IWill be 75 in March, and we old people often reflect on why certain things happened in our lives. This is very personal, but I was tall and thin as a child – I was always the one who got hit at school. The only refuge I had was in plants and bugs, and animals in general.
Nothing in nature ever tried to “get” me – not even predators. They weren’t after I. I always felt sympathy for animals that were attacked or vulnerable. Your personality guides your research, and this got me interested in the idea of ”hardness” in environments.
This would eventually lead me to a professor of biology at the University of Guelphand to discover the oldest and least disturbed forests in eastern North America—perhaps even the oldest in North America.
I didn’t start by looking at trees. The organisms I first worked on were the most marginalized and misunderstood plants in the world: lichens. Many live in Arctic tundra where the wind, snow and cold constantly attack vegetation, making things tiny and stunted. And yet they survive in their own little paradise because no one else bothers them.
When I got my PhD, I decided to work in a habitat that would be as brutal as the Arctic tundra, and that’s when the idea came to the Niagara Escarpment There were these stunted, brittle-looking organisms up there and no one ever thought they were worth studying. People called them “rock scum”. But from the point of view of one sympathetic to cattle being beaten, this was a beautiful habitat; I wanted to study it.
The people in my lab assumed that Europeans had cut down all of southern Ontario, so we didn’t expect to find old trees anywhere. But then we found these small, ancient trees clinging to a thin patch of hard habitat.
When we found our first tree that was over 1,000 years old, I thought, “you’ve got to be kidding me”. I had goosebumps. It was like a bolt of lightning striking – it put this forest in a completely different category.
So many people have walked past here and just assumed there was nothing there. It is within sight of the busiest highway in North America, the 401, and one of the largest cities, Toronto. It was a shock to find them in such an industrialized urban environment.
We started research to find out the limits of antiquity of the trees in this forest. One was more than 1,800 years old, although it died long ago.
The next question was: is the presence of this ancient forest on these cliffs unique to Ontario? There are many beautiful limestone outcrops in the south of France, so I contacted researchers in Montpellier and said we would like to come and study them. Again they told me there was “nothing there”. Yet they finally found one tree that began to grow before the Romans left France. This made headlines in Le Figaro. This tree saw the Romans leave! They are the oldest living plants in France.
We found that there were ancient forests on all the cliffs in the south of France, and then eventually we made similar discoveries in the USA, New Zealand, Germany and England. It turned out these little old forests are everywhere. Cliffs are now recognized as one of the hotspots of biodiversity worldwide.
It was 1988 when the media first became interested in the ancient forests. It is now 2023, and it has never stopped. It connects with the whole matter of human life – when you’re working on something that’s 1,000 years old, you suddenly feel smaller and realize your role in the universe isn’t as big as you thought.
Our people place great value on productivity. What I learned philosophically about life from the ancient trees is peace and joy can be found in the slow, the careful and the wary, as much as it can be in the rich and famous.
I found the ancient forest to be my greatest teacher. The trees taught me that growth is not necessarily necessary or good. If we humans want to be sustained by this planet forever, we cannot suck it dry. This ancient forest is one place we don’t get to – it has survived us by ignoring it. There is a way to make the planet infinitely sustainable for us, if only we ask less of it.
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As told to Phoebe Weston. Doug Larson is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He is an expert on deforestation and a frequent contributor to media discussions on the subject of old-growth forests. His latest book, written with his son Nick, is called The Dogma Ate My Homework
