The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West

5th December 2025 

Gary Ferguson 
Island Press, £24.00

‘Solastalgia’ is the deep sense of unease that one’s home landscape is unravelling. Many of us feel this without necessarily being able to put it into words. I, for example, live in Australia, on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. There is a phenomenon called ‘reef grief’, which is the despair in knowing the growing human impact on ocean temperature means that the reef is constantly stressed by coral bleaching events, and that there will be widespread loss of these magnificent ecosystems. 

For Gary Ferguson, it is the loss of the ponderosa pine tree, whether in forests or as lone sentinels, that evokes the feeling of solastalgia. In The Twilight Forest he takes an expansive journey from north to south, east to west, across the landscapes in which these giants are found. He records his thoughts as he visits places and witnesses the devastation caused by the fires and droughts that have come to dominate parts of the US over the past 20 years.

More than 200 million ponderosa trees have been lost, many of them because of mismanagement of fire in the past resulting in the high fuel loads that have changed the nature of today’s fires.

Ferguson does not have much good to say about the US Forest Service, nor the scientists who advocated for modern-day science and laid no store in the indigenous ways of managing fire in these fragile ecosystems. The truth is that the ponderosa forest is lost in many places and will not be back, despite worthy efforts to replant the trees. 

One gets the sense that Ferguson wrote the book because he wanted to bear witness to a loss, for not just our generation but for generations to come. Writing about nature in an age of human-induced climate change is tough, but we are fortunate to have writers such as Ferguson who are willing to take the journey and lead us by the hand as we kneel and weep at the edge of the abyss.

Professor Iain Gordon FRSB