, by John Valliant.

While at some stage this book chooses to focus on one tree – and the famous end it came to – for me this book was about many trees. Trees as far as the eye can see. Woods. Forest. Yes, those dark scary things that always feature in fairy tales. (Why is it that we fear what we don’t understand?)

The tale starts early in European settlement and trading in the British Columbia region. Valliant focuses us in on the Queen Charlotte Islands (I believe it was named on the same journey as New Zealand’s own Queen Charlotte Sounds, in honour of the vessel that carried the explorers). These islands are home to the Haida people – resourceful and cunning in the wild ways of this land and seascape.

The emphasis of the early part of the book is on the misfortune the sea otter pelt industry had on nature’s balance, as well as on the Haida culture. The trade was so disruptive that it created industry, followed by wars, followed by almost-extinction and deep poverty.

Valliant makes sure we know just how serious the consequences were before he details the next industry that made this region its home – logging.

New technologies, clear-cuts, exciting progress, and horrible deaths, are all actors in this story about industry. But even at the high points there is a sense of doom. Knowing that today almost all the old wood is gone from this region, and knowing that the size of what has been cleared is enough to show huge scars from those looking down from spaceships, is a lot to swallow. And surely we would have learnt, especially after the sea otter debarkel?

Stronger than any message, however, is the factual account of the end of the Golden Spruce – a mutant strain of spruce. So gorgeous and glamorous it was, that the major logging companies chose to save it. When the book’s likeable anti-hero chops it down he is showing that praise for one mutant tree is senseless when compared with the ruin, and often waste, laid on every side of this one tree. Why glorify one after all you have done, he asks?

That is one hell of a stand to take for a converted-logger.

If you need converting, read this book.