The Future Forest

Bill Finch pauses on a densely wooded hillside in The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp-Bingham Mountain Preserve in northeastern Alabama. He points out a number of tree species as though he’s sharing the names of old friends. “We have southern red oak, chestnut oak, cherry bark oak, white oak, chinquapin oak, northern red oak, scarlet oak, black oak.”

Clad in a flannel shirt, jeans and a straw hat, white hair tumbling to his shoulders, Finch nods to cedars, maples, butternuts, beeches, roughly a dozen species of oaks and the area’s once-historically expansive short-leaf pine. Nearby tower about five species of elms, all with genetics immune to the devastating Dutch elm disease, and a “weird oak” with spotted, elongated-lobed leaves that hasn’t been described as a new species in the lab—yet.