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Perfect for history buffs, nature lovers and anyone with a passion for wood, "American Canopy" provides snapshots of pivotal moments and eras in America's forests.
The book opens with the story of researcher Donald Currey, who, in 1964, inadvertently cut down the world's oldest tree-named "Prometheus"-from a stand of bristlecone pines in Nevada. Rutkow writes that the felling of this tree was a "tiny chapter in a much larger narrative of trees in America," but that the details in the story-e.g., that Prometheus was located in a national forest created by the government, which would have seemed "ridiculous" to America's founders-"represent important shifts in America's relationship with wood, trees and nature. It's this relationship that Rutkow explains.
The book includes stories on important figures like Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan and Daniel Boone-no, not this Daniel Boone-and places like New York's Central Park and Peshtigo, Wis., which, in 1871, endured the worst forest fire in America's history on the same day as the famous Chicago fire.
"America-if indeed it existed-would be a very different place without its millions and millions of acres of trees," Rutkow writes. Thankfully, we do wield this resource, and after putting the book down, readers should have a better understanding of the integral role trees have played in our national story.
