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A sign erected by Forestry Tasmania read, “Sideling Arboretum … The arboretum was planted to allow forest researchers to determine the best softwoods to grow in Tasmanian plantations. Tasmania's radiata pine industry grew from the experiments conducted in this plot.” Radiata pines were the plantation trees we had seen encroaching on the edge of Todd Walsh's lobster habitat. They were fast-growing, watersucking imports from California and had replaced large swaths of native Tasmanian forests.

The sign had been defaced multiple times. At the bottom one graffito read, “Invest in old growth FOREST not weeds, ya bastards!” Another scrawl extended the sign's logo so that it read, “Forestry Tasmania DESTROYING OUR FORESTS.”

We were beginning to wonder what Forestry Tasmania's story was when we rolled into Scottsdale, the area's regional center. There were a few shops and a bank, but most conspicuously there was a stunning, swooping building on the town's edge. It rose like a spaceship out of a browning cow pasture. A sign out front read “Forest EcoCentre.”

The building was shaped like a truncated cone, flat on the top and leaning to one side. Its curving exterior walls were made of large panes of milky-colored glass set into a thin grid of pale wood.

Alexis studied it with a critical eye. “On the one hand,” he said, “I'm thinking a UFO in a cornfield. But on the other, it looks like a giant tree stump.”

We walked inside the building and were confronted with a bizarre forest simulation. A concrete walkway, sparingly lined with ferns and other forest plants, encircled the base of the glass walls. Overhead, an enormous flat-screen monitor aired a tumbling waterfall in the middle of a cool, lush forest. A sign with an arrow directed us to the “Animal Walk,” a dark corridor with color posters of a devil, quoll, and potoroo interspersed with potted plants. On another video screen, a documentary scored with sentimental music and birdsong extolled the beauty of Eucalyptus regnans, the largest tree species south of the equator.

Outside, the sun beat down on brown grass. There was hardly a tree in sight—unless you counted the lobbed-off tree ferns that had been transplanted into a bed of wood chips.

“I don't get it. Is this where the forestry people have their offices?” Alexis said.

It was. The EcoCentre was actually a building within a building. Forestry Tasmania's offices were hidden from public view in a three-story wooden structure surrounded by the outer glass wall. The EcoCentre was designed to be energy-saving, tilting toward the north to receive maximum sun exposure in winter. During the summer, louvers—controlled by smart-building software—opened and closed to keep the building cool and funnel the warm air back outside. The public space, with its high-tech hardware and software, wrapped around the offices like a doughnut.

It was a postapocalyptic design. An eco-friendly building erected by the same people who were destroying habitats just down the road. They even had an Orwellian slogan: “Forestry Tasmania: Growing Our Future.”

Alexis looked like he was going to foam at the mouth.

“Is this their vision of the future?” he said. “Highly controlled simulations of what Tasmania used to look like? It's like Silent Running.” (In the movie Silent Running, the world's last forests are preserved on a spaceship bio-dome, because they can no longer survive on a ravaged Earth.) Alexis began to peruse the informational sheets scattered around the exhibits. A fact sheet on Tasmania's tall trees explained that Forestry Tasmania protected all trees over eighty-five meters tall (279 feet) and suggested that if visitors wanted to see some of the Northeast's tall trees they should drive to the Evercreech Forest Reserve. The reserve was thirty miles from the EcoCentre as the crow flies and one hundred miles by road.

“What's wrong with the forests nearby?” Alexis said. “Why don't they promote those?”

“Maybe they don't want people to get too attached to them,” we suggested.

“It's like they're keeping trees in concentration camps