Lâle Davidson grew up splitting time between a college town in Oneonta, NY, where her mother taught literature, and her father’s farm outside of Pittsburgh. This land had been farmed, timbered and strip-mined, before her father bought it from his father. Over her lifetime, he fostered it into a rich wild forestland. She spent many summer days sloshing after him through the woods carrying buckets of water or walnuts, trimming and wiring saplings to protect them from deer. Ancient apple trees provided warty comfort during a lonely childhood. When she and her husband visited the redwoods in California in the late 1990s, and stumbled across the story of Redwood summer and the saving of the Headwaters, she dreamt of the Sierras as if seeing them from above. While the camera’s eye roved over tre
