A Great Book and Me w/ a Sitka Spruce

Sometimes we have to kill the golden goose to let everybody know the geese are in trouble. This is the dilemna that writer John Vaillant tackles in The Golden Spruce. The book is about Grant Hadwin, a privelidged son of the British Columbia timber industry. Without graduating high school Hadwin chucks his engineer father's aspirations for him and pursues his interest in becoming a tree faller. He lives and works among the old growth for years, felling hundreds of trees. He eventually gets liscenced as a forestry technician and builds a name for himself as an independent contractor, cruising virgin timber lands, estimating the timber for harvest and recommending routes for building the roads in to extract it after its been cut.
Then Hadwin has an epiphany, religious experience, spiritual event. He becomes combative and unemployable, his wife divorces him and he travels to Russia to hand out clean needles and condoms. Ultimately he finds his calling in drawing the world's attention to the destructive practices of the large scale, mechanized logging industry. To do this he cuts down a 160 ft tall Sitka spruce that has a mutation which makes it have gold needles. The tree is reveered by the native Haida people and has become a tourist stop in the remote coastal outpost of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Vaillant writes the story of Hadwin, the tree, the Haida culture, and the logging industry with clean prose and occassional, understated wit. His style and his book have been compared to Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild and this is a favorable comparison. One of the most seering insights in the book is made over and over again by old growth loggers who know they are the last generation. Several times a logger will remark how he loves working in the old growth forests and how strange it is that he earns his living by killing what he loves. Eight hundred years to grow, tweny-five minutes to bring down.
I have personally seen alot of the clear cuts in the Northwest. The Olympic Peninsula is scarred with them. Climb up Storm King Mountain and you are met with stunning views of Lake Crescent, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and a clear cut. There are also the monospecies silvaculture forests that were first harvested in the 1930's, cut again in the 1980's, and thinned in the 1990's. The original nutrients of the soil was trucked out in the logs of the first two cuttings so this third growth has to be heavily fertilized which affects area streams and fish populations. I've worked on the lumberyard at Lowes, stacking 2x4's and the more expensive 2x10's and 12's into the beds of trucks. We are a world hungry for wood. But like oil we have had it on the cheap for a long time. Grant Hadwin wanted the world to know that forests are a finite resource.