A Murder Mystery in the Woods

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 49-52

49

A Murder Myster y

in the Woods

By Oliver Houck

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness , and Greed,

by John Vaillant. Norton. 28 8 pages.

From the September/ October 2007 issue of The Environmental Forum.

We have a new kind of nature writ-

ing these days, and it is superb. e

books of the past, and some are clas-

sics, treated a subject like Our Vanishing Wild-

life or e Sea Around Us with high seriousness

and a passion that let itself emerge toward the

end of the book, a plea to America to wake the

hell up and do something. en there was the

travelogue genre in which an explorer, often a

scientist, took us along to a n exotic place, the

Lower Colorado, the Sands of the K alahari, a

diary of discovery. Both genres still produce

keepers, and they line the shelves of anyone

interested in natural resource policy and law.

Meanwhile, the craft of writing has ta ken a

turn toward what it calls creative non-ction,

and its blend of history, personal saga, intrigue, and even suspense is like

reading for the rst time in 3-D. ese are page turners, without the guilt

of pulp ction and all the more punch for being honest-to-God real. Such a

book is e Worst Hard Time, described in the May/June issue (see page 42).

Such a book is also e Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant, which is so good at

this new-dimensional kind of composition that it wi ll stay with you a long

time, reecting and wondering.

e book is about the plunder of resources along the coast of the Pacic

Northwest, to which Americans came late, but then quickly made up for lost

time. It is about white folks engaged in the enterprise, and Native Americans

who got coopted into it and are now left with the incongruity of their yester-