Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest

by Nathaniel Brodie (Editor), Charles Goodrich (Editor), Frederick J. Swanson (Editor)

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.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Ecology

264 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2018

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a handsome volume, and there are some individual pieces that really stand out and are worth the read. Fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer will be happy to find she has several essays included here. Still, as an anthology, it fails: there's too much redundancy in both tone and content, and a bit too much self-satisfaction with the project itself, both the research forest in question and its decision to bring in writers to write onsite. Questions about the connection between science and poetry get gently raised and just as gently let go, with little insight. Hopefully the next such collection will build upon this, and probe a little deeper than this first set of writers managed to do.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, thought-provoking selection of the writings from the first decade of the project that brings writers and scientists into close contact at the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.

[~Emmy~ REYN · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Amazing Insights right through to the acknowledgements.
I have ear marked so many pages and so many poems - even to research references at the end for further reading.

More people should get a hold of books like this one.

symbiotic relationships between man made and nature.