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By Root 740 0

wood toward one of the biggest stumps. It was taller than we were. What remained of its bark was black and crumbling. We grabbed on to handholds and hauled ourselves on top of it. Twenty-five people could have stood up there with us. From this perch, we could see the Maydena Range—about a mile off. It was thickly covered with Eucalyptus regnans and myrtles. A single slash ran through it for running hydroelectric wires, but otherwise it was twenty thousand acres of uncut, old-growth forest. “It's got no roads. No tracks,” said Suzi. “If you go over there you need a compass. That's the heart of our proposed national park.”

As we stood there, we contemplated the enormousness of the stump and the size of the tree it had once been part of. We hoped it had been used for Shakespeare and not toilet paper.

Actually, Suzi said, some of the wood hadn't been used at all. “With the old-growth, they're often more interested in the land than the trees,” she said. Once the virgin forest was cleared, Forestry Tasmania could turn the land into a tree plantation. Behind the clear-cut was a plantation of young trees not native to Tasmania, growing in neat soldierlike rows.

Suzi said that to prepare the land for replanting, the clear-cuts were burned at extremely hot temperatures. Helicopters flew over the stumps and dropped packets of petroleum gel that exploded on impact. They worked like napalm. After the scorched ground had been reseeded, forestry workers laid out poison baits to stop native animals from browsing on the plantation trees. Weirdly, the poison—called 1080—was put in carrots dyed the color blue. When possums, wombats, pademelons, and wallabies came to graze on the young shoots, they also dined on the blue carrots—and ended up dying slow, painful deaths from the poisoning.

The use of 1080 poison in Tasmania was highly controversial—pet dogs sometimes scavenged on dead animals that had eaten the blue carrots and then died in horrible convulsions. And animal lovers didn't like to see so many native creatures knocked off for the purpose of enriching corporate tree farmers. Suzi positively shuddered as she described it.

Suzi drove on to another coupe, this one old-growth forest that had been marked for the chainsaw. She parked on a logging road, and pointed out a small trail that Wilderness Society volunteers had blazed through the woods and marked with little flags. It led through moss and tree ferns to an unusual double-trunked eucalyptus tree. At the base, it was fifty-six feet around. About fifty feet up, the trunk separated into two trees. Because the slope was so steep, one of the double tree's massive roots actually shot through the air, forming a bridge we could walk under, before embedding itself into the soil.

Suzi was trying to come up with a catchy name for the double-trunked tree to get people to rally around saving the forest. We racked our brains to think of something Classic that would fit in with the theme of the Styx. The Pillars of Hercules? Jupiter's Salad Tongs?

“I don't mean to be crude,” said Alexis, pointing toward the double tree. “But how much would you get for a tree this size?”

Yeah, we thought. Picassos and Pollocks sold for millions of dollars. How much was this forest worth?

When all that remained of Jupiter's Salad Tongs was a dead stump, Suzi replied, the government—the people of Tasmania who owned the land—would receive $1,200 to $1,400. About a quarter of a cent per resident.

It was sobering. We started to head back down the trail, following the flags, but soon became disoriented. We couldn't find the next trail marker—or the one behind us either. Somehow we had gotten off the trail. We turned to Suzi, assuming she would have a plan—but she looked baffled. “This is why I don't usually do these kinds of bush walks,” she said.

You don't?

“Well,” Alexis said, surveying the steep terrain. “It's all downhill from here.”

We commenced an off-trail bush bash. The forest floor was thick with stalks. Several times as we pitched downward, our way was blocked by the roots of giant trees and the