Chapter 1: Can''t Get Away from Your Roots It was late afternoon and the August sun was slanting crimson through the trunks of the Douglas firs. The forest felt eerily still. The trees seemed to flag. I heard a tree fall in the distance, and I shivered and looked over my shoulder. Just tired, I thought. Every inch of my body was aching from two solid weeks measuring every tree, log, and soil layer in this forest. I loved the work, but the heat and exertion were taking a toll. We were working in the Cariboo Mountains, a short drive from Likely, British Columbia, and an eleven-hour commute from our hometown of Nelson, establishing the boundaries for one of the Mother Tree Project plots.

If all went according to plan, this plot would be logged three months later, in November 2018, and replanted with our special mix of seedlings the following spring. I banged a foot-long piece of rebar into the ground with my axe, marking the center of the plot, and ran the end of the tape due north fifteen meters through the tangle of creamy honeysuckles and ivory snowberries. The warm, woody air drew streams of sweat through my hair that soaked my ball cap. A red-breasted nuthatch sang a high-pitched neen neen neen, as though playing a tin trumpet in rhythm with our work. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the embrace of the mountains. I could hear the ringing thump of Jean''s axe as she established the other end smackdab south, completing the thirty-meter north-south transect. For the past forty years, Jean and I had worked side by side in the bush, studying how forests responded to the many ways prospecting foresters had cut them down and tried to grow them back. In our early twenties, we''d scrambled up trees to escape grizzlies in the Lillooet Mountains and scaled the craggiest peaks carrying twenty-kilogram packs on our backs.

We were bound by our shared love for the woods, by our triumphs and our stumbles. When my daughters were born, I''d plopped them down in the middle of lush thimbleberry bushes to play while we worked. "Can I eat this, Jean?" Hannah would ask, her chubby cheeks and dark hair already smeared with the scrumptious maroon berries. Now both daughters had grown lean and perceptive, their childhoods mostly a memory, while Jean and I were older and more experienced, and more resolved than ever to finding a solution to the ecological crisis that threatened us all. Peering through the stand of Douglas firs, I could make out Hannah and Nava, eighteen and sixteen years old, briskly laying down a line perpendicular to ours. The heat didn''t seem to bother the girls much. They were scaling over rotting logs, ducking under scarlet-stemmed Douglas maples, and threading the tape directly through plumb fir and feathery cedar saplings to ensure it was dead straight. Beautiful, I thought.

I was proud of my daughters. At one end of the east-west tape, I spied Nava poking her graduated trowel into the ground every two meters to measure the depth and substance of the forest floor. Her nut-brown hair tied back with a shoelace and a sprig of willow, she pushed at the duff, gently separating the fibers and roots with the metal blade. My younger daughter was pensive and curious. I could hear her whispering thanks to Mother Earth for showing her these hidden secrets. Hannah had started along the north-south line, calling out forest floor depths as Jean jotted down the numbers. At five foot two, Hannah was a good five inches shorter than Nava and just as fast, her legs lithe from leaping over creeks, arms muscled from packing field gear. Both girls knew just where the greasy black humus, the deepest layer of the forest floor, stopped and the gritty mineral soil started, signifying the depth to which organic carbon could easily be counted.

The two girls raced each other down the lines, their bodies agile, carrying the genes of French scieurs de bois from my side of the family dating back generations. The forests of Europe had provided for our family and prepared them for the woods of North America when our ancestors emigrated five centuries back. The carbon-rich trees and waters of the world''s forests were knitted in the sisters'' blood and bones. Even though they had planned to veer in different directions, one toward human health and the other to the orcas in the Salish Sea, the forest always called my daughters back. "Can''t get away from your roots," my mum, Granny Junebug, would say, as they sat on her back porch sipping lemonade in the forest-clad valley of the Kootenays where our family had settled. Mum grew up on the edge of the woods in the dirty thirties, didn''t suffer fools gladly, and knew how to get out of a pickle fast. "Git yer stuff and let''s get the hell outta here!" she would say when confronted with a wildfire or an irate bear. She''d instilled in her granddaughters an instinct for survival and a passion for tending the soil and growing a garden, as well as the knowledge that they''d better get a darned good education if they valued their independence.

After ten minutes, the four of us had established the two line transects, each pinned at the middle to the center point, forming a cross in the forest. The ends demarcated the quarter chimes of the circular plot, which looked half the size of a hockey rink. Next, we would methodically record every detail of the plot: the large trees, the small trees, the plant community, the woody debris on the ground, the forest floor, and the layers of mineral soil beneath. I glanced over at the forest within the plot, seeing trees young and old, shrubs laden with berries purple and red, paintbrushes and arnicas glowing scarlet and yellow. Gaps had opened where some trees had fallen, allowing new light to reach the leaves of willows and alders. Old trees at the edges of the gaps had produced a multitude of cones, spawning new seedlings that were enlivened by the shafts of sunlight. Large decaying logs on the forest floor stored carbon and water while providing homes for shrews and salamanders as well as new conifer seedlings. In the duff, chocolate brown humus was cycling carbon and nutrients to deeper, more protected horizons beneath.

The bed of an ephemeral stream meandered through the center. A snag shedding graying bark stood leaning, a pileated woodpecker foraging its cambium for insects and sapwells. I envisioned layer upon layer of stomata, the very lungs of the trees, in this highly structured woodland, with foliage folded under and over itself in brilliant strata from the forest floor to the treetops. Life felt capable here. Solutions were wired into this place. Our experimental plot, which was split into four segments, aimed to capture the teachings of a medicine wheel, a symbol that has been used for generations by Indigenous cultures around the world. Among its many interpretations, the medicine wheel embodies a worldview of interconnection and the cyclical nature of life: birth, youth, elder, death. Air, water, earth, and fire.

Winter, spring, summer, fall. Anyone with a metal detector would be able to find the center pin of this plot, the heart of the medicine wheel, even if the forest burned and found new life again. Jean and I got busy recording details about the trees while Hannah and Nava turned to measuring downed wood along the transects. Sweat trickled down my spine as I squinted through my laser at the leader of the tallest Douglas fir and shouted its height: "Forty-two point six meters!" This tree was a good two meters taller than the green shoots of its neighbors, and its girth thicker. Jean measured its diameter at 1.3 meters above the ground. The chunky, corky bark was scarred on the north side from a ground fire a century ago, and on the east side by another fire decades earlier. I imagined its massive roots tapping into underground rivulets of water, enabling it to resist the flames.

I heard Jean cranking the increment borer, then calling the tree''s age. "Two hundred and fifty-three!" "Is it a mother tree, Mum?" Hannah glanced up from her meter-long calipers clutching a rotten log. "More like a grandmother." This tree was not only a giant, she was the oldest in the patch. I shifted my laser to measure the height of another elder tree as a black-and-yellow swallowtail butterfly fluttered down through the branches, then wafted up again in the soft, warm air. A mirage of carbon dioxide and water molecules from photosynthesis and transpiration was hovering in the downdrafts and updrafts. I blinked, paused to take a drink of water, looked again. The molecules were splitting into their bare elements: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Carbon, with six each of protons, neutrons, and electrons, was forming covalent bonds and joining into long-chain organic polymers. Then it was flipping between its two stable states, 12C and 13C, and its natural radioactive species, 14C. Forming graphite and diamonds, right before my eyes. Heat will do that to a person, I thought. Carbon is the element of beauty, essential to life on Earth. Carbon dioxide is fixed by plants into sugars by photosynthesis, and this food is used for growth and development. The plants in turn serve as food for the herbivores, who are eaten by carnivores, and this places plants at the base of the food chain. Photosynthesis is the finely evolved process that makes all life on Earth possible, by converting light from the sun into chemical energy, which then becomes biomass and habitat, abundance and biodiversity.

All that we were measuring today in this plot. Carbon is thus an essential element of life in forests. It is sequestered and stored in the trees and plants, and transformed, transmuted, and stored in the soils and animals. Indeed, about half of the biomass of a tree is.