ABSTRACT
Above my childhood home in the US Pacific Northwest is a peak that somehow got the oxymoronic name of Canyon Mountain. I’ve ascended this peak quite often, passing clearcuts covered with snow and forests cleared by fire. And when I’d get to the top I’d climb an old navigational beacon, look out at the forests of southern Oregon, and witness firsthand the magnitude of the human transformation of nature. As far as I could see, they had been altered by human hands, plundered of their original timber wealth and then-with varying degrees of success-replanted to produce more. Aside from the effects of fires that roam the hills of southern Oregon in the dry summers, these forests have undergone a magnitude of environmental change in the last half-century unmatched by non-anthropogenic forces over the last several millennia.
