The Golden Spruce Quotes

“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“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.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“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.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas,”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“Their houses are the size of small airplane hangars; their carved”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“Traveling in these giant cedar canoes, the Haida would regularly paddle their home into, and out of, existence. With each collective paddle stroke they would have seen their islands sinking steadily into the sea while distant snow-covered peaks scrolled up before them like a new planet. Few people alive today have any notion of how it might feel to pull worlds up from beyond the horizon by faith and muscle alone.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“The island was nothing but saltwater, they say. Raven flew around. He looked for a place to land in the water. By and by, he flew to a reef…to sit on it. But the great mass of supernatural beings had their necks resting on one another, like sea cucumbers. The weak supernatural beings floated out from it sleeping, every which way, this way and that way. It was both light and dark, they say. —from “Raven Who Kept Walking,” a Haida creation story”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“A coastal forest can be an awesome place to behold: huge, holy, and eternal feeling [...], once inside, there is no future and no past, only the sodden, twilit now.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“In an editorial, the managing editor of Prince Rupert’s Daily News compared Hadwin’s logic to that of the pro-life activist who would kill a doctor for performing abortions.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“Each version of a story is highly dependent on a given teller's memory, integrity, agenda, and intended audience, but it also depends on the current needs of the teller, the listeners, and the times.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“In an article entitled "Upset about the Golden Spruce? Re-examine your perspective, says Hadwin," he told a reporter for the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer that "we tend to focus on the individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered."

“Everybody’s supposed to focus on that and forget all the damage behind it. When someone attacks one of these freaks you’d think it was a holocaust, but the real holocaust is somewhere else.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“It is due in large part to these immense trees that the Northwest forests support more living tissue, by weight, than any other ecosystem, including the equatorial jungle.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“The Lebanese flag has a cedar tree on it because much of what is now desert was thickly forested before the harbingers of civilization--i.e., woodcutters, farmers, and goats--saw to it that large stands of cedar will never grace the Holy Land again. The stark and sere limestone hills that we think of as typical Greek and Italian landscape were once all but invisible beneath a layer of long-gone topsoil held in place by forests of cedar and oak.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“June is a bad month for bugs in Alaska; generally it takes a good five or ten knots of breeze to keep them at bay, but even then they will tend to hover in your lee, waiting for the wind to die. Mosquitoes swarm so thickly up there that they can, like clouds, briefly form recognizable shapes. This is probably the only circumstance in nature where it is possible to look downwind and see a shadow of oneself infused with one's own blood.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed