Farewell, sugar maple
(E-Book)

Martha Carlson wants to know if she could see climate change in her backyard. Her study begins in her own forest on the south face of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. From maple tree to maple tree, Carlson visits sugar bushes around her valley and then across the Granite State. Sugar producers, skeptical of science and sure that climate change can’t be real, join her search and share their keen observations of the change they see in tree and sap and syrup. Carlson’s journey takes us to classrooms and laboratories at the University of New Hampshire where scientists teach her the facts of climate change and the scientific method for asking her question. Carlson peeks inside sugar maple cells, learns how trees turn sunlight into sugar, and watches as her trees respond to drought, changing seasons, forest fire smoke, heat waves and cold so deep her tree explodes. She coaxes scientists, skeptical of citizens, to focus their tools on the sugar maple, to help her examine the trees with satellite imagery, scanning electron microscopes, and high performance liquid chromatography. Carlson asks intriguing questions. What makes the sap run up a tree? How come the maples don’t blow up when they tear water molecules apart to make sugar? And what is putting black goo on the syrup filters in sugar houses all across maple country? Carlson doesn’t offer any easy answers. Her scientist colleagues recite poetry, tell jokes about philosophy, and rant about science. Her sugar maker friends begin to think maybe there's something to her climate change ideas. Jeff Fair, Carlson’s long lost friend who followed loons to Alaska, writes the forward to Farewell, Sugar Maple. Fair says the book is “a delicious story,” “a far-reaching paean” to the sugar maple. Carlson’s photographs “will blow your mind,” he says. Carlson, Fair declares, might just be “the Jane Goodall of maple trees.”