Focus on Arts and Ecology

Visiting the largest known white pine. 

By Bill McKibben , November 23, 2023

As far as the climate (and, truthfully, much else) is concerned, 2023 has felt like one nasty jack-in-the-box moment after another; there have been a record number of billion-dollar natural disasters in the United States and much worse in the rest of the world. That may explain why I was so pleased a few months ago to read a short article in a Syracuse newspaper about something both unexpected and quite unreservedly lovely: this past July, in the remote Moose River Plains Wild Forest, in the Adirondacks, a young botanist named Erik Danielson found the largest Eastern white pine known to exist. Indeed, it is the largest tree of any kind known in that great wilderness, and ever since I read about it I’d been hoping he might be persuaded to take me for a look. Earlier this month, with a dusting of snow on the ground, he led a small group of enthusiasts on a two-hour bushwhack into the forest.

Danielson, aged thirty-three, is a self-taught botanist who works for the Western New York Land Conservancy, helping to, among other things, identify rare and endangered plant communities. “I’m particularly interested in mosses and liverworts,” he said, and, indeed, we’d barely left the dirt road between Indian Lake and Inlet, New York, before he was bent over a carpet of green. But, in his spare time, Danielson is a big-tree hunter, at work for the Gathering Growth Foundation, on a book about the big trees of New York. He’s part of a small band that has systematically sought out the patches of old-growth forest that were left across the East after the rapacious logging of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. I’ve known some of these sleuths for years—I spent a pleasant day a quarter century ago with one of Danielson’s mentors, another autodidact tree-lover named Bob Leverett, measuring white pines in a state park in the Berkshires. I’ve visited forest patches in the Carolinas, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but much of the remaining Eastern old growth is confined to the Adirondacks, the vast and sparsely populated quarter of New York that rises north of Saratoga, south of Quebec, and between the Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rivers, Lake Champlain, and Lake Ontario. Though the region is high and cold, with a short growing season, it’s also protected and empty, as long as you stay away from the scenic High Peaks around Lake Placid. I’ve often wandered there for days on end seeing no one.

Danielson was alerted to this particular corner of the Adirondacks by a hunter, Matt Kane, who posted a picture of a giant white pine on a Facebook group this year. Kane had been researching the logging history of the area, which came into state hands in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when it was still largely virgin forest. In 1950, a huge storm—still known as “the big blowdown”—toppled most of the trees there, and though the area was officially protected wilderness, the state allowed a controversial “salvage logging” of downed trees. For the first half of the hike, we followed, in places, an overgrown former logging road. Danielson has tools that his predecessors lacked, most notably lidar scans—basically, a Light Detection and Ranging aircraft pulses a laser down at the earth, measuring distances so accurately that it can build a 3-D picture of any area. “I was processing the canopy height model, and you could see that there had to be trees that were a hundred and forty to a hundred and sixty feet tall,” Danielson said. “In the Adirondacks, that’s very tall. And what made it really exciting was that it was a large area—it looked like five hundred or five hundred and fifty acres. Usually what you find are very small clusters”— such as the eight-acre Elder’s Grove, near Paul Smith’s College, where the state’s onetime tallest pine, Tree 103, fell in 2021.

Sometimes, as with the Elder’s Grove pine, these giant trees are situated conveniently near a road. Not in this case. We clambered along the remains of the logging road until we came to a sizable brook; you could plot a theoretical course across the rocks, but, as is often the case, theory succumbed to practice, and I slipped and got my boots wet (thank science for Gore-Tex). Across the brook, the forest began to deepen, and so did Danielson’s story (though it gave way at regular intervals to short seminars on bronze grape fern, which comes in two forms, and Northeastern sedge, “which looks a lot like yellow sedge except for some details”). He was describing his July expedition to us. On the first day, he found a very big white pine, but barely had time to catalogue it. “It felt so remote,” he said. “Usually, there are some signs of hunters, but here I didn’t even see a beer can.” He hit on a small brook, and followed it up through a quiet forest, scrambling across giant deadfalls—“nurse logs” sprouting hundreds of seedlings. “I was in a kind of ecstatic state, especially after I saw that waterfall over there,” he said. “Then I glimpsed an extra-large trunk through the trees and, as I got closer, it wasn’t getting any smaller.” Foresters, charmingly, measure the size of trees by D.B.H., or diameter at breast height, which is calculated from the circumference. He added, “When I wrapped my tape around it, it was 16.39 feet”—one of the largest ever measured for a white pine. (This tree’s D.B.H. is more than five feet.) But base circumference does not make a big tree—indeed, most really wide white pines are comparatively squat. “Looking up at this one, though, I could tell it was tall,” Danielson said. He crossed a gully to a small glade where he could get a clear view of the crown and, using a hypsometer, measured the tree’s height at a hundred and fifty-one feet and six inches.

That’s not the tallest pine we know about—last year, Danielson, not surprisingly, had measured the post-Tree 103 New York State height champion, on the other side of the Adirondacks, near Lake George, at a hundred and seventy-four feet. But many tall trees, including that one, are relatively skinny. This Moose River Plains pine, which he named Bigfoot, is a solid pole heading up into the sky. He could tell that, even at eighty feet, it was still forty inches in diameter, and he was able to conservatively estimate its volume (of the trunk and the main branches) at fourteen hundred and fifty cubic feet—reportedly, a record for the species. Indeed, Danielson says there are fewer than a dozen known, living, and verifiable specimens of white pine larger than a thousand cubic feet.

There’s enormous practical value in a big tree—new research makes it clear that they sequester vast amounts of carbon, and that letting big old trees grow is an even more effective way to draw down greenhouse gases than planting new ones. But the impractical value is likely larger; to be in the presence of a giant is for some reason calming—the air felt tranquil here, the sunlight scattered, the wind stilled. And it was somehow hopeful to think of what the tree had lived through in what Danielson says must be at least three centuries of life (it hasn’t been cored yet, and probably won’t be) and of what it might yet witness. Among many other things, that tally includes the Civil War, a trauma that exceeds even our current discontents. As it happens, one of the people on the hike was an old friend, Aaron Mair, who was the first African American president of the Sierra Club and now works with the Adirondack Council, the region’s premier conservation group. This past summer, Mair oversaw the first rendition of the Timbuctoo Institute—which draws its name from the settlement established for free Black men and their families outside Lake Placid, near John Brown’s homestead—bringing students of color from New York City to the Adirondacks to work with botanists, wildlife experts, and other conservation professionals. “It was a huge success,” Mair said. “I’ve got hundreds of kids who want to come next year, and they are going to be rangers, biologists, you name it.” Often, even amid the traumas of the moment, the seeds of what comes next are growing; sometimes they grow into something very mighty indeed.

(Sources: The New Yorker)

Here’s a look at why greens are so vulnerable to contamination, how to avoid getting sick, and whether you can really trust labels that say “triple-washed.” 

BYSARAH GIBBENS, OCTOBER 19, 2023

After a long night of whatever long nights mean to you, there’s nothing quite as redeeming as a bowl of leafy greens. 

Kale, spinach, mesclun, romaine, buttery-soft baby bibb—leafy greens tossed with veggies and proteins are the gastronomical equivalent of sleeping on fresh sheets. 

When I eat a big bowl of greens, I just feel healthy—knowing that their vitamins, fiber, and other nutrients have been dispatched to perform cellular maintenance. But is there actually something more sinister nestled among all that microscopic goodness?

Leafy greens, infamously, are regularly recalled for contamination. They're the vegetables most likely to get you sick according to a 20-year study of California’s contaminated produce. One of the most famous outbreaks occurred in 2006 when spinach contaminated with the bacteria E. Coli hospitalized 200 people and caused 18 deaths. Just this past June, a listeria outbreak in leafy greens hospitalized 18 people. 

These cases make me pause when I reach for my weekly bag of kale, and I’m not alone. One Consumer Reports survey of a thousand shoppers found half had the same concerns. 

How do we weigh these risks—and is the risk of getting sick even that high at all? Here’s a breakdown of which lettuces are healthiest, exactly why they can be so vulnerable to contamination, and why pre-washed bags of greens may not be as safe as you think. 

And if you have more questions about navigating the science of your everyday life, tag me on X (formerly known as Twitter), or send me an email here. 

Which greens are the healthiest?  

Our bodies need different nutrients and vitamins to properly function. By eating just a cup of kale, an average adult woman like me could get half her recommended intake of vitamin A, nearly a third of her daily recommended intake of vitamin C, and nearly all her recommended vitamin K (a vitamin that helps build healthy bone tissue).

And while I’d still need a well-rounded diet to get my needed daily dose of dietary fibers, protein and minerals like potassium and magnesium, that cup of kale could help me get part of the way there.

(Learn more about how magnesium affects your sleep and anxiety.)

“[Leafy greens] quite literally are these powerhouses of nutrients,” says Debbie Fetter, a nutritionist at the University of California, Davis.

What exactly are leafy greens, you asked? This large category of vegetables describes the literal vegetable leaves we eat: lettuce, which encompasses romaine and iceberg, as well as other greens like kale, arugula, and spinach. All these greens are healthy, but they vary in the amount of vitamins and minerals they imbue. A single cup of romaine lettuce would trump that cup of kale when it comes to vitamin A, but it’s much lower in vitamins C and K.

Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Harvard Medical School created this helpful chart showing which greens provide which benefits.  

Personally, I love finely chopped and oil-massaged curly kale, which means I’m in luck—a good rule of thumb for choosing the most nutritious greens is to select the darkest green colors, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. 

But Fetter says that guiding principle isn’t a perfect science and consuming a variety of greens means you’ll also be consuming a variety of different benefits. 

Ultimately, the best greens for you are probably the ones you’ll eat the most often.

“I always recommend people pick the ones they like because life is too short to force yourself to eat something just because you hear it’s healthy,” she says. “There are so many options out there that you’re bound to find one that fits your taste.”

Are leafy greens dangerous to eat?

Despite their myriad benefits, the fact that lettuce could make me sick is enough to keep me vigilant. Because while rare, the risk is still very real.

From 2014 to 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged over 2,000 illnesses and 18 deaths from leafy greens. And in the two decades spanning 1996 to 2016, leafy greens dominated the list of vegetables likely to be the source of food-related illnesses, according to the California Department of Public Health. 

Lettuce made up nearly 40 percent of those incidents and spinach was a close second, making up 26 percent of those incidents.

“If you look at the way romaine lettuce grows, it creates a funnel. The leaves are uneven and corrugated. Some of these bacteria can attach and stick to the leaves,” says Michele Jay-Russell, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies leafy green food safety. 

She says her personal favorite, spinach, “has some unique risks because it’s grown so close to the ground.”

While that recent California study showed other greens like radicchio, chard, kale, and cabbage only had outbreaks in the single digits, they still beat out all the rest of the vegetables studied. 

Nailing down exactly where the bacteria that contaminates these greens is coming from is complex. 

“We don’t have fields where cattle are just pooping in the field. It’s much more subtle. And there’s very little indication that it’s coming from farm workers,” says Jay-Russell. 

Anything from birds swooping down and defecating in an irrigation canal to floodwaters washing dirty water onto a field could cause an outbreak. 

But another reason leafy greens are so frequently caught up in recalls might simply be that we eat them raw instead of cooking them like we do with other vegetables. 

That deprives the greens of what Jay-Russell calls a “kill step,” a surefire way to completely eliminate any viruses or bacteria—the same way that pasteurizing milk makes it safer to drink milk. 

Leafy greens might also be overrepresented in causing food-borne illnesses because of their popularity, Jay-Russell says—meaning more people buy them and are potentially exposed to their risks than other produce. According to the International Fresh Produce Association, lettuce was the fourth most popular veggie purchased in 2022, and other leafy greens followed close behind. 

So what can you do to avoid food-borne illnesses

The most obvious precaution to take with greens is to throw out any greens in your kitchen that have been recalled for known contamination. 

And if you’re tempted to seek out those plastic containers of triple-washed lettuce the next time you’re at the grocery store, you might want to think again. Pre- and triple-washed labels aren’t regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and even these products have been recalled for contamination risks.

“It makes a difference, but it’s not a guarantee,” says Jay-Russell. 

(And who wants to buy all that plastic anyway?) 

But, she says, if you do buy pre-washed, ready-to-eat, or triple-washed greens, you might as well eat them as-is instead of additionally washing it in your sink because the average kitchen sink is known to be a hotbed of germs. (I wrote more about that back in 2018.)

If you got your greens fresh at the market—in which case, kudos to you—you do need to give them a rinse. The CDC recommends rinsing them off in water. Not diluted bleach. Not a vinegar solution. Just water. 

With just a little vigilance, we can have our greens and eat them too. 

(Sources: National Geographic)

CRYSTAL WAHPEPAH IS A MEMBER of the Kickapoo nation of Oklahoma, but growing up, she spent most of her time in Oakland, not far from the location of her new restaurant. Her goal is to introduce diners to the beauty of Native foods. While she gets much of her produce from local Indigenous farmers, she features a variety of beans, corn, rice, and other foodstuffs from Native producers across the country.

Wahpepah was the first Native contestant on the Chopped TV show in 2016 and was recently nominated for a James Beard Award for Emerging Chef. Before opening this spot in the fall of 2021, she catered both locally and at Native events across the country.

In a colorful interior featuring murals by celebrated Native artists, her mostly gluten-free menu celebrates the seasons. Carnivores will appreciate her bison meatballs in blueberry sauce and braised rabbit blue-corn tacos. Vegan choices include sweet potato tostadas and pumpkin seed mole with wild mushrooms. Her Three Sisters Veggie Bowl is a festival of tastes and textures, including heirloom corn, quinoa, squash, tepary beans, blueberries, walnuts, and greens. Wahpepah clarifies that being a Native chef is not just a business. “It’s historical,” she says, “and about respect.”

Know Before You Go

Reservations are recommended and can be booked on the restaurant's website.

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REAGAN WYTSALUCY GREW UP IN Gallup, New Mexico, just outside the Navajo Nation reservation. Despite her Native heritage, she grew up “very absorbed into westernized culture,” she says. Her father owned several McDonald’s franchises on the reservation, and she never learned to speak the language. It wasn’t until she started to study plant sciences in college that her father told her about the peaches that once thrived on the reservation where he grew up.

Centuries ago, the Navajo people tended flourishing peach orchards across the Four Corners area, where the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. But in 1863, the U.S. government ordered the Navajo in Four Corners to leave their homelands.

When the Navajo refused to leave, General James H. Carleton ordered Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson to slaughter their livestock, massacre any resistors, and burn their crops, notably their thousands of peach trees. One American troop, under the command of Captain John Thompson, claimed to have destroyed more than 3,000 peach trees. Thompson himself reported how his men, in a single day, cut down what he called 500 “of the best peach trees I have ever seen in the country, every one of them bearing fruit.”

The destruction nearly spelled the end of centuries of cultivation. In fact, Native Americans across the Southwest once grew vast peach orchards, some stretching all the way into the Grand Canyon. Scholars believe that the Pueblo communities in the Southwest were the first to receive peach seeds from the Spanish in the Rio Grande Valley. Appreciation for the fruit was widespread, and the plants passed from tribe to tribe, in many cases far in advance of any contact with European settlers.

Faced with the destruction of their orchards and starvation on the horizon, many Navajo surrendered during the winter of 1863 and were forced to march in the “Long Walk.” This trek, of nearly 400 miles through the harsh desert in frigid winter weather, ended at Bosque Redondo, an internment camp on a bleak, wind-swept prairie in eastern* New Mexico. There they were meant to live and eventually assimilate into American culture. But due to poor water, rampant disease, and insufficient agricultural conditions, Bosque Redondo was deemed a failure by the U.S. Government in 1868. Thus, many Navajo made the brutal trek back home.

Not all Navajos went on the Long Walk. One particular holdout, Chief Hoskininni, secreted himself and others in one of the most remote corners of the Southwest. Not only did he successfully evade capture, he also played a pivotal role in helping re-establish the local Navajo community. According to Wytsalucy, Hoskininni gave farmland and animals to each family when they returned so they could rebuild their lives. Wytsalucy herself is a descendant of Hoskininni. According to family lore, part of the reason he was able to survive was because of the fruit trees hidden deep within the canyons.

Wytsalucy’s journey to discover what was left of these orchards began in college. When she told her father about how she didn’t know what to study, he encouraged her to research local, fast-disappearing traditional foods, which for the Navajo include their precious peaches.

As a graduate student in 2016, Wytsalucy set out into the Navajo reservation with her father and two Utah State University horticulture professors. The goal was to track down, record, and collect seeds from the ancestral peach trees in the area, based on her father’s memories of where he saw them growing as a child.

The most common peaches grown by Native Americans in the Southwest were white-fleshed, free-stone, and notable for their small size. Unlike traditional orchards, trees were not pruned and irrigation practices were limited. One Hopi elder told her that pruning the trees was traditionally frowned upon. “Those seeds, just like the corn plant, are revered as our children,” she recalls them saying. In the old days, peaches were eaten fresh or boiled, and when harvests were bountiful, they were dried in the sun and stored in masonry bins or stone cavities.

It took three years for Wytsalucy to receive her first peach seeds, handed to her by an 85-year-old woman in Canyon de Chelly, a lush collection of gorges in northeastern Arizona in the Navajo Nation. Encouraged by that first success, Wytsalucy kept knocking on doors all over the Four Corners area. Eventually, she tracked down eight more orchards.

Genetic analyses show that these peaches are significantly different from modern cultivars. According to Wytsalucy, that persisted despite the U.S. government’s efforts to provide new peach trees to Native people in the late 19th century. Instead, many of the elders kept the seeds from the government and the traditional peaches separate from each other—they didn’t want them to mix.

Many of the peaches Wytaslucy tracked down in the Four Corners area are currently growing wild, without any human interference. They’re smaller than modern cultivars, about the size of a large apricot. The skins are mostly green with a slight red tint. As for how they taste, says Wytsalucy, “they have a tart peel and are very sweet inside,” and “a muskmelon flavor.” Nutritional analyses show that they are higher in calories and have more calcium, fiber, carbohydrates, and total fat than standard peaches.

Wytsalucy’s work with the peaches has gone well beyond just preserving seeds and planting trees at research sites across Utah. She’s also working to record stories and traditions of peach-growing from elders across the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni tribes. Much of this knowledge is in danger of being lost as elderly members of these communities pass away.

Many elders told her that the old orchards were managed with little supplemental irrigation. Only young trees were watered. Farmers planted their orchards on mesa shelves and in canyons, where the runoff from mesa tops would flood and irrigate them during summer monsoons. Climate change has added a new urgency to Wystalucy’s project. Nowadays, extreme drought in the Southwest will likely hasten the loss of these trees, although preliminary research has shown the Navajo peach trees are more drought tolerant than commercial varieties.

Wytsalucy’s father is also using his childhood memories to help restore Native foodways. Like many Navajo children of the 1960s and 1970s, Wytsalucy’s father, Roy Talker, was taken away from home by the Indian Student Placement Program. Only eight years old, Talker was placed with a family in Snowflake, Arizona. Wytsalucy believes that the enduring trauma her father experienced from being caught between two cultures is one of the reasons why she herself was never taught how to speak the Navajo language.

He did well for himself and for his family by becoming a businessman, but Wystalucy says her father has some regrets about bringing fast food to the reservation. Today, Native Americans have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the county, and fresh produce is often more expensive and harder to come by in rural communities.

Wytsalucy also says that her research has had the unintended side effect of bringing her closer to her father, especially as he shares his memories about growing up on the reservation. “It’s been a really great experience for our family,” she says, “and it helped tie me back into who I am as Navajo.”

After graduating with her Master’s Degree in Plant Science in 2019, Wytsalucy took an Assistant Professor position with the Utah State University Extension in southeastern Utah ​and got right to work on restoring old peach varieties. Currently, Wystalucy is working with community gardens throughout the Four Corners region to produce peach seeds for Native communities and provide resources for individuals wanting to grow them. She’s also collaborating with Canyon de Chelly National Monument and Capitol Reef National Park to preserve Native peaches, as a way to honor the parks’ rich Indigenous histories.

She’s also researching their unique genetic traits with her advisor, Utah State University professor and Extension fruit specialist Brent Black. Black is especially interested in whether or not they could be used as a rootstock and grafted with modern cultivars. “That way, they could potentially provide drought-tolerant characteristics in more conventional peach production systems in arid climates,” says Black.

For Wystalucy, though, the project remains a deeply personal testament to how, despite the U.S. government’s efforts to eradicate both the Navajo people and their peaches from the Four Corners area, both remain deeply rooted in the region today. Now, all that’s left is for those roots to spread. “My hope is that these trees will be able to be returned to the homeland in an abundant form,” says Wytsalucy. “And that they will become a bountiful food resource in our communities again.”

(Sources: Atlas Obscura)