Virgin Beech Research Articles

Seeking the Language of Solid Ground: Reflections on Ecocriticism and Narrative

Seeking the Language of Solid Ground: Reflections on Ecocriticism and Narrative Scott Slovic Seldom does the faUen climber survive to teU his or her own tale. A few years ago, overburdened by a backpack fuU of books and distracted by my professional role as textual critic, I ignored my place in the physical world, stepped off a mountain wall, and nearly lost my life and my voice as a scholar. Ecocritics, in forgetting the worldly context oftheir reading , of their thinking, do so at the peril of their own language. Language without context, without grounding in the world, means next to nothing. At the end of July 1995, a group of eight traveled to the Shirakami Mountains in northwestern Honshu, a United NationsWorld Heritage Site, to do a story on wilderness protection in Japan for Audubon magazine.1 Three of us—nature writer Rick Bass, photographer Mike Yamashita, and I—had come from the United States for this excursion. Translator and nature writer Bruce AUen, editor Nobuhiro Sato, and environmental journalist Shigeyuki Okajimajoined us inTokyo for the flight north to Aomori. Our guides were Makoto Nebuka, a prolific outdoor writer and the principal defender of the Shirakami wilderness, and one of his mountain-man friends, known to us only as "Narita-san." We were an all-male group. Hisako Tanaka, an editor for the popular Japanese nature magazine called Shinra, had flown up separately from Tokyo just to interview Rick during the limo ride to the trailhead; she hiked with us for an hour on a paved path to see a few picturesque waterfaUs, but when the rest ofus left the trail and began dragging ourselves on hands and knees up a sheer, overgrown ridge, she smiled and waved goodbye. We hadn't expected such rugged conditions. For three days in the virgin beech forests of Shirakami, we worked our way up rivers in special hiking An earlier version of this essay was prepared as a position paperfor the roundtable titled "Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism" at the Western Literature Association Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, October 11-14, 1995. 34 Scott Slovic35 shoes caUed "chicatabi" with rubber cushions and metal spikes on the bottom , cUmbed smaU waterfaUs, and crawled up steep mountainsides with scraggly trees and bamboo-like sasa grass, interwoven with poison ivy, as handholds. These forests were traiUess, except for occasional deer paths. I found myselfpreoccupied with the other writers on the trip and the efforts of Mike, the photographer, to document the place and the people wtdle struggUng to keep up with Nebuka-san's steady pace. The expedition was like a hall of mirrors—everyone was watching, interviewing, keeping a notebook . I was fascinated with Rick's abiUty to take notes on a pocket-sized pad even while wobbhng across rivers or while pausing on a taxing slope. Occasionally, he would say something aloud like, "So many images oflight. SunUght, bright-colored frogs, light on water, Ught through leaves" or "The strands ofthe story break apart and reweave themselves—first bears, then the Shirakami Preserve, and now Nebuka-san himselfis emerging as the center." My own notebook reflects Rick's comments more than the place itself. At the end of our second day in the mountains, after ten hours of grueling travel, our guides became disoriented just as it began to get dark; we clambered and fought our way downhiU through a dense thicket of sasa grass, foUowing an apparent animal trail, until we found ourselves looking over the dribbling lip of a narrow waterfall—two hundred feet down. We paused there for another half-hour—Rick took notes and I took notes about his notetaking, and photographs—as our guides deliberated. The guides figured we could inch our way across the top of the waterfall and along the sheer slope to one side, then climb down to a possible campsite. Back and forth they crawled, scouting out the route. I continued watching Rick and bantering with the others. Then it was my turn to go. I was the second person to foUow the guides, trying to secure myselfby holding slender sasa stalks and using my spiked shoes to grip the grassy lip on the...

The heterogeneity of humus profiles and earthworm communities in a virgin beech forest

Thirty sites, encompassing a range of soil and vegetation conditions in the biological reserve of La Tillaie (Fontainebleau Forest, France) were investigated in April 1992. Beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) was the dominant tree species, with several developmental phases forming the forest patchwork. Sessile oak [Quercus petraea (Mattus.) Liebl.] was present but only as old relictual individuals. Gaps in the canopy cover were abundant, mostly caused by wind storms 2 years previously. The next most recent storm was 25 years before, resulting in distinct patches of full-grown trees. Humus profiles were classified and compared with the distribution of earthworm communities, canopy cover, and soil types. Geomorphology was responsible for the main part of the observed variation. Absence of lime in the substrate and direct contact with a sandstone stratum near the ground surface was associated with the absence of earthworms and the appearance of an OH horizon (moder humus). Elsewhere, earthworms were present and humus profiles did not display any OH horizon (mull or mull-like moder humus), but species composition was variable and strongly influenced by the thickness of the superficial sand deposit overlying limestone. On a thick (1 m or more) sandy substrate earthworm communities were dominated by epigeic species together with the anecic Lumbricus terrestris L. The species richness was higher on a shallower sandy substrate (50 cm) where lime was more accessible to tree roots and burrowing animals. The influence of the forest cycle of beech was visible in the latter case (covering most of the area), with an increase in the thickness of the OL and OF horizons and a decrease in endogeic earthworm populations during the phase of intense growth of beech. This fall in burrowing activity was apparent in gaps created by wind storms and fungal diseases within mature stands as early as 2 years after the fall of the trees.