What can you learn about ecosystems from the top of a 100 meter redwood?
By Andrea Gawrylewski
ARTICLE EXTRAS
At thirty stories up, in the expansive, intermingling tops of West Coast redwood trees, Stephen Sillett, a renegade tree biologist and aerial fungus guru, was one of the first to describe an unanticipated ecosystem brimming with life in the mid 1990s. His story, and the story of the other "big tree" fanatics, is the stuff of Richard Preston's new book, The Wild Trees.
However, in an unfortunate waste of the very material he might claim to treasure, Preston doesn't manage to capture either the meaning or significance of such discoveries. The laborious first half of the book traces the childhoods of the main characters, none of which provides any insight into why Sillett and his friends would choose to pull themselves by nylon ropes 100 meters into the air, protected by barely ...
