From the Archipelago: Sending Out New Roots

February-March 2001

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Alexandra Morton

The fir tree outside my window bends low, the hanging moss twirling and spiralling crazily, snow driving deep into the cracks of the rough bark. The wind moans and the waves beat against my underwater microphone. Far in the watery distance I can hear the tiny voices of dolphins. Winter has come to the Broughton Archipelago. The schools of salmon have been replaced by dark masses of herring and an arctic stock of capelin which has increasingly been showing in these waters.

Resident orcas live on healthy wild salmon and salmon in turn need intact forest streams to survive. It’s all connected, and it will all come apart if we don’t take care. Photo by Alexandra Morton

The eagles are trying to catch these tiny oil-rich fish, but all too often the purple and silver shadows slip through their talons. The schools of herring are much smaller than I saw 16 years ago when I first moved here, but at this stage in history I am glad to see any fish at all.

The web of living species found on this coast today is relatively recent. Life at the western edge of North America is dynamic and had only just reached a balance of sorts, moments before we began disassembling it. 10,000 to 15,000 years ago the glaciers covering the coast were well into their current retreat. The vast amount of water still locked in the ice created dry land in areas now flooded, such as the shallow sea floor under Hecate Strait, and this aided the spread of species, including Homo sapiens. The land beneath the glaciers emerged as a scoured rock face from beneath the melt.

Miraculously, scraggly little shore pines germinated in this barren land and sent fibrous roots out to hold onto glacial deposits running off the land with each rainfall. Over thousands of years this pioneer species blanketed the raw land with a skim of rich organic soil built from the death and decomposition of each plant.

For a plant that none of us has ever seen get up and walk, trees have a phenomenal ability to travel. Like the pine, the Sitka spruce also found its way to this coast and made a niche for itself, drinking up the magnesium wherever waves and wind threw salt spray upon the earth. Then one day in the trackless past, a seed of the Douglas Fir alighted on this hard won earth, and sprouted. The little shore pines were no competition for this giant of a species, and retreated to the bogs as the firs shot up an astonishing 100 meters. From that lofty vantage their seeds cascaded down to make a forest of titans.

Gradually, the coast turned from gray-brown to deep verdant green. But with the fir tree's enormous success came a flaw that limited this species' ability to dominate the coastal forest: the next generation of firs were unable to germinate in the deep, cool shade of the parent trees. So below the fir canopy, the forest floor lay naked and inviting. And onto this deepening humus drifted a shade- loving species-the western red cedar.

As this mixed forest matured, the salmon populations spread. No salmon could survive in the gritty fast flowing glacial run off, but as new river beds were carved, trees grew up along the banks and brought stability. Rain no longer hit hard ground and rushed headlong to the sea, taking the rock with it. Now it was intercepted by the highest branches and guided on a circuitous route, taking days through the living fibre of the tree. Water flows became regular, and heavy rainstorms no longer clawed away the soil and rock in a torrential rush for the sea. The addition of trees made this coast into a perfect home for the salmon.

During glaciation, the salmon had taken refuge in a few rivers, including the Columbia, but this family of fish is coded to wander. A small percentage are always looking for new places to spawn and these wanderers carried their DNA into the virgin habitat. Salmon brought a new source of energy to the forest. They carried the photosynthesis of the Pacific ocean deep inland. This was a living alchemy- salmon transforming ocean nutrients into terrestrial ecosystems, carrying food up mountains in extraordinary abundance, feeding the entire forest web of life, and ensuring replication of their own species.

The trees sucked up this gift from the sea, recording the size of prehistoric salmon runs in the width of each of their annual growth rings. Bears, wolves, martin, racoons, eagles, ravens, crows, king fishers, water oozles and humans took this protein from the open sea, a place none could reach on their own, and gave birth to burgeoning populations and cultures.

Before the red cedar arrived, the brave humans who first eked out a living on this coast had hard, tough wood fibres to work with. But as the red cedar flourished, so did the culture of British Columbia's First Nations. Now they had a wood that was softer, easier to carve, but also resisted decay-so craftsmanship endured. From the cedar they made their homes, clothes, boats, cradles, drying racks, storage containers, cooking ware and magnificent art. Red cedar was lighter, split better, had higher insulation properties, a natural fungicide and a straight grain that filled a wide range of cultural needs for the first people.

By about 3500 years ago the coast reached an equilibrium of abundance. But in the last couple of hundred years a new "life" form arrived. Small and diverse at first, these rapacious invaders coalesced, eating each other, gradually morphing into a multi-headed, formless, non-carbon based organism. As its huge feet pressed deeper than the recent crush of the glaciers, life juices were squeezed dry and ceased to flow. Plunging its head deep into the nervous system of each river artery, it began pumping away the offerings of salmon and cedar, breaking the cycle of renewal.

Obtusely protected by law, this abomination of human ingenuity will eventually turn on its benefactors for any interruption in the cycle of energy exchange between the organisms of this planet weakens all.

Like a deflating balloon, the life-sustaining rhythm of life is now careening wildly into a cycle of uncertainty. The resource extraction economy is out-competing carbon-based life, but can not survive without it.

The only real economy of earth is life, and life comes from the entwining of diversity. Nothing can survive alone, not even those astride a mountain of cold hard wealth.

Many people give their lives to try and stop the mounting imbalances of life swaying dizzily around us. Here in the Archipelago, it is exhausting work. Just as Christmas was luring us happily away from daily life, Interfor asked for extensions to apply toxic chemicals on our land base. The salmon farmers are ignoring a decade of warnings and pouring a million more Atlantic salmon into farm after farm, fully aware they won't be able to contain them. The logs are literally flying off the hillsides at unprecedented rates, while yellow cedar is piled high and burnt as waste. Oil may soon be sucked from beneath us and our fresh water pumped south.

It is time to stop thinking that someone else, for better or worse, is looking after things. The guidelines and policies of this Province exist only on paper-the hope exists only in citizens like you and me. We must unplug this headlong pursuit of a wasteland before the water and air are so poisoned that we can no longer survive.

Firmly astride a peninsula near here, a thousand year-old great red cedar has spread it roots far and wide. Shallow by design, these roots gain their strength by lacing intimately with their neighbours. Beneath the soil, tender tips touch and embrace, hair-like at first, then grow into arms, legs, mighty, inseparable gnarls of co-existence. We still have among us these sentinels of previous millenniums. My hope is that today, another thousand year- old red cedar is feeling the first stirrings of life in its tiny protective seed case. Red cedar and humanity grew up together on this coast and if we plan to stay, it is time to send out roots of life-sustaining contact. Without them we will atrophy and vanish.

Alexandra Morton is a marine mammal researcher and writer in BC’s Broughton Archipelago. ©