The Golden Spruce

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

by John Vaillant

“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilization. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929” 

"When the golden spruce fell, it knocked down every tree in its path. From a distance it looked like the wreckage left by a lightning strike, or a freak wind, which in a way, it was. After all, what were the chances? The golden spruce was one in a billion, and so was Grant Hadwin. “Whoever did this,” said a MacMillan Bloedel spokesperson shortly after the tree was found, “had to be hell bent.” He was referring not just to the logistical details, but to the raw effort required to access the tree, and then to cut it down in the middle of the night. It is hard to imagine anyone else with the same combination of motive, obsession, endurance, and skill required to do such a thing." 

“There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife,” and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset’s first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. “If you live on the edge of the circle,” he explained in a documentary film, “that is the present moment. What’s inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What’s outside has yet to be experienced. The knife’s edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick,” says Davidson, “is to live on the edge.” 

“It is an eccentric and uniquely human approach to resources: like plowing under your farmland to make way for more lawns, or compromising your air quality in exchange for an enormous car.” 

“By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsam of the cut block known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into a siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.” 

"It seems that in order to succeed - or even function - in this world, a certain tolerance for moral and cognitive dissonance is necessary."