Features
Seeing the Forest and All Its Trees
With a Nor’easter crawling toward his College Park office, Maryland geographer Matthew Hansen is thinking about traveling into untouched tropical wilderness. On a computer screen is a large swath of green, a natural forest in the Congo, with a small black dot in the middle. Some of the forest has been burned along a nearby river, but the black dot—a lake—is in the ever-shrinking, unsullied portion of the world’s ecosystem.
