By Richard Preston
EISBN-13: 978-1-58836-603-0
Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain woodland valleys in Northern California are the biggest and tallest organisms the area has ever sustained--the coast redwood bushes, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percentage of the traditional redwood forests were destroyed by means of logging, however the untouched fragments that stay are one of the nice wonders of nature. the largest redwoods have trunks as much as thirty ft large and will upward push greater than thirty-five tales above the floor, forming cathedral-like constructions within the air. till lately, redwoods have been regarded as almost most unlikely to ascend, and the cover on the tops of those majestic timber used to be undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding tale of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny staff of bold botanists and novice naturalists that chanced on a misplaced international above California, an international that's harmful, hauntingly attractive, and unexplored.
The canopyvoyagers are young--just students after they begin their quest--and they proportion a fondness for those timber, persevering even with occasionally crushing own hindrances and failings. They take tremendous hazards, they forget about universal knowledge (such because the idea that there's not anything left to find in North America), they usually even make love in hammocks stretched among branches 300 ft within the air.
The deep redwood cover is a vertical Eden jam-packed with mosses, lichens, noticed salamanders, placing gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry timber, all growing to be out of huge trunk structures that experience fused and shaped flying buttresses, occasionally carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out through fireplace, known as "fire caves." Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and flora that's unknown to technological know-how. people go through the deep cover suspended on ropes, a ways out of sight of the floor, understanding that the cost of a small mistake could be a plunge to one's death.
Preston's account of this impressive international, by means of turns terrifying, relocating, and engaging, is an event tale advised in novelistic aspect via a grasp of nonfiction narrative. the writer stocks his protagonists' ardour for tall timber, and he mastered the strategies of tall-tree mountaineering to inform the tale in The Wild Trees--the tale of the destiny of the world's so much the best option forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.
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Extra resources for The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Sample text
100. Il est vrai que Ward Goodenough est plus nuancé : « la description ethnographique exige des méthodes pour traiter les phénomènes observés de telle façon que nous puissions construire une théorie de la manière dont nos informateurs ont organisé le même phénomène. C’est la théorie, et pas seulement le phénomène, que la description ethnographique vise à présenter » (« Cultural anthropology and linguistics », 1957, cité par W. Sturtevant, op. cit. , p. 100). 50 que chaque lexème possède au moins un trait définitionnel en commun avec tous les autres - trait qui caractérise le domaine de référents dont le lexème dépend et qui autorise, en contexte na turel, sa permutation avec les autres lexèmes au sein du champ - et un trait distinctif qui oppose le lexème à l’ensemble de ceux qui lui sont apparentés.
Ainsi, la production de subsistances est-elle une réponse aux besoins du métabolisme ; la parenté, aux besoins de la reproduction ; l’abri, aux besoins de bien-être corporel, etc. Réponses bien peu éclairantes car, même au ni veau élevé de généralité où se place ici Malinowski, chacune d’entre elles peut correspondre à plusieurs besoins et chaque besoin peut appeler plusieurs réponses : hygiène et protection sont des réponses culturelles tout aussi adéquates que l’abri au besoin de bien-être corporel, tandis que les fonctions de protec tion et d’abri servent à assurer la santé tout autant que le bienêtre corporel et la sécurité.
Là encore, la caractérisation des besoins apparaît, au rebours de la logique, comme une justification fonctionnelle a posteriori de la réponse qu’ils appellent, la nature de la cause étant présupposée par la définition de l’effet. L’incapacité dont fait preuve Malinowski de remonter du fait social à sa base organique est constitutive de tout finalisme fonc tionnel, car plus le besoin hypothétique placé à l’origine d’une institution possède un caractère général, moins il a de valeur explicative.