One Tree

Through words and photographs, acclaimed ecologist Gretchen Daily and photographer Charles Katz describe how one relict tree—the magnificent Ceiba pentandra in Sabalito, Costa Rica—carries physical and spiritual importance. The people in the town of Sabalito call the tree la ceiba, a term said to be derived from a Taíno word referring to a type of wood used for making canoes in the West Indies.

Ceiba evokes times and places where people hollowed out the great cylindrical trunks and glided along languid rivers winding through lush tropical forest. Today the tree is known by different names in regions ranging from southern Mexico and the Caribbean to the southern edge of the Amazon Basin and western Africa. The ceiba has survived what is probably the highest rate of tropical deforestation in the world. It is a legendary and vital tree in the centuries-old forests of places like Costa Rica that were once almost completely forested (98 percent in the mid-twentieth century) and decades later suffered devastating deforestation (34 percent by 1980).

Gretchen C. Daily is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.