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After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens - Paperback | Diverse Reads

After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens

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A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

On May 18, 1980, people all over the world watched with awe and horror as Mount St. Helens erupted. Fifty-seven people were killed and hundreds of square miles of what had been lush forests and wild rivers were to all appearances destroyed.

Ecologists thought they would have to wait years, or even decades, for life to return to the mountain, but when forest scientist Jerry Franklin helicoptered into the blast area a couple of weeks after the eruption, he found small plants bursting through the ash and animals skittering over the ground. Stunned, he realized he and his colleagues had been thinking of the volcano in completely the wrong way. Rather than being a dead zone, the mountain was very much alive.

Mount St. Helens has been surprising ecologists ever since, and in After the Blast Eric Wagner takes readers on a fascinating journey through the blast area and beyond. From fireweed to elk, the plants and animals Franklin saw would not just change how ecologists approached the eruption and its landscape, but also prompt them to think in new ways about how life responds in the face of seemingly total devastation.


ISBN-13: 9780295750712

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Publication Date: 05-17-2022

Pages: 264

Product Dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.80(d)

Age Range: 18 Years

Eric Wagner, who earned a PhD in biology from the University of Washington, writes regularly about animals and the environment. He is author of Penguins in the Desert and coauthor of Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish. He climbs Mount St. Helens annually.

What People are Saying About This

Ben Goldfarb

Unleashes a pyroclastic flow of wonder and surprise as it tracks the astonishing transformation of Mount. St. Helens's ecosystems. After the Blast is an impassioned ode to the scientific method and the irrepressible resilience of the natural world.

Robert Michael Pyle

After the Blast is the story of the greatest ecological experiment in Northwest history, told with beauty and verve by one of our best biology writers. Eric Wagner gives us a terrific read, equally gripping for its social and natural history. I recommend it in the highest terms.

Steve Olson

Thoroughly reported, well structured, and gracefully written—this account of scientists doing fascinating research on the ecology of Mount St. Helens is pretty much perfect.

Table of Contents

Prologue: After 3

Part I More than the Boom

1 Paper 1250 13

2 A Portal to Other Ways of Knowing 27

Part II Natural Experiments

3 Biological Legacies 39

4 The Survivor-Hero 55

5 To Recover or Not to Recover 69

6 Lines of Succession 78

7 The Concrete Forest 99

Part III Of Logs and Lakes

8 A Black Stew of Bacteria 113

9 The Tunnel 126

10 The Log Mat 135

11 Fish in a Fishless Lake 144

Part IV Chances to the Land

12 Disturbed Ecologies 163

13 Fish in a Fishless River 175

14 The Elk in the Cardboard Box 191

Epilogue: Volcán Calbuco 209

Acknowledgments 223

Selected Reading 227

Index 233