Who doesn’t love Big Old Trees!? “You would have to be some kind of monster!” That pretty much sums up the episode. Author Amanda Lewis shares her journey around her book Tracking Giants-Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest. Amanda brought a breath of fresh air into the way I think about big trees. Her fun nature and transparent writing style make for a great dialogue and an even better read!

Resources

Tracking Giants by Amanda Lewis

Sponsors

West Fraser

GreenLink Forestry Inc.

Quotes

48.03 - 48.07: “That’s the thing about trees - once you stop looking for them, they start to reveal themselves.”

Takeaways

When the forest calls (05.09)

Amanda went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver but had to move to Toronto to pursue a career in publishing. She returned 8.5 years later to the forests of her childhood, burnt out from a difficult career and shaken from the big life change.

We are the champions (08.05)

Amanda‘s friend introduced her to a book called Big Lonely Doug, which spoke about a Douglas fir tree included on the BC Big Tree Registry. She decided to start a blog called Tracking Giants which would record her travels to all the champion trees.

The most difficult and the most rewarding (11.10)

The BC Big Tree Registry, created by Randy Stoltmann, is an online database of native trees where they are assigned tree scores based on their dimensions. Big tree registries originated in Maryland to catalogue what was left of the big trees after logging.

Obelisk in the desert (19.53)

Amanda points out that trees change across a landscape and a digitized registry allows for updates to reflect the changing state of trees. She muses that the reason big trees draw people in is that “they represent that deeper time and that slower way of being”.

Missing the forest for the trees (28.30)

Amanda likes to look at metrics of appreciating trees that are beyond numbers. Since Indigenous peoples knew of the trees since time immemorial, younger tree trackers are choosing not to name them.

Approaches to conservation (36.02)

Amanda highlights that Indigenous peoples refer to trees as family members. She laments that polarized perspectives on working in the forest are untrue and that they show that you can both love and harvest trees.

“To find the tree, you must become the tree” (45.38)

Amanda shares about the opportunity for anyone to be a ‘community scientist’ in what is a very democratic registry by nominating any big tree they come across.

What a tree can be (57.56)

With time, trees can become big and rare and it is a “tragedy of forestry on the coast” that many trees have been logged, leaving no chance of an old-growth forest.

An epidemic of loneliness and technology (1.07.00)

Amanda invites listeners to think about the decisions that can be made in the present to be able to look back without regret in the future.

Children of the same soil (1.14.20)

Amanda feels centered thinking of herself as part of the same world as trees with rich stories, and believes there is hope to rewrite the narratives of our relationships with them.