I spent the winter of 99-00 completing my graduate studies in forestry on the snow blown campus of Michigan Tech. The school is situated on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s UP, where the warmer air and moisture of Lake Superior combine to dump copious amounts of snow on the entire landscape.

Its no coincidence that Houghton, Michigan has one of the nation’s best forestry schools. The entire Upper Peninsula is home to the country’s largest remaining stands of Northern Hardwood forests. I spent most of my time there doing two things: studying and walking in the woods.

During that time there was one particular phenomenon that caught my attention and disturbed me. The Mead Corporation was investing millions of dollars in a genetic engineering project to drastically reduce the lignin content of aspen trees.  Essentially, lignin is the undesirable content extracted during the pulping process; the extraction is chemically intensive, environmentally damaging, and, of course, expensive.

Genetically modified forests are the newest reality of biotechnology. With traditional food crops like corn and wheat, we can observe the life cycle of the organism in a single growing season. Not so with forest trees. How can we possibly assess the ecological risks of an organism that takes 50 or 100 years to complete its life cycle?

But my greatest cause for consternation was much more philosophical in nature. During my walks in the woods I learned a great deal about the Northern Hardwoods: chickadees and nuthatches are the only forest birds that remain during winter, mycelial masses stay dormant under the perpetual blanket of snow, firs and spruces are whorled to help bear and shed the weight of the snow without snapping.

All of the books and classes on ecology and forest management give different insights and perspectives on Nature. However, Nature herself is the best teacher of all. I could not reconcile the people in lab coats, their syringes and Bunsen burners, isolated in the warmth of their laboratory, with the perfect maelstrom of Creation just outside door. How could we isolate ourselves so completely, and still tamper responsibly with the blueprint of life itself?