The Ghost Forest with Greg King
The forest is disappearing—it’s becoming a ghost—and along with its entire ecosystems. This is not something distant from us; it is us—the power of a tree is the air we breathe. Two and a half billion years ago enough oxygen had built up on earth to support multicellular life, and the first trees evolved about 400,000,000 years ago. The first primates appeared fifty-five million years ago, living in trees in the rain forests. In the past 10,000 years, the earth lost one-third of its forest—almost all of it in the last few hundred years. And the recent loss is caused, not by ice and fire and ice or earthquakes and volcanoes, but by the deliberate acts of human beings. We’re talking in his Arcata home with an extraordinary writer/activist named Greg King, author most recently of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods.