“American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation”
Scribner; 416 pages; $29
In his first book, Eric Rutkow tells a tale of thick white pine forests in New England, orange groves in Florida and California, the longleaf pines of the Deep South and the tall Sitka spruce of the Pacific Northwest.
Readers also learn about giant Sequoias, endangered elms, the once-abundant American chestnut and the world’s oldest tree, a gnarled bristlecone pine called Prometheus that was accidentally felled in 1964 at the age of nearly 5,000.
But Rutkow’s “American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation” is no dry botany lecture. It is a lively story of driven personalities, resources that were once thought to be endless, brilliant ideas, tragic mistakes and the evolution of the United States.
Rutkow has cut through America’s use and love of trees to reveal the rings of our nation’s history and the people who have helped shape it.
Rutkow, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, is an attorney who is pursuing a doctorate in American history at Yale. In “American Canopy” he takes an unusual look at U.S. history by examining the role our bountiful forests played in our growth, wealth and success. Few nations, he says, have ever had the combination of resources and the ability to exploit them, as has the United States.
In fact, he writes, our existence as a nation was born in large part from the explorations of the 1500s, when European powers saw North America’s forests as limitless new sources of timber for navies and much-needed building materials and fuel for growing populations.
When Giovanni da Verrazzano wrote his account of his voyage to North America in 1524, notes Rutkow, he called the land Acadia — meaning idyllic place — and said its timber supplies were astounding. “The woodes (were) so greate and thicke that an armye (were it never so greate) mighte have hydd it selfe therein,” he wrote.
For nearly 500 years since da Verrazzano’s Acadian tale, Americans have used those great forests to build cities and ships, a transcontinental railroad and fuel a westward movement and post-World War II housing boom.
“Perhaps it is because trees have been so integral to American history that it becomes easy to overlook them,” Rutkow writes. “People notice the unusual, not the ubiquitous. Like so many Americans, historians are guilty of taking trees for granted. But trees are the loudest silent figures in America’s complicated history.”
Rutkow begins with an overview, then tells his story chronologically over 10 chapters and more than 350 pages, from discovery and revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries to the environmental era of the 20th and 21st.
He uses a formula, setting a theme for each chapter and then breaking down that theme into subsections about the people and issues involved. He shows us the evolution in thinking about trees, from exploitation to conservation to preservation.
While repetitive, it’s a format that works, carrying the reader from one topic to the next, with Rutkow deftly weaving tales of remarkable personalities into the trees that have provided lumber, pulp, fruit, beauty and recreational wilderness.