Overview

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.

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9780295743660

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Reviews

Forest Under Story demonstrates that a holistic survey of any forest includes not just data, charts and EIS, but also stories and reflections from the human heart. * Cascadia Weekly (2016 Gift Guide for Greenies) * The publication of Forest Under Story represents a turning point in cross-disciplinary collaboration between scientists and writers. . . . Forest Under Story is very successful in its ability to inspire in the reader an ecological awareness of the temperate forests in Oregon and elsewhere. -- Erik F. Ringle * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment * In the Andrews Experimental Forest, `experimental' is the domain of the scientist and writer alike. It is also the domain of the forest itself. . . . Forest Under Story seems keenly aware that the most important feature of language involves listening. When writers listen to the forest, when they press their ears against the bark of a hemlock or yew, the forest always speaks, however softly. -- Lawrence Lenhart * High Country News *

Author Information

Nathaniel Brodie is a freelance writer; Charles Goodrich is a poet and director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University; and Frederick J. Swanson is research geologist emeritus, Pacific Northwest Research Station, U.S. Forest Service.

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